- 150 photos: 94 b & w, 56 color
- Size of photo: 17.7 x 25.5 cm
- Technik: b & w print, Gelatin silver print: color print, Type C print (LightJet print)
Early in 2018, as soon as the year dawned, I set about cleaning out the attic. I decided to use the New Year as an opportunity to organize the miscellaneous items that had accumulated in a clump before I knew it, and at the same time, my real purpose was to organize and check the details of Christine related items. I was contemplating presenting the "work" by Christine's own hand in a solo exhibition that was scheduled to take place in 2019.
In the attic, I found various objects related to her, some I had already forgotten about their existence and some I had never seen before. In addition to the written material, there was Super 8 film, cassette tapes, and pocket camera film. During the process of examining the found materials in detail, I realized something. It was when I found a slide film of myself standing behind a tripod with a 6 x 7 camera mounted on it on the beach of Izu, my hometown. It's a picture she took of me with a Leica that she had on her own, when I took a portrait of Christine, wearing a Leica around her neck and black rubber boots, standing at the end of the wharf with a bamboo stick.
I was a little excited, muttering "Face to Face" in my mouth.
As I studied more and more of the photos taken by her pocket camera and the photos she took with her 35mm camera, I discovered that Christine was often taking pictures of me, and they were taking pictures of each other almost simultaneously. This act of photographing and being photographed with varying degrees of frequency continued until the day before Christine took her own life in East Berlin in October 1985.
This portfolio "Face to Face" begins with a picture of Christine taken in my apartment in Graz on February 28, 1978, and ends with a photo of Christine with Komyo, taken on October 6, 1985, against the backdrop of Tsitsilienhof Palace, the site of the so-called "Potsdam Conference" in 1945, where the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union discussed the post-war handling of World War II.
The first portfolio was produced in 2020. It contains a total of 150 photos, that means, 75 photos of each other.
All the photos were taken by Christine and Seiichi of each other, with one exception*.
* Graz, 1979, Opus list No. 59 was taken using a self-timer.?
News
A book “Face to Face" will be published by Chose Commune in December 2020.
