ラウル エリース　LAUL Eliis

作品解説　Statement

日本に住んで 3 年が経ち、日本ととりわけその都市とある種の対話ができたと思います。私は都会人でも田舎者でもなくその間のどこかにいます。どちらでもないからこそ、両方を好きなように見る自由があります。これまでの間、ゆっくりとした速度とそれらが思い起こさせる物憂さのために、小さな都市や町が特に好きになりました。それらは大都市と、辿り着くのも難しい奥深い田舎のちょうど中間に位置しています。近くや遠くの小さな町で、かつて栄華を誇った古い廃屋や店の話を聞きながら隠れた路地を歩き回ると気持ちが落ち着きます。通行人の顔には微笑みとわずかな疑問が浮かびますが、それでも私の旅は続きます。遠くの山々、ゆっくりと広がる川床、楽しそうに自転車に乗る男子生徒、町の真ん中にある古い神社。それらはすべて、まるで昔から知り合いだったかのように私の友になります。ほとんど知らないものに親近感を覚えますが、写真とはそういうものなのかもしれません。何かを感じたり何かや誰かと繋がったりするのに周囲のすべてを知る必要はありません。お互いに長い間離れていた後でも不思議なことに被写体と結びついています。被写体は夢の中に現れ、イメージがそれなしでも生き続けるにつれて、新しい現実を形成します。

For the past 3 years that I have lived in Japan, I’d like to believe I have formed a sort of conversation with it and with its cities particularly. I’ve never thought of myself as a strictly city person, neither a true countryman, so I’ll probably stay somewhere in between them. I guess being neither one or the other gives me certain freedom to see both as I please. During this time, I have become especially fond of small cities and towns because of their slower speed and melancholy they remind me. They are also perfectly in-between the big metropolis and a deep countryside, which may be sometimes hard to reach. I feel at home wandering around in nearby and further away small towns and its hidden alleys, listening to the stories of old abandoned houses and shop windows of past days glory. I am greeted with both smiles and a slight suspicion on passerby’s faces, but my journeys continue nevertheless. Distant mountains, a slowly outstretching riverbed, joyfully cycling schoolboys and an old shrine in the middle of the town, all become my close friends as if we had known each other for a long time already. I feel affinity with the things I hardly know, but realise that this is probably what photography is all about. We don’t need to know everything about our surroundings in order to feel something or connect with something or someone. We remain strangely bound to our subjects even after we have long departed from each other. They come to us in our dreams, they form new realities as the images of them live on without them.