About Book 

「FLYING FRYING PAN」の普後均が放つ新たなる名作。
2010年度伊奈信男賞受賞作。

円形の貯水槽の上を舞台とし、日常的な世界とメタファーの世界とが交差しながら進行する。
無名性と個、生命、陰陽、暴力、光。宇宙的な広がりを孕むモノクロ65点。

---

ON THE CIRCLE

円形の貯水槽の上に寝て目を閉じる。
宇宙に包まれるという感覚ではなく、宇宙を包み込むという感覚、
そのような一瞬は来るのだろうか。
多分、その時は、生きることの不安からも死の恐怖からも解放されるに違いない。
瞼に柔らかな光を感じながら漠然とそう思う。

円の上で交差する。直線的な時間と円環する時間が。
円の上で融合する。日常と非日常の世界が。

草を揺らす風の音。小鳥のさえずり。銃声。子供の泣き叫ぶ声。水面ではじける水滴の音。
円の上に音があふれる。

母の声は錯覚だったのだろうか。

日が落ちて、ぼくは起き上がり、貯水槽の上に立つ。
仄暗い中、何もない円を見つめる。

普後均

ON THE CIRCLE

I lay down on the top of the circular water tank and close my eyes.

Not the sense of being enveloped by the Universe, but of enfolding the Universe - I wonder if such an instant will come. Surely that will be the instant when I am liberated from the uncertainties and uneasiness of living and the fear of death. As I feel the soft light on my eyelids, this thought floats nebulously in my mind.



On the circle they intersect - linear time and circular time.

On the circle they melt together - the ordinary world and the extraordinary world.



The sound of wind gently rustling the grasses. Bird song. Gunshot. Children's wails. The sound of water drops spraying up from the water's surface. On the circle sounds exist in abundance.



Was my mother's voice just an illusion?



The evening comes. I sit up. I stand on the water tank.

In the fading light, I gaze at the circle of nothing.




Hitoshi Fugo

-----

It's not unusual for Hitoshi Fugo to use his photography as an exentded meditation on a single subject: his previous photobook, "Flying Frying Pan," was an entire series in which he looked at an old frying pan, and discovered galaxy-like configurations of light in its tiny nooks and crannies. With "On the Circle," Fugo has left the world of the frying pan, but he's still photographing in a fundamentally experimental way. In this work, he's set his camera up on a small circular patch of artificial grass, and taken all of his photographs from a slightly elevated perspective, looking down at the curve of this patch as it meets the dirt around it. From this starting point, Fugo's photographs cover a broad range of subjects and styles. Sometimes he takes what appear to be straightforward portraits, but he also plays with the scene, in a Surrealist style: he's introduced many different objects into his photographs, and in a particularly striking image, three women in swimsuits appear to execute a freestyle stroke across the circle. After discovering the universe in a frying pan, Fugo has returned to a circular area more in line with the scale of the human body, but he continues to find new ways to present the familiar in an unfamiliar way.

Includes an English translation of text by the photographer.

Top of Page

Book Previews

Artist Information

普後均 | Hitoshi Fugo

1947年生まれ。日本大学芸術学部写真学科卒業後、細江英公に師事。
1973年に独立。 2010年伊奈信男賞受賞。

作品に「遊泳」「暗転」「飛ぶフライパン」「ゲームオーバー」「見る人」「KAMI/解体」「ON THE CIRCLE」他。

写真集に「FLYING FRYING PAN」(写像工房)、池澤夏樹との共著に「やがてヒトに与えられた時が満ちて......」(河出書房新社)他。

国内、海外での個展、グループ展多数。

パブリックコレクション　東京都写真美術館、北海道立釧路芸術館、京都国立近代美術館、フランス国立図書館他。

Born in 1947. After graduating from the Photography Department in the College of Art at Nihon University, Fugo studied under photographer and filmmaker Eikoh Hosoe. Fugo began working as an independent photographer in 1973. He was the 2010 recipient of the prestigious Ina Nobuo Award.

Fugo's photograph series include Floating Around, Dark Changes, FLYING FRYING PAN, Game Over, Waterfall Watchers, KAMI/Demolition, and ON THE CIRCLE.

Photography collections include FLYING FRYING PAN (Shazow Kobo, Tokyo) and a work in collaboration with author Natsuki Ikezawa, The Time Given to Man Shall Lapse Sometime and... (Kawade Shobo Shinsha, Tokyo).

Fugo's works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Japan and overseas.

Public collections of Fugo's works are housed at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; the Kushiro Art Museum, Hokkaido; the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.