運命共同体

Growing up in totally different environments, we first met each other by photography and then got married as a new family. We started this project in order to take our “unique family photos.”

The scene of this photoshooting is the ancestral land which will turn into our home; We’re going to build up our house there in the near future.

As we continued photoshooting, we started to ask the meaning of our bond to each other. We also had internal arguments about the following questions:

“Why did I meet her and become her husband?”
“Why did I meet him and become his wife?”
“What will our relationship be like from now on?”
“What is a ‘married couple’? What does it mean to become a new family?”

We don’t know the answers yet at this point.

Cracking the ground, a brand-new fellowship is born in this world, and it eventually comes to an end, going back into the ground. While one life begins, another life goes to an end.
In such a circle of life, we’ll keep on facing our fellowship called “family” throughout this project.

Ichio Usui

Afterword

One day, my husband suddenly told me to bury myself in the ground; It was a very cold, snowy day. I remember that my body had been shivering from the cold all day long.

Ignoring me freezing, he just directed a serious look at me through a camera lens. I couldn’t hear that much sound under the ground, but his voice giving me directions was so pure and soft. Strange to say, I was able to feel his love through this weird space between us.

Just like vinegar and oil are combined and emulsified by eggs, my husband and I combined together and united into one through photography. I felt that we were like mayonnaise.

In our everyday life with a mixture of hopes and fears, we gradually unite into one fellowship while colliding to each other. There are no logical answers here; I feel that each fellowship has a different form, while always changing the form since it was born.

Inspired by our shocking event called “marriage,” we started this project to take our unique family photos. Looking back to our path all the way here, I feel that we created a piece depicting more than our fellowship: the style of a husband digging a hole in a place inherited and protected by ancestors and having his wife bury herself in it, a unique Japanese spirit of sticking to one specific land, the gender inequality we still have unconsciously in Japan, and so on.
This piece is full of our anxiety, doubt, hope and preparedness as Japanese.

For this series of photography, we’re going to have three parts in total.
Following our life changes, this series depicts “the birth” in the first part, “the growth” in the second part, and “the end,” when either of us passes away, in the final part. We think this piece will be completed when a circle of our lives completes one rotation.

Please look forward to what will happen to us as time goes by from now on.

Chika Usui