Photography of Masahiro Hiroike

Masahiro Hiroike is a remarkable photographer who, while originally working within the tradition of landscape photography, has begun to expand the potential of digital photography by engaging with themes such as chance and temporality.

In the course of producing works focused on the natural world, Hiroike turned his attention to the luminous trajectories created by the swarming Himebotaru fireflies. These traces of light, emerging from the darkness, are in essence a form of automatism: the result of contingent circumstances, exceeding the artist’s direct intention. Such images were once explored within Surrealist photography as well; however, whereas Surrealism emphasized the strangeness of the realized image and its appeal to the unconscious, Hiroike instead directs his gaze toward the latent potential of new digital technologies.

This potential lies in the vast number of images that can be captured instantaneously; in the ability to manipulate exposure or sensitivity in real time as one verifies each image; and further, in the act of imparting motion not to the subject but to the camera itself. In the resulting works, the light of the Himebotaru is no longer rendered as movement but as a constellation of scattered luminous points, while fireworks appear as dense, trembling filaments of line.

What is realized there is not the “déjà vu” (a feeling of having already seen) of Surrealism, but an image of “jamais vu” (a feeling of never having seen).

Shinichiro Osaki
Director
Tottori Prefectural Museum of Art