shashasha

In January 2009, My grandmother was admitted to the hospital.
The doctor told us she had three months to live.
I went back to my parents’ house as many times as I could, thinking about capturing her image as frequently as I could.
But I could hardly do this because she was more emaciated each time I saw her.　 I walked around my house and took photographs of it as if I sought for the shadow of my grandmother.
She passed away in April as the doctor had predicted .
The funeral, the 49th day after death, the Bon Festival, all has passed so quickly.
I continued to go back to my parents’ house to take photographs afterwards.
The year 2009 came to an end in that way.
I noticed that I could feel her presence more strongly from the photographs taken around my house than those taken of her, herself and of which I had only a few shots. Memories will fade out little by little from one’s mind, but I realized that the fragments of memory that were etched into a little landscape where I spent with her will remain from now on.
The landscape which seemed nothing much to me before, has become a beautiful memory now.

Toshiya Murakoshi

Toshiya Murakoshi lives and works in Tokyo. He chose his hometown as a photographic subject since 2006. He is working on this series as if tracing the memory of a place where he was present. This series is included in five books published since 2008, and also has been exhibited at TAP, an independent gallery of which he is a member. The 15 works for this exhibition were created at the time when he experienced his grandmother’s death in 2009; the incident was a trigger that prompted an awareness of the relationship between the action of taking photographs of his parents’ house and the memory of his family. These works are follow Murakoshi’s “until and unless”（published in 2010）and “calendula”（published in 2011). Murakoshi began working on this series at greater pace following the Great East Japan Earthquake. He also exhibits past work as well as this series in parallel. His work turns on various time axes that cannot be separated from each other.