いくしゅん

Ikushun

showcase #11 curated by Minoru Shimizu Ikushun Returns Ikushun (b.1980) won the prize of special nomination in Canon New Cosmos of Photography Award in 2009 and 2011, then participated in showcase #2 in 2013 and published in 2015 his first photo book Desuyone (That’s it, you know), which got some attention. Since then, however, it seems that during the last seven years he scarcely has had a chance to present his works, except that he sporadically posts daily photographs on his blog, which still testify the unchanged characteristics of his photography, washing over the beholder with both comfortable and uncomfortable feelings. I decided to present his works anew at this year’s showcase #11 and contacted Ikushun, who consented immediately. Ikushun’s works bear a style of what is called street snapshot. They capture “decisive moments” and have something in common with “Tomason ” or “Vow -photographs”, to which they are never identical, though. Like a fullback observing rugby players’ moves in the square field, Ikushun watches every corner of the square frame of photography capturing the world and reads the next moment to release the shutter. Rather than landscapes and objects, he photographs mainly humans and animals (moving beings), which are often brutally cut out in various ways with or within the frame. Ikushun’s dexterity, the brutality as well as his sensitivity to his subjects’ eyes may remind us of Garry Winogrand, although Ikushun never tilt the camera. Some of Winogrand’s photos violently demonstrate racial gap and social inequality whilst Ikushun’s show small slacks and frays in decent everyday world in Japan, tirelessly and relentlessly. Not that the slacks and frays betray a kind of true world behind it. Ikushun’s photographs bear witness to the fact that there is no revelation in the world but only slacks and frays.