CONSTRUCTIONS

This reportage is the analysis of a specific aspect of the Japanese society.

I have had the opportunity to open my vision on societies considered widely modern, with regards to economic potential and population density. This work, called “Constructions”, is divided in two sets.

The first one is called “We are (NOT) Together” and the latter is called “We are (NOT) alone”.

Both sets include eight photographs. The general title and each set’s titles are essential to read my experience. The “constructions” theme is analyzed under two aspects. In the first set, constructions are shown as social and cultural process that crushes individual consciences, making them similar elements, as they were built, after losing their human characteristic of intimacy. The intimacy approach is considered in the sense of a constitutive and essential element that defines man as a thinking being. On the other hand, the second set analyses constructions as the whole of infrastructures of any type, representing the building and development of normal daily aspects of life inside society and all of its structural processes.

We are (NOT) together:

In this first series, I wanted to show and transmit the total depersonalization of individuals. Their uniqueness and their intimacy are less represented than the place where they execute their profession. There is no more introspection, no more possibility to know them in their intimate sphere.

The human individual, deprived from its private sphere and its representative elements, becomes an extension of his work, and nothing else. Individuals thus become a pure transposition of society, expressed in the constitutive elements of it. When looking more thoroughly to the first shots, one might observe an absence, the absence of faces. They are hidden behind a financial newspaper or an advertising billboard. It shows the will to merge the body with the profession, which are constantly linked together, even outside of the work sphere.

The public, by entering the private sphere, accepts to be absorbed by it. Private space is represented in the public one and becomes a screen, an attempt of separation. The name of this series is ironic: whereas in a place that is as densely populated as where I have lived, where a great number of persons inevitably interact everyday, I have observed a loss of intimacy and introspection. I have seen many isolated individuals, all in their own sphere, constantly looking for their physical and mental space. We are NOT together.

When removing the brackets, the “NOT” takes a greater importance. It refuses the postulate that makes us think that a such great number of persons would lead to a proportionally life quality standard and to a greater social and system, close to the persons’ needs and making them more united. On the contrary, I assist to this great loss and I see people stop being persons and becoming stereotypes of their own role. I also identified a guilty party, which is society itself, which turns its back on us, as a collateral effect of our request for more freedom and power, and takes back from us our most important human aspect. W built immense societies, but the immensity hasn’t brought the expected human relation between the individuals that occupy it. It’s like if society detached from its space and would recover a separate own identity, that doesn’t reflect its own individuals’ will. Or it does, but only in its material constructions. It’s like a game. By following the rules, the individuals mentally cancel themselves. By refusing to follow them, their fate is the same, since they are excluded from the umbilical cord that ties people together. People don’t touch each other and live with their own idea of society, which is the same for everyone and that condemns them to play alone. The bowling ball shot in the photograph called “The Game”, must be thrown towards the bowling pins: that’s the only reason why they were created. That’s the aim of the game. It’s at the same time a silent and interior scream that emerges from the impossibility to know each other, and discover each other again.

Passengers

Rapid Eye Movement

Constructions

The Game

Financial Distortion Of Perspective

The Blind Man

Intimacy

Deus Ex Machina

We are (NOT) alone:

In the second series, on the other hand, I wanted to represent places completely void of any human presence. This relates exactly to the constructions mentioned before. We are placed before the material product created by society, and not a living product anymore. Lime, iron, copper, cement or wood... In this series, what is represented is the vision of uninhabited places. We are alone.

Here again, there is a lack. The absence of the human element, which doesn’t complete the cycle, symbolizes the absence of the human individual itself. We are alone. As in the first series, the removal of the bracket reveals the true meaning of the photographs. We can give to the structures a new role: a reference to the human element. The places are concrete constructions, materials and products of society, made for its normal development.

We are not alone. We can see structures as collateral waste from the process that makes men social stereotypes. However, here they are: working spaces, garages, buildings, schools, gas stations that quietly send back to society messages of secret agreement. We know why we have built them, we are therefore the ones who give them their current shape, but they in turn become operational and dictate our lives. We stop being humans; we become biomechanical elements of this great system. It is so complex that it leaves me with a question I tried to answer with this work: “Is the human presence preferable, even if it is annihilated and buried in its own product: society and its roles, or is it better to have total human absence, even if it is unforgettably present in its own constructions, since it is creations of the social human product and void of sense and utility with it?”

In both cases, the absence is the true protagonist and the centre of attention in my work. The latter pictures all have the night as common element. They were all produced during night-time, with a reason. Night is the time frame for sleeping, cities are empty and we ask ourselves – inside the walls of inhabited spaces – who are we and where are we going?