“I want to become as beautiful as a sewer rat”
“Because there is beauty that cannot be captured in a photograph”
I sometimes find myself suddenly remembering these words from “Linda Linda” by the Japanese punk band THE BLUE HEARTS.
Of course, I think the “beauty that cannot be captured in a photograph” Hiroto sang about was not so much a beauty that photographic technology cannot capture, but rather something that cannot be measured by so-called outward appearance alone.
Even so, when taking photographs, this lyric can sometimes resonate with me in a slightly different way.
The more photographs I take, the more the atmosphere that existed before me fails to appear as I imagined. Once turned into a photograph, it looks somehow slightly different.
Anyone who takes photographs has probably felt this frustration at least once. Yet even if beauty cannot be captured in a photograph, that does not mean the beauty before us has changed.
The desire to preserve something, and the sensation of seeing more deeply precisely because it cannot be preserved. I believe both exist in the time we spend engaging with photography.
What appears in a photograph, and what does not.
I want to look closely at the small beauties that remain between the two.
From the Journal
A photograph retains not only what appears in it, but also a little of the atmosphere that was there and the presence it could not fully capture.
This issue’s feature explores the textures created by scanning printed photographs. The roughness of paper, the bleeding of ink, and traces of light add something to the image, allowing the photograph to emerge not merely as a record, but as something tactile.
To remember what was not captured, we look once again at what was. We chose this article as a perspective that resonates with this issue’s theme.
Memory Note
This month, a photograph by Stoneriver caught our attention within the cizucu community. It is an image that flattens and freezes a reflection in a window. The scenery reflected in the glass seems to be there, yet it cannot be touched. But through the camera, that fleeting image remains as a photograph, transformed into something that can be placed on a wall or a sheet of paper.
In an interview with “The British News Digest” in 2012, photographer Daido Moriyama said, “There is no quality without quantity.” If the camera is a tool for visually collecting the world, then a photograph must also retain the rawness of the images encountered by the person taking it. The fleeting landscape reflected in the window, and the creator’s unconscious response to it, may also be part of that collection.
The “beauty that cannot be captured in a photograph” Hiroto sang about also overlaps with our impulse to press the shutter even when faced with something that cannot be fully captured. We preserve what appears in order to remember what did not.
Taking photographs, pasting them, photographing them again. Through this repetition, images may gradually acquire a tactile quality.
This Month’s Question
This Month’s Question
“Because there is beauty that cannot be captured in a photograph.”
Hiroto’s growling voice sometimes suddenly starts playing back in my mind.
And yet we press the shutter, hesitantly. Knowing that we cannot seal away the beauty before us exactly as it is, perhaps we still try to create, within a photograph, an opportunity to remember it in our hearts later.
What appears in a photograph is never everything.
Yet photographs quietly remain, so that we can remember what was not captured.
Next month, we will bring you another small story about what exists within photographs and what lies beyond them.
cizucu Editorial Team
cizucu Editorial Team