Ken – Ichi Murata

 Death & Eros together again in the amazing hand-colored black and white photographs by Ken-Ichi Murata…

“When I was ten years old, I came to realize that “the human will die someday”. And I got so afraid of death that I could not get out of my house at all. Since then I got anxiety neurosis and have been living with it. Therefore, this disease has influenced my life. And the consciousness of death which I always have influences my creation a lot. Then I will tell you how they influence my works.
With the action of binding, I can express “Captivity by others” and can also express “Self Captivity in mind”. And those expressions also reflect the condition that all my life was bound to my obsession due to neurosis…

…Repeating those photographic shootings, I gradually got familiar with death and now I got a harmony agreement with it. This may have been due to the fact that I take eros for a primitive religion. So I add a kind of magical story to the models’ eros held in the garret, and fix it on the developing paper, and regard it as my own “Ikon”.
This is my new way of relationship with death because I do not have any religion.”