foam magazine # 34 dummy
I want e ideas d to play w a percei bout how with ve wh at’s tr e or fals ue e. What is Primal Mountain about? Where did the idea for the series originate? I came to the project after a friend sent me a picturesque postcard showing mountains too beautiful to be true. I wanted to play with ideas about how we perceive what’s true or false. After the earthquake in Japan in 2011 and the Fukushima disaster we lost our illusions with the Japanese news media. It was hard to distinguish the genuine from the false. This theme is only implicit to Primal Mountain, but there is definitely an ironic allusion to a state of disillusion. How did the idea take shape to turn your project Primal Mountain into a little book. Did you conceive of it as a book right from the start? Each time I work on a project I make at least one dummy book, if only to show people what I’m working on. At first I didn’t think about making a book of Primal Mountain. I simply made a dummy like I always do. When Elisa Medde (managing editor
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of Foam Magazine) asked me to submit work to the Unseen Dummy Award, I decided to send this in.
Did you create multiple versions of the dummy before the one you submitted to the award? No, for each project I make only one dummy. Do you think the photobook is the appropriate platform for Primal Mountain or can you envision it could work as well as a website or an exhibition? I think this project fits the book format really well, but exhibitions are always my goal for each photographic project. Ideally, I publish a book on the occasion of an exhibition. I was fortunate to have met Sayaka Takahashi of Photo Gallery International (Tokyo) last year at a portfolio review. Now we are working together on an exhibition, with the series Pulsar in particular, but a small room will be devoted to Primal Mountain. There is a page in the dummy that looks like an index page that gives an impression of how the photos will look when hung on a wall.