foam magazine #14 / meanwhile
portfolio text
The recent series Sakura (Chery Blossoms) seems to emerge visually from White. Suzuki began travelling to Yoshino in Nara Prefecture from the spring of 1996. There are some 30.000 wild cherry trees on Mount Yoshini, and in the spring the entire mountain is gradually cloaked in blossoms, which bloom starting from its foot and rising to the summit, offering a truly remarkable view. Suzuki has visited the area repeatedly and in 2003 showed his photographs of cherry trees in bloom at an ex hibition at Gallery Koyanagi. His newest series Sakura (2007) is based on those photographs. Many photographers take pictures of cherry trees, but Suzuki’s continued sessions of photographing the cherry trees of Yoshino is not an expression of the beauty that Japanese find in the cherry blossoms or a love of the cherry as a symbol of life and death. Yoshino was a tra ditional pathway for the practitioners of the ancient Shinto discipline of austerities called Shugendo, and leads, through the Omine Okugake Trail to Kumano. When the Oto Matsuri festival of Kumano is over, and winter turns to spring, Suzuki moves from Kumano to Yoshino. Suzuki confronts the cherries to return to Kumano.
After photographing the cherries of Yoshino, as if to seek respite from spring’s arriving warmth, he returns to Kumano. There, in the mossy shad ows of the rocks and beyond the thick forests, he senses an aura that he hadn’t noticed before. He aims his camera at what is as yet unconscious and brings it into consciousness through the process of photographing it. Lead on to the sacred site as yet unknown, but to be revealed in the next instant, Suzuki continues his journey through Kumano. IV An Endless Melody Imagine a pendulum with Risaku Suzuki as the fulcrum. The pendulum swings back and forth between the moment captured by the photo grapher and the universal time and space in which his subjects or landscapes exist. The arc of the pendulum’s swing is Suzuki’s work, his photography. It moves back and forth, never remaining in the same place for an instant, never travelling exactly the same path, tracing its arc through space and time, like life itself. Capturing life, which cannot be captured, in a photograph and leavinga record of its being. Photographs, which are chemical traces of the path of light, eventually fade, their images disappear, only the blank white of the paper they are printed on remaining. But even then, Kumano, snow, and cherry blossoms will continue to exist, as the seasons shift and change in their unending cycle. The photographer accepts this and creates his photographs out of the relationship of everything to photo graphs – time, place, existence itself – to himself. Risaku Suzuki’s dynamism is increased by his constant shifting be tween phases – the ordinary and the extraordinary, reality and memory, the moment and the eternal, life and death, the macro and the micro, be ing and nothingness. When we allow ourselves to submit to the swinging of the pendulum marked by his works, we, too, begin to hear an endless melody. Risaku Suzuki’s photographs are like a pendulum, swinging back and forth between the perception of the viewer and memory, a vision that gives a continuous thrill. +
This text is a shortened version of the essay with the same title published in the catalogue ‘Risaku Suzuki – Kumano, Yuki, Sakura’, Tankosha Publishers, 2007. This catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Kumano, Yuki, Sakura’ in the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in 2007.
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