Of what use will be a dish of roses to thee? Take a leaf from my rose-garden. A flower endures but five or six days.But this rose-garden is always delightful.
Sa’di, The Gulistan (“Rose Garden”)
More often than not, people behave rather oddly when they face roses.One day, shortly after I moved to Osaka, I encountered a tribe of people obsessed with roses in an urban rose garden I found purely by chance.
Almost all visitors to this rose garden whip out their smart-phones and cameras, and start taking pictures as soon as they see the first flower.They look very serious indeed, and probably because of that, strangely stiff at the same time. I couldn’t tell which is more important to them, embracing the flowers or taking pictures of them.That brought me to the methodology of using carefully controlled daylight-synchronized strobe in order to restore and even out the visual impacts of the beautiful roses, and the appearances and behaviors of the visitors within calculated, two-dimensional frames.
The images I photographed of the rose garden ended up confusing me even more, contrary to my original intention. The photographs make the visitors look more theatrical, but whether their priority is to embrace the flowers or take pictures of them still remains a mystery to me. In fact, I came to a conclusion, that the object of their admiration doesn’t have to be flowers in a rose garden. It could be a zoo, a famous tourist site or even a lunch with friends at a nice restaurant.However, When I think that flowers are still blooming on their flush memory, I am amused at the thought of the tens of thousands of rose gardens, with countless roses that will never wilt, and will never drop their petals.
About Takayuki Narita
I usually choose different photography methods for each projects. Now, I am taking pictures from the standpoint of modernology . Modernology (the study of modern social phenomena) was proposed by Kon Wajiro, a prominent folklorist in Japan, is one of my most interested concept in photographing modern society. Like archeologists, Modernologists also use typology. I consider modern people’s behavior by observing and collecting various types on streets.[Official Website]
