Images are for illustration purposes
このシリーズは、コンビニやスーパーマーケットに並ぶお菓子や日用品、そのパッケージに印刷されたイメージ写真の部分をネガとして扱い、カラー暗室でプリントしたものです。このプロセスによってもとの文脈から切り離されたイメージ写真は、本来容易に連想できたはずの具体的な情報が失われた抜け殻のように、ただの不可解な像として印画紙上に残されています。
ウェブ上に写真が溢れ返るようになった一方、印刷物もかつてないクオリティでの大量生産が続き、イメージ写真はそうした消費社会と複製技術の「いま」の一片として日常に偏在している。フォトグラムは、素材の表面に残る網点のパターン、プラスチックや紙といったパッケージの素材感も印画紙へ定着しています。
たとえば光の原理的な側面から見れば、印画紙の特性によってネガ化された色彩は、物体に吸収されて私たちの眼には届かなかった、いわば光の裏側でもあり、現実との物理的な接点を持つ記号でもあると言えます。それは視覚媒質としての光を受け取るチャンネルが無数に在り、私たちの視覚もあくまでその一つという隠喩を垣間見ているようでもある。そんな「印画紙の眼」によるこれらの像は、イメージ写真を写した（photographed)痕跡であり、現代の異相としてのインデックスを持つものでもあると考えています。
By Darren Campion, from YET magazine: issue12
One major consequence of the digital economy is that more images are produced and circulated than ever; at this point the numbers involved have become almost meaningless. Such intensity of production has also meant that images are more volatile than ever, sometimes literally so, one overwriting the next in a seemingly endless cycle, seen and then forgotten, all physical traces of their existence erased. But of course digital technology only changes the scale and not the fundamental terms of our visual consumption. Even printed media can be ephemeral, often serving a particular function, such as with advertising, the images used having a definite communicative purpose, but a short life, soon replaced. The cycle of photographic production and consumption is itself part of a larger social pattern.
Masashi Mihotani makes this apparent in a quite literal manner, because although the subject of his series Images are for illustration purposes seems to be food, what we're really seeing here are images, refracted back through another visual technology. These pieces are made by placing material from food packaging encountered in the artist's daily life into a photographic enlarger, which projects the image onto light-sensitive paper to create a new image, heavily cropped and recontextualised from the original. Because of how they are made the colours and tonal values are all reversed, further distancing them from their starting point, so that they begin to resemble scientific specimens. Indeed, Mihotani has likened the process of working with this material to his childhood passion for collecting insects; there is a shared concern for varieties or types, for sorting and classifying, but also for wonderment, in this case at the sheer proliferation of visual media.
Here the consumption of images is related to consumption more generally, as a kind of mass production, something emphasised by the texture of half-tone printing dots apparent in the images, and by the largely artificial nature of the food pictured. The relentless pattern of image production and consumption is critically framed as being fundamentally unsatisfying, substance replaced with mere echoes or traces, simulations of the real. And yet, Mihotani does something that seems quite paradoxical with this work, he gives a physical form back to the increasingly disembodied image, reproducing a reproduction so that the underlying processes- iconographic and technological both - become visible. In doing so he suggests it is possible to reimagine broader practices of representation, however disposable they might be in material terms.