Interview with Hideyuki Ishibashi

IMA, Vol. 15, Spring 2016

I interviewed Hideyuki Ishibashi about his latest project, Connotations, and about his work with found and appropriated images.

How did the idea for the series Connotations come about?

Connotations is a collaboration I undertook with the poet Win Harms from the Untied States. At the time I was studying French in Lille and that is where I met Win Harms. When she showed me her poems they felt very new to me. A lot of Japanese poetry is about atmosphere, about intangible things. But her poems are about her life, which has been very difficult: she had a drug problem and ended up living on the streets. She also spent time in mental hospital. Her poems seemed very vivid, like documents, like Nan Goldin’s photographs. I thought that I could collaborate with her and maybe make images based on her poems in order to create some kind of memories. I thought that I could transmit these memories to the viewer in some way.

For this project I wanted to show that my images were constructed, unlike Présage. For Connotations I only used photographs from Flickr and Instagram, because I wanted to use images that do not have any materiality. Images which anyone can easily search for and see. 

Read the full interview on the amana art photo website