Tamami Hitsuda

　 My research theme is the "beauty"
　 of the decorative and sacred.

First, I want to ask you about your production process. You build a stock of photos, feed the images to your personal computer, and then create a collage. In the end, you print the image to paper.

Yes.

Normally, do you shoot with film?

No, I use a digital camera. Shooting is the important thing, and I’m not very concerned with the texture of the photograph itself. I normally use a digital camera, but I don’t care so much about camera features.

This is your usual routine?

Yes. If I want to see something, I'll go and photograph it. Or sometimes I might want to photograph something again, so I’ll reshoot it.

But you don't often travel to specifically shoot something, do you?

That’s right, most of the time when I travel, it's for something else, and I shoot on the side. I think that's the best way. Sometimes I do travel to see landscapes that I might want to use in my works.

Do you always carry a camera with you when you go out?

Yes, I carry a compact digital camera and a digital SLR. Even when I used film, I always used to carry a camera. I blew up my film images to a large size so I also used a PLAUBEL Makina W67 medium-format camera (using 120 or 220 film).

When you actually create a work, you take all the image data, combine them together, and decide how the final image will be. Do you do everything yourself, even the printing? When I visited your studio before, you had a very large printer.

For large installations, I use a large-scale digital printer to make the prints. Since I have my own printer, I can freely change the printing media such as the paper and canvas. It's like a woodblock printing press.
I take an installation-like approach to making large works, so it’s more like a painting process than a photographic one.

It's like when you had the show at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography ("On Flowering Images; Contemporary New Photography," 2004).

For that exhibition, I had prints almost 20 meters long. I had them printed out with the help of Mr. Yoshihara at Canon's Design Center. Even now, he continues to assist artists and I'm thankful to him.
But for a show like this (at Tomio Koyama), I used C-prints (made on negative-type color photo paper) mounted on plexiglas for stability.

Are they lambda prints (made with a laser from digital data taken from scanned slide film)?

I use power prints (made on silver-halide photo paper exposed directly by a laser from digital data) and C-prints.

For this show, you originally had the idea to print out large, wallpaper-size prints, right?

Yes. But for this gallery space, I thought it would be better to make each print an independent work. Each one is quite large.

Yes, they certainly are big.

The width is about 3 meters. "The Swan" was actually smaller, so I was concerned about the resolution.

Were there any major problems?

For images taken with the compact camera, I was concerned about how big they could be enlarged. When I started creating the works, I did worry about the physical aspects. Sometimes, when I suddenly got the urge to shoot, I only had my compact camera. I've experimented a lot, and from experience I can now pretty much tell when the image will be okay. Recently, I got a full-frame digital SLR whose CCD sensor is the same size as the 35mm film format. So I always look forward to shooting new images.

You have a collection of photos of various motifs. At what point does the final image enter your head?

When I feel like making an image, I start simply creating it. I photograph nature and everyday things, but I prefer art to mother nature. My techniques and compositions are based on aesthetics. I like old Japanese paintings and European Romanesque art. I even have friends who tell me that I must've been a medieval person in a previous life (laughter).

You originally studied painting, didn't you?

In those days, people thought I painted very freely. I guess I had some Romanesque influence.

Like the Rimpa school?

I like Rimpa too. I also like Heian-Period Buddhist paintings before Rimpa, as well as the style after Rimpa. The work is decorative and sacred. "Beauty" is my research theme!

You started digital photo imaging early on, in 1997. And you studied painting. What exactly prompted you to start photography?

I've always taken pictures of everyday things that catch my fancy. It's like sketching something. When I was living in London, I became interested in the unusual inherent in the ordinary. I was also interested in computers.

And when you combine the different images, the process is very much like painting, isn't it?

Yes. That's the only way to look at it (regarding the direction of the work).

Your balance between man-made objects and nature is always interesting. While in this show, a landscape-painting theme is apparent overall, in the "The Place Without Name" show (Tomio Koyama Gallery, 2003), you featured man-made objects.

That show had London's new Ferris wheel (London Eye), airplanes, curtains, and so on. For this show, a deer, a swan, a rose, a water fountain, and a waterfall serve as main subjects.

This use of fairytale-like things that we may or may not find in everyday life is common to all your exhibitions.

There is fantasy in a deer becoming a god, isn’t there? It's simply my own imagination. I incorporate these fairytale symbols into the photographs. Some people might look at the deer and think, "Oh, there's Bambi!" That’s fine. It's also okay if they ask whether it's a reindeer.

It's also okay if they think it’s cute, isn’t it?

Of course, yes. I took this symbolic or special thing and made it into something that viewers could easily relate to.

Such elements weren’t part of your work before. But the atmosphere of "Roses in the dark," where we can't tell whether it’s night or day, is similar to that of past works.

Yes, it’s daytime, but it's dark. And even though it's night, there's a blue sky.