Photography usually tries to capture the moment when the most commonplace or complex being shows its secret identity (Cartier Bresson’s “decisive moment”). For Hiroyuki Masuyama instead the basic aim is that of capturing the secret “otherness” of events, to discover the future they have compressed within their being. He distils into a single frame a multiplicity of shots and, paradoxically, creates a correspondence between the passing of time and its duration. If he wants to show the evidence of a flight from Frankfurt to Tokyo he photographs the flow of clouds where the passing of time is linked to a place (however hazy) and, therefore, to a state: to staying still in time. If, instead, he wants to investigate a space (a park for example) he rotates his camera by one degree a day in order to obtain a panoramic view, one that changes a circular vision into a linear one, and the mutation of the seasons into a single visual season.
Masuyama makes us look into a space and a time that do not exist. And even if the images seem to record reality objectively, we are in fact dealing with a potential, complex, and multiple reality: not a frame of the worlds but a world of frames, digitally enhanced and capable of producing a visual geography that has all the indefinable characteristics of “nowhere” and of “everywhere”, of the commonplace and the ideal.