Tales
STATEMENT
There is a word “sonder”. This is a neologism made by John Koenig, who is a German artist, and one of the words recorded in his project The Dictionary of obscure Sorrows which was invented to fill in a hole in the language by means of giving a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for. According to that, “sonder” is defined as “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own”.
We all live our lives as the main character, while it is a fact that millions of other lives do exist simultaneously and complexly behind the scenes. It includes our friends or neighbors as a matter of course, but such as strangers in a jam packed train, busy crowd and also countless people we’ll never be able to see have the stories of their own lives. Or rather realizing a tremendous fact they spend their irreplaceable days with having a range of emotions as we do. Everyone has a story. I got an idea from this thought and decided to show it through photography.
In this project, I provided an instant camera to my friends, acquaintances and their friends to request that they took their daily lives. Not only the aim of bringing various realities which they deal with and how they live in, by shooting fragments of the everyday typically overlooked, but also I tried to show an ordinariness as a gathering of daily scenes by presenting their works in the form of contact sheets. On there, images of each frame are likened to the lights on the windows as a metaphor describing their stories.
In this day and age, we gradually realize it is not taken for granted we live. The aim of this project is to awaken fresh viewpoints about the relationship with others and our everydayness itself.
Ongoing project
