Mēdeia2.0 ISSUE N˚04 Hiroko Komatsu

Mēdeia2.0 is a publishing label launched as an offshoot of Project Mēdeia1.0, which was established to use fashion as a medium to spread awareness of events and social issues around the world captured by photographers both in Japan and abroad.

While Mēdeia1.0 confronts viewers with piercing truths, Mēdeia2.0 focuses on the ‘white space’ of thought and emotion, while also highlighting the new appeal of the photographs and works through elaborate printing and book design.

In the fourth issue, Japanese photographer Hiroko Komatsu appears, who emphasises the materiality of photography and works to expand the concept of photography through a wide range of techniques, including video, collage, drawing, and installation.

Komatsu consistently shoots in black-and-white film, focusing on industrial areas in western or southern Tokyo, demolition sites, scrap materials, and the back of trucks transporting building materials such as steel bars and pipes. She has taken on the conceptual and universal theme of ‘death’.

In this book, the works are presented in a continuous, long, folded accordion-bound format, reflecting this theme.

Each work consists of scanned images of the front and back of prints that Komatsu hand-developed in the darkroom. By intentionally leaving the pages folded and reproducing the notes on the back that are normally invisible, the materiality of photography that Komatsu pursues is expressed without compromise in the printed form.