We are pleased to announce the publication of Masahiro Kodaira’s Videre Videor. While Kodaira has always pursued instinctive photographic action, he has continuously meditated on the process of recognizing a subject and releasing the shutter.

If one were to photograph ‘a scenery perceived subconsciously,’ what should the photographer do? Masahiro Kodaira’s photographic practice is one answer to this pending question. (from the contributed essay by Mitsuhiro Wakayama) The series title Videre Videor derives from the sentence videre videor, audire videor, calescare videor—the passage from which Descartes arrived at cogito, ergo sum. A series Kodaira has developed since the outset of his photographic career, now spanning nearly thirty years, Videre Videor explores the radical relationship between the individual and the world through intuitive image-making, in an ongoing dialogue with this philosophical tradition. He thus illustrates one possible answer.

Moments of nature, life, scenery, everyday, or journeys; Kodaira’s photographs bear a sense of familiarity, yet also emerge as images so fresh they seem to have never set foot in this world. Seri Tanaka’s experimental design delivered a publication that celebrates nostalgia whirled with a freshness of the present day. 

At times, photographs render my vision in an entirely unexpected form

—like a miracle.

Some suddenly take shape before my eyes; others reveal themselves only once they have become a photograph. This experience is not unfamiliar. 

I still don’t quite understand how to capture it.

It is perhaps following one’s nature,

or simply embracing what I see, as it is. 

Perhaps it’s not to think at all.

Anyway, down that road, it comes back again, just when I had forgotten to expect it.

(from the artist’s statement)