2025/12/1~12/31
～Charm archives pt.1～
Artist:Guramette
【The Meaning Behind This Exhibition】
This exhibition is like an archive recording the “charm” I felt at certain moments in my life.
The intense emotions and sensations I felt in those moments—I felt they were worth preserving in a form that incorporates my own perception and slightly alters reality. I am presenting this as Part 1 because I myself am constantly changing, and with that, how I see the world and the creative medium at the core of my expression are also changing.
I hope that my expression will become even stronger and deeper from here on out.
【Introduction】
For him, a Frenchman, every Japanese landscape is fresh and new.
Even scenes that Japanese people take for granted, he finds captivating and captures them in photographs.
Come visit his exhibition and rediscover the ‘charm’ of these landscapes.
〈The Artist’s Background〉
2006: Played around with my mom’s Handycam, jokingly saying “poop.”
2009: Threw a tantrum to get a film camera at a garage sale, but never used it once.
2012: Made videos of my head exploding on a Samsung Galaxy Ace, and secretly filmed my sister entering passwords for online games.
2013: I overused bokeh with my dad’s compact camera and thought I’d gotten good. But that’s how I got my first “client”—my dad asked me to take his profile picture for a dating site.
2014: I became a photographer in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
2017: I started getting a little more serious… though that mostly meant using Instagram filters.
2018: I bought my first camera and started going out to shoot. The next year, I took that camera on my first trip around Japan.
2020: I got “stranded” in Japan due to COVID. But that became the starting point for my current photography work.
I’ve always been drawn to landscapes, but as I traveled by bicycle and on foot, recording everyday scenes, I realized my heart was constantly stirred.
Whether natural scenery or urban landscapes, places locals take for granted appear utterly fresh to me as a Frenchman. It is precisely this unfamiliarity that creates the charm. I cannot look without curiosity—that very sensation is the origin of my photography.
Here, the concept of “charm” entered my life and work, and it has remained with me ever since. Charm is ever-present in my work, deeply connected to the contextual memory of the moment I experienced it, the sensations I felt, and the senses that were stimulated. I express it as a vision of the entire place. It encompasses not only physical elements but also intangible ones like color, light, and sound, all blending together to create a dreamlike harmony.
This is the means through which I convey “the identity of the place” in my creative work.
Simply put, this is my personal endeavor. It has no commercial purpose; its aim is to archive the world’s “charm.” First for myself, then for our generation, and perhaps for someone in the future.
Beyond mere artistic sensibility or “artistic-sounding words,” I see charm as a “means to feel truly alive.” It is a fleeting yet sharp sensation that makes you realize, in that moment, “I am truly alive.”