Izima Kaoru

I’ve been feeling like exploring, or, mining my memory banks. so far i’ve went all the way back to a time i loved everything Japanese. a pointless declaration, i know. but it all brings me back to a trip to japan i took with my mother.

this is one of the few photos i have of her. i don’t want to go off on some sentimental journey with you. well, not just yet. but she died in a hospice, that wasn’t too, well, i have no clue how to describe it. let’s just say if she needed to call for help she had to pull a string of yarn. i believed she deserved better. but i wanted to make sure that when she died. if it’s true that when the soul leaves the body it can see. i wanted her to look back and know that she was loved. and that i was by her side.

I took that photo, coincidentally  right before she died. i remember clearly how it didn’t make me cry. i felt a strange ethereal feeling i hope one day to describe. however now i don’t have the philosophy to describe it, without sounding theatrical. because it was the most peaceful human felling i’ve ever felt to this day.

anyways back to japan. when we were in japan we enjoyed the fact everyone believed in ghosts. witches not so much. witches are consider to be faire tails. but, ghost were real as nature.

there is a fashion photographer  named Izima Kaoru. i’ve been obsessed by his work ever since my mothers death. they give me a great calm. almost a feeling of validation for my gesture.

Izima Kaoru---

i imagine the soul of the dead persons body. and as they are rising up, they look back at their corpse. for example

   she has been hit by a car and has died. the soul will think “why did i have to die there? i had so many things i wanted to do"

 she would be disappointed and frustrated. but then while she’s rising, and looks back; she can think she looks beautiful. if you think you look beautiful; then to me the person can be satisfied with their life. i want the models to look at the pictures and think that was them. i was afraid of death, and i wanted to ease that feeling. i think that when people get closer to death; they can start to prepare for it better.

for this series i interview the models who were posing as the corpse; to find out in what way they want to die. then i create a story around the wishes of the models in each picture.

this is Ai Tominaga: fashion model. when i asked her how she wanted to die; she said she didn’t want to die by getting older and sick. she wanted to die in her prime with a heart attack, while she was walking. thats what she wanted out of her story. so we killed her off in a airport. while she was traveling for work

this is the last thing she saw as her sprit was rising up

this is mari Natsuki. she’s a high class actress. she told me she’s really obsessed with food. so she wanted to die surrounded by food. we chose tomatoes. also she really likes traveling, so we decided she would be traveling alone. she would meet a truck driver who gave her a ride. while they were traveling she would sleep with the truck driver, and in the end he would kill her. and dump her with the tomatoes.

that was the story she came up with.

 i haven’t done it yet but i want my death to be the last of the series of photos 

Izima Kaoru

source - japanorama.s3.e5

von lintel gallery new york

http://vonlintel.com/Izima-Kaoru.html