TOKYO-2020 Book / Fine Art

What On Earth Is The Past?

  • Prize
    Bronze in Book/Fine Art
  • Photographer
    Yugo Ito
  • Agency / Studio
    Ito Photo Studio
  • Technical Info
    Handmade Dry Plate Collodion Process, 4x5inch Tintype
  • Photo Date
    2017

What on earth is the past? While looking at these dry plate photographs, you will realise that you hover between the present and the distant past of each place at the same time. You will sense the past as if you know the past. However, you have never actually experienced those pasts. In other words, the past exists in our brain as the future does. These dry plate photographs describe that the past is not something to stream to the present. It is something to be improvised for the present on each occasion.

He grew up as the 4th generation of a family-owned photo studio. He has mainly taken Daguerreotype, Wet plate collodion process and Dry plate collodion process photographs for his customers with his hand-made large format camera. But, since 2019, he has started to build a huge portable darkroom camera in Giroux Daguerreotype camera style in the photo studio. Customers can get inside the darkroom camera and also witness how their photo that this darkroom camera takes is developed with a photographer. He has also got interviewed for Asahi Newspaper and Kyodo News about the darkroom camera.