Vessels of time a short essay on Hirokawa ........ By Kohtaro Iizawa

To capture time is one of mankind's unfinished dreams. Shapeless and invisible, time passes ceaselessly. Even when we try to preserve a single moment for eternity, it slips through our fingers like sand, gradually losing its form and fading away.

Artists have long tried to represent the ever-changing form of time as visual images on canvas and in stone or clay. Since photography was invented in middle of the nineteenth century, photographers have inherited these hopes and dreams and attempted to enclose time within the silver grain. The work of Taishi Hirokawa clearly shows the excellence of the photograph as a means of expression that can serve as a vessel for time.

The main theme of his Timescapes series is huge rocks found all over the world.Since the earliest days of the earth when the continents emerged from the boiling hot sea, over periods of time so long that their mere contemplation makes one feel faint, certain kinds of rocks have been formed. Time has thus accumulated in the organic forms of these rocks since the primitive ages.

The rocks have been created by power of time. In order to represent in abstract form the power and energy hidden in these rocks, Hirokawa decided to include the movement of the stars in the photographs. He does this by superimposing rocks photographed during daytime with images of the night sky taken through exposure over long periods. This light from the stars, coming down to the earth's surface at the speed of light from galaxies tens of thousands of years away,may be viewed as a metaphor of time itself.

In the series Still Crazy, the scale of time becomes a little shorter. This series consists of photographs of the 53 nuclear reactors located throughout Japan.It is well known that although nuclear power stations are products of the most advanced modern scientific technology, they are also very dangerous and potentially destructive to mankind,as shown by the disastrous accident at the nuclear power station in Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union in 1986. Hirokawa has deep misgivings about these products of mankind's "craziness".

However, rather than complaining loudly about nuclear power,he simply presents in to us quietly and without comment in the form of objective scenes with only dates and place names. In fact, the deterioration of nuclear reactors is surprisingly fast ; they usually have to be destroyed after about forty years. This means that the nuclear reactors that Hirokawa has photographed will probably no longer be there in forty year's time. In spite of the quiet manner of its presentation, Still Crazy is a series which fills the viewer profound fear.

By photographing objects constructed on the premise that they will be abandoned and disappear, Hirokawa succeed in encapsulating not only past and present time but also future time. Taishi Hirokawa is a unique figure among Japanese photographers.

Underlying his work are very clear ideas and concepts and the attention to detail and patience that make it possible to realize them in the form of photographs.Worthy of special mention is Hirokawa's readiness to spend a long time working on each of his projects.
He therefore has the ideal temperament for tacking vague themes that cannot be easily grasped, such as time.

Hirokawa will undoubtedly continue to pursue his use of photographs as vessels of time and crystallize it in refined images. I very much look forward to watching this process.

Kohtaro Iizawa Critic