Red and white plums

Norio Takasugi

A photograph only offers one small section of a real situation—it is a transient, unfinished thing. We photograph moments precisely because they flit by and seem irrevocable. Photographers have taken many paths to connect their work, bound to the moment, to timelessness.

Norio Takasugi (born 1973 in Shizuoka, Japan) takes photographs of plants. His aim is to depict the plant in all its three-dimensionality. Light and shadow and various planes of brightness are superimposed in the pictorial space. In his new project, he combines the technique of silver leaf sulfurization (see Korin Ogata’s Red and white plum blossoms), used as early as the eighteenth century in Japanese painting, with a printing technique of superimposition. Takasugi photographed a motif multiple times using different exposures, printed these images in the silver foil sulfurization technique, and printed the resulting individual images over one another. In comparison to silver gelatin, silver leaf sulfurization has the advantage of a deep black tone. The idea here is to attain to a whole and timeless image through unifying photographic prints.