i like frogs, sometimes
“I like frogs” told me one day my eight years old son.
We were looking together at some of the photographs I had taken over the last six years in and around Heisenji - a small rural village of slightly more than 1,000 people, in center Japan.
After a short pause, as he picked up another photograph, he hesitantly added “sometimes".
These words got stuck in my head for no apparent reason.
Having reflected about it, I now believe that in that instant of uncertainty, my son must have had somehow unknowingly caught a faint glimpse of the complex mental and emotional mechanisms behind curiosity and exploration; behind human morbid attraction to inconsistencies and oddities; to the unbalanced and the distorted.
The exact same mechanisms that every so often make us fascinated by things we don’t really like.
The mechanisms that at times whisper us to let go of certainties and to embrace paradox.
Besides, these thoughts gave me the key to understand what was actually enthralling me as I was walking with my camera in Heisenji all throughout these years. More than documenting a specific place, this series is about getting lost into contradictions and while being astray, trying to create a personal emotional diary of my time there.
[photographs taken between 2012 and 2017]
i like frogs, sometimes
“I like frogs” told me one day my eight years old son.
We were looking together at some of the photographs I had taken over the last six years in and around Heisenji - a small rural village of slightly more than 1,000 people, in center Japan.
After a short pause, as he picked up another photograph, he hesitantly added “sometimes".
These words got stuck in my head for no apparent reason.
Having reflected about it, I now believe that in that instant of uncertainty, my son must have had somehow unknowingly caught a faint glimpse of the complex mental and emotional mechanisms behind curiosity and exploration; behind human morbid attraction to inconsistencies and oddities; to the unbalanced and the distorted.
The exact same mechanisms that every so often make us fascinated by things we don’t really like.
The mechanisms that at times whisper us to let go of certainties and to embrace paradox.
Besides, these thoughts gave me the key to understand what was actually enthralling me as I was walking with my camera in Heisenji all throughout these years. More than documenting a specific place, this series is about getting lost into contradictions and while being astray, trying to create a personal emotional diary of my time there.
[photographs taken between 2012 and 2017]