“Asakusa Zenzai” is a documentary photograph series that focuses in on an old couple living in an old neighborhood of Tokyo. The title is reminiscent of the easygoing feeling and sentimentality of this old neighborhood. However, this exhibition is not meant for those who like high art that is easy to take in. In these 80 photographs, the undulation of life is relentlessly portrayed, wrenching the hearts of their unwitting viewers. The artist who took these photos is Eriko Koga. Born in Fukuoka in 1980, after graduating from Sophia University’s French Literature Department she unwaveringly embarked on the path of photography, choosing to become a freelance photographer. She had wanted to become a photographer since high school, and while in college she studied photography on her own, going around town taking photos of people. At 22, she met an old couple at the Asakusa Sanja Festival and spent the following 6 years focusing her camera on their lives. Her record of Asakusa she started photographing in May of 2003 was selected for the 2004 photo documentary “NIPPON” presented by Guardian Garden and 3 years later featured in the June 2007 issue of the photography magazine “Kaze no Tabibito”. Then, in April of this year, the photograph series she had been working on for 6 years, “Asakusa Zenzai”, was finally completed and this summer will be presented in a long-awaited exhibition at our gallery in Hiroo. Ms. Koga’s photographs are roughly textured. It would be hard to say her technical control of light is flattering or refined. However, even so, you rarely find photos this strikingly unforgettable. Perhaps these works are so moving because they capture lives as they truly are: the lives of a couple aging, year by year. Like the spectrum of a fading rainbow, the shining vermilion light intersects with the lonely blue-gray light of wasted things intersects in these photographs. Ms. Koga controlled the timing of her shots while portraying this old couple as they are. The works in this exhibition can be seen as trading a physical richness for a close examination of a modern society that is gradually losing its humanity. In recent years, the trade-off for our emphasis on economic development or social progress is a society that cultivates excessive individualism and inequality and has resulted in many people being abandoned. The old couple portrayed in “Asakusa Zenzai” may be among those very people. However, thanks to the young and promising Ms. Koga, for whom becoming a photographer was everything, this old couple has not been completely abandoned. “Nothing I could say could better express what is in these photographs. I would be thrilled if people feel something beyond what can be seen when they look at these photos.” These words Ms. Koga shared upon the start of this exhibition also leave a lasting impression.

May, 2008. Seiji KOMATSU, Director of Emon Inc.