Infinity, exhibition and book by Natsuko Zanma, at Poetic Scape, 3 June – 16 July, 2023.
For many years, Zanma has been producing photographic works, mainly with plants as her subjects. The photographs are repeatedly taken in places she has photographed many times in the past, such as her own garden or a botanical park she has visited for nearly 20 years. However, Zanma says that the locations are not always the same, as the season, time of day and her own state of mind changes.
“I don’t know why, but the place in front of me is good enough , I don’t need other places”.?from her own notes on her work, same for the rest of quotations?
Zanma was deeply moved when a friend told her about Giorgio Morandi, a painter who spent his life painting still lifes in his birthplace of Bologna. Instead of visiting different places, Zanma prefers to visit the same place over and over again, and “I want to be deeply involved (with the place), layer by layer”. This attitude has not changed since her student days.
In several of her recent works, plants, which should be the main subject of the work, are placed on the periphery rather than at the centre of the work. Zanma says that what is visible to her has neither a main subject nor a background, she feels everything is equivalent.
“The plants, which are often seen as the main characters, the background, the soil on the ground, the dead grass on top, the grains of the ground that no one pays attention to, the air, the light and my own presence as the photographer, all float in space at the same time and overlap”.
For the past few years, we have been forced to live with restricted movement. These difficult times are coming to an end and people are returning to their days of hurriedly moving from one place to another. Meanwhile, Zanma has long ago shared a long time with the familiar places. And the moment she is aware of the beauty that slowly becomes visible as her body is accepted by the places, she feels a sense of welcome in the world.
“What I want to say with photography is that you can choose what you see, and that the possibilities of what you see are endless, and it’s up to you to decide what you want to show yourself.”
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