Masato Seto
Saturday, 8 August 2009
This series, titled “Picnic”, by Masato Seto, shows people in parks, sitting and lying on plastic sheets placed on grass. They look as if they were in their rooms without roofs and walls. Seto creates invisible rooms using a conceptual tool - plastic sheets - within a conceptual space: parks. It makes us unaware of the dislocation from the real world, just as costumes disconnected from reality become symbols. The couples are very close to each other, and behave as if they were alone. They are naturally so while the photographer is shooting, not having been told to pose. Although there are no settings used for these photographs, they look out of place.
One seeks documentation when attempting to equate photographs to reality. But documentation is not free from stories. It makes sense to say photography is fiction rather than saying documentation is free from stories. A fiction is naturally detached from reality. If one seeks documentation with photography, it is going to be anti-documentation (which is photography itself). A lot of people refuse to be tolerant of the disconnectedness from reality because they dont want it erode their reality. The photographer betrays the expected documentation.
Text adapted from a review by Koike Hiro’o.