Cozue Takagi, pool

pool

Cozue Takagi

Publisher
Akaaka Art Publishing
Year
2025
ISBN
978-4-86541-205-5
Specifications
Swiss binding with double-leaf pages
208 x 154 mm
112 pages
Book design by Yuzo Kariya

Cozue Takagi, who keeps asking new questions of the idea of photography and chooses her method each time to suit her intention, here works with cyanotype, the nineteenth-century technique known for its beautiful blue tones. She exposes images taken by moonlight with long exposures, outputs them as digital negatives, lays them over cyanotype paper and exposes them again to sunlight, so that a picture caught in night light is fixed by the light of day: moon and sun, night and day, yin and yang meet in one image and several times coexist. I assumed that the moon in the photograph was the sun, she writes, and when she learned that it was the moon a vague picture of sunlight and moonlight together rose in her mind. She set up a tripod where artificial light did not reach, mounted a 6x9 medium-format camera loaded with negative film and exposed it to the moon for anywhere from a few dozen seconds to a few dozen minutes, then developed and scanned the film and printed inverted images on digital negative film. The film was laid over washi paper coated with cyanotype solution, sandwiched between two glass plates and exposed to daytime sun, while the surface changes from yellow to green, then blue, gold and finally a pale pink, and the print is rinsed in water for half a day. The book offers a timeless landscape floating in blue and another way of being a photograph.

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