Private hand-made publication, hardcover, limited edition of 100, signed. Dual 1&2 arrived second at the Kassel photobook award just one vote behind the "PIGS" by Carlos Spottorno.

"During the act of taking a photograph, the camera’s lens acts as a tool that can separate all the different factors that make up the world.

By freeing these factors of their respective inherent attributes, I reduce my photos to a pure, Silent Motif. The prints I create gradually assemble into photographic piles, patiently waiting for their turn. The DUAL series is about lining two prints up next to each other and searching for every possible relationship between the two in a pluralistic manner. A chemical reaction occurs whose random outcome changes the nuances and meanings of the photos in ways that could not have been predicted, leading the imaginative stimulation into new directions and thereby uncovering previously hidden thoughts and impressions.

This is a method reminiscent of the way two music instruments join to play a duet with each other, bearing the sudden changes, the strengths and weaknesses, the shades and tonalities of musical composition

Outside the boundaries of newly created or pre-existing categories, the meanings of the pictures expand, stirring the consciousness, and offering a virtual illusion as if being amidst a flood of images. Inner vision influences how to interpret the new, third sensations evoked by the joining of two motifs. Using the sense of sight, I intend to open the doors to a diversity of new thoughts, interpretations, ways of thinking by linking parts in the recipient that are usually kept separate — parts of their personality, their memories, their experiences. Inducing unconscious thoughts and the deep bliss that comes with them when one joins previously disconnected temporal fragments of the minds — akin to the Reminiscence technique Proust employed in his In Search of Lost Time — is another of DUAL’s goals. I attempted to allow for an unconscious journey, a travel without specific end or beginning, going back and forth between the everyday and the extraordinary, the real and the real, employing the chance meeting of fragments, like an analogy of micro and macro, or contrasting of monochrome and colour, or comparing the organic with the inorganic and so forth.

The book is split into six parts, Plan A-F, and divided into two volumes, but no special meaning is associated with this. The photos have been grouped together spontaneously according to inspiration and have not been altered afterwards. During the book designing process, I decided on an ambiguous finish that would allow no clear idea of what the book’s content has to offer, with a strong emphasis on originality especially for the painted book cover. No two editions are quite like another. For the inside, a Japanese paper was selected that would offer a rough touch with each turn of the page, something that cannot be achieved by image selection alone. In order to reproduce the colours of the photos according to a certain taste, a printing machine from an earlier generation — already out of production, located in the countryside — has been used. This commitment was in order to eradicate the trace of time from inside this book, thereby achieving a certain universality that need not submit itself to a specific axis of time, neither old nor new. DUAL’s conceptual frame, by removing the photos from the confines of their reality, moving them closer to a place of the ideal, tries to offer something not yet experienced. A plurality of conclusions derives from a diversity of interpretations. My aspiration are photos that act as elements that encourage thought and pondering, to push photography, one of the possibilities of expression, into an even richer form of imaging." (Toshithugu Yamawaki)

Pages: 446
Place: Tokyo
Year: 2013
Publisher: Studio a la page
Size: 23 x 31 cm (approx.)

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