ENTRY DESCRIPTION
Wet Plate Collodion Process, 6x6 cm Ambrotype, 2015

“Oblivion Terror Management” underpins my photography. When the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred, most people lost everything and were desperate to find their photographs. Many victims of the earthquake began to wash the mud out of their retrieved photographs. I believe this is because of the true power of photography that assures the referent’s existence, which in this case would mean that their lives’ consistency would be assured. Consistency is substances gathering together. Each substance corresponds to experience. Experiences can never be memories until something is suggestive of the experience, bringing it back into one’s consciousness. Thus, when people lose their photographs, people cannot help but regard this as losing the referent itself. Human beings recognise an experience A as a memory after ‘experiencing’ the experience A. Photographs can be suggestive. Experiencing the past presence in a photograph is the essential feature of photography, which strengthens life’s consistency.

This wet plate collodion photograph is my very first successful shot in my life. It expresses “Oblivion Terror” by the shadow that is about to overwhelm me in the photograph from the right bottom.

AUTHOR
Yugo Ito
Born in Tsushima City, Aichi, Japan, in 1991.
Grown up as the 4th generation of a family-owned photo studio called Ito Photo Studio.

At the photo studio, he has mainly shoot Daguerreotype & Wet Plate Collodion & Dry Plate Collodion with his hand-made Urushi-coated wooden large format camera.
Recently, he has started a new project to build a huge darkroom camera in Giroux Daguerreotype shape in his studio.

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