this year's model

Go Itami’s works have examined what it means to “look” at the everyday landscape through the two-dimensional medium of photography and attempted to expand the medium’s potential by exploring the concepts of vision and visuality. In his previous work study, he carefully observed the world and meticulously selected photographs from a vast pool of images. He also explored the potential of photography by considering various methods of presentation and combinations of images. His latest work, this year’s model, is a culmination of his thinking about photography in recent years.

Based on the concept of this year’s model, the exhibition of the same title uses the entire gallery space, by incorporating its furniture, fixtures, and photo books into the exhibition, to reconstruct the photographic image and extend Itami’s method of layering and composition beyond his images and into the space in which they are presented.

Photography entails the transformation of the real space in front of me into a two-dimensional image through the use of an optical instrument. The change is dramatic and contradictory the more I try to copy the real, the further it retreats. If we call what has been turned into a flat picture an ‘image,’ I am interested in just that?the thing that has been captured and transcends emotion, narrative, and theory to become an image. Why are we moved by these ‘images’? What is it that moves us in them? Where does that power, which transcends language, exist? To continue shooting, rather than to summarize, and be surprised by images, I have no choice but to believe in the power of images. ―Go Itami