Female Narrator In the second half of the 20th-century, Japan was expanding socially and economically in ways never seen before. The presence of television, and the importance of television, cannot be underestimated. Between 1975 and 1976, street photographer Masao Mochizuki took his still camera indoors to record a year of television. Photographs curator Arpad Kovacs.
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Arpad Kovacs I think he was interested in the sequential nature of film, how a film strip has dozens and dozens of small frames that, when projected or when played in sequence, create motion.
Female Narrator To create his version of a film strip, Mochizuki took still images of moving pictures.
Arpad Kovacs What you get is this composite picture of [music ends] multiple images of the TV screen at various moments in the program’s duration.
Female Narrator The images capture the juxtaposition of content on the television. Serious subjects were constantly being interrupted, says Kovacs.
Arpad Kovacs When you read one of his photographs sequentially, you’ll notice coverage of an event and suddenly the tone shifts. So there’s a commercial for soap or there’s a commercial for something else and that interrupts the seriousness of the program that he intended to photograph.
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Female Narrator Mochizuki was fascinated by the stream of images that wash over the viewer while watching. In his book, he pastes grids of images side by side, as if pushing how much time he can fit onto a page, knowing that however many moments he captures and fixes in his frame—50, 100, 200—it will never be enough. It will always be incomplete.
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