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People die. It's a fact of life. But it's not every day that you see someone die. It's even rarer to see someone die right in front of your eyes. Or to almost die yourself. But we all know. One day, we all die.
People die every day. The world is full of death. 922,139. The number of people who died in Japan one year at the end of the century. 15,147. The number of people who died in traffic accidents. 5,911. The number of people who fell to their deaths. 5,588 people drowned and 3,846 people died from food-related accidents. 30,492 accidental deaths.
In one year at the end of the century, 255 people were stabbed to death. 170 were strangled. 6 received the death penalty. And nearly 500 were murdered in other ways.
922,139 dead people. Almost 1 in 2000 murdered. There is a 1 in 150,000 chance that a living person will be killed in one year. And it all depends on luck.
One day, all of a sudden, I saw him. He is killing someone. I don't move.
He knows I am watching, but he continues in silence. After he finishes the kill, he slowly starts toward me. My natural reaction is panic. "He's going to kill me!" My body refuses to obey my mind. I am frozen. He undresses me and begins caressing me. I don't resist. His penis enters me. There's no pain. No pleasure. No sensation. My mind feels nothing. My body feels nothing. I don't even know if this is really happening. Only one thing floated vaguely in my mind . . . the concept of death.
Even before I met him, I was possessed by death. I thought about death until everything else around me disappeared. And I found myself lost in the forest.
This was when I met him. I watched him kill, and realized something. Death is not a concept. Death exists right here in reality. Now, every time he kills, he calls me. When he finishes, we have sexual intercourse. This is how I began to photograph dead bodies.
I have changed. Ever since I began taking pictures of bodies. I exercise more now. Every day, I jog for 2 hours and swim for 1 hour. When my body runs low on oxygen and my breathing becomes distressed; when my muscles produce lactic acid and begin to ache and tire - this is when I become conscious of my physical body. After exercising, I can hear distinctly: the sound of my lungs breathing, my heart beating, a faint ringing in my ears. These sounds confirm to me that my body is here, and alive. And I wonder whether these sounds will go on forever. My mind goes blank.
I concentrate on my physical body. Oxygen enters the capillaries via the bronchial tubes and alveoli. The heart pumps this blood out to the body. The digestive system absorbs nutrients from food, which is turned into energy. Yes, my body is really here. I am moving and reacting.
The more I observe my own body, the more I understand the dead bodies. A dead body is no longer a person. It is undoubtedly and overwhelmingly dead. The existence of death transforms the air around the body.
When life disappears from within a body, it creates a void that sucks in the air around it. The current created by this movement of air is intensely cold to the touch. But this sensation cannot be recorded with a camera. When a person becomes a thing - an object - that is when death can finally be captured as a photograph. But this is not the true form of death.
Decomposing bodies. I use digital effects to make the details more prominent. Various colors, various shapes. I create something unimaginable from the original images. How pretty!
Freshly dead bodies. They look still alive. I use the effects to twist the contours of the eyes, nose, mouth. How grotesque.
What is beautiful? What is ugly? Values become more and more ambiguous.
Beauty and ugliness. Joy and sorrow. Pain and pleasure. Dynamic and static. Treasure and trash. White and black. Common and uncommon. Day and night. Signals and noise. Fluid and stagnant. Spirit and body. Red and green. Good and evil. Favorable and unfavorable. Front and back. Inorganic and organic. Expansion and contraction. Beginning and end. Man and woman. Him and me. Life and Death.
I use the effects to wander the ambiguous ravine between life and death.
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