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March 23, 2014, The Sun at the Apparent Altitude of 570 m in WNW, Hijiyama Park, Hiroshima from the series Exposed in a Hundred Suns
Arai Takashi (Japanese, born in 1978)
2014
Medium/Technique
Daguerreotype
Dimensions
Framed: 54.6 x 44.5 x 4.4 cm (21 1/2 x 17 1/2 x 1 3/4 in.)
Image: 19.3 x 25.2 cm (7 5/8 x 9 15/16 in.)
Image: 19.3 x 25.2 cm (7 5/8 x 9 15/16 in.)
Credit Line
Sophie M. Friedman Fund
Accession Number2015.2948
NOT ON VIEW
CollectionsAsia, Contemporary Art, Photography
ClassificationsPhotographs
DescriptionJapanese, born in 1978
They say we must never forget Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Daigo Fukuryumaru, Fukushima. But for the vast majority of us who did not directly experience those events ourselves, this slogan is an impossible command. Nevertheless, we continue to refresh our individual experience and memory through continuous contact with monuments. We must continue to alight here on their surface. To confront these monuments is to connect with a bygone time and space. It is to lend an ear to the new tale of you and of me that is being spun from the monuments’ surface. This is surely how the new 21st-century resistance to extinction and oblivion will once again be waged.
For his images Arai has embraced the daguerreotype, the early 19th-century photographic technique, which involves exposing a polished silvered plate to light. He has been attracted to the process because it is slow and deliberate. It also produces a single image that cannot be replicated, unlike the products of negative-positive film. Arai believes that his daguerreotypes, with their own three-dimensional presence, can serve as compact monuments, compelling us to remember.
March 23, 2014, The Sun at the Apparent Altitude of 570 m in WNW, Hijiyama Park
from the series Exposed in a Hundred Suns, 2014
Daguerrotype
Arai took this image of the sun, waiting for it to perfectly align with the detonation point of Little Boy, the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.
Courtesy Photo Gallery International
They say we must never forget Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Daigo Fukuryumaru, Fukushima. But for the vast majority of us who did not directly experience those events ourselves, this slogan is an impossible command. Nevertheless, we continue to refresh our individual experience and memory through continuous contact with monuments. We must continue to alight here on their surface. To confront these monuments is to connect with a bygone time and space. It is to lend an ear to the new tale of you and of me that is being spun from the monuments’ surface. This is surely how the new 21st-century resistance to extinction and oblivion will once again be waged.
For his images Arai has embraced the daguerreotype, the early 19th-century photographic technique, which involves exposing a polished silvered plate to light. He has been attracted to the process because it is slow and deliberate. It also produces a single image that cannot be replicated, unlike the products of negative-positive film. Arai believes that his daguerreotypes, with their own three-dimensional presence, can serve as compact monuments, compelling us to remember.
March 23, 2014, The Sun at the Apparent Altitude of 570 m in WNW, Hijiyama Park
from the series Exposed in a Hundred Suns, 2014
Daguerrotype
Arai took this image of the sun, waiting for it to perfectly align with the detonation point of Little Boy, the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.
Courtesy Photo Gallery International
Provenance2014, consigned by the artist to Photo Gallery International, Tokyo, Japan; 2015, sold by Photo Gallery International to the MFA. (Accession Date: September 24, 2015)
CopyrightReproduced with permission.