shashasha

With “Blind”, Japanese photographer Keita Noguchi interrogates the way that unquestioned perspectives and accepted ideas of value influence his way of seeing the world. For Noguchi, it was the simple graphical entity of the barcode (“an indicator of a thing’s value,” he writes in the afterword) that came to symbolize his own willing blindness, and barcodes appears throughout the book in various roles and places. Created by printing images onto transparent film and separating each page with see-through paper, the very act of browsing “Blind” forces the reader to engage with the photographs – whimsical moments and details of nature, the sea shot through the window of a boat, close-ups of a horse, bushes and shadows forming patterns – in multiple ways.

“Sometimes, this barcode blinds me to the extent that it covers up the essence of the subject, and sometimes it exists as a thin filter without me realising it. Moreover, my ‘barcode’ changes day by day, and when I think it has disappeared, it creates new standards of value. You can’t have completely unfiltered eyes […]”
― from Keita Noguchi’s afterword (included in Japanese and in English translation)