ZA :

In the work ‘Toxic,’ which is a collection of negatives taken between 2005 and 2019 that have never been printed, you write “I am made of soul and flesh. I remain in my photographs.” Would you be able to further verbalise this act of finding yourself in these images?

HT :

At the time, I had lost someone very dear to me and was living with that loss. The forgotten negatives resonated strongly with this feeling. I was constantly learning lessons from my photographs. Only recently did I understand the underlying principle of the medium. We live our lives thinking that our thoughts are defined by us, but truly, they are a product of our environments, and the original “I” is much simpler. I came to understand that the photographs are the original “I” for me. Then I remembered why I have a physical body. It was “to touch the one I love.” The direct act of touching. This is an act that only a living being with a body can perform, and photography is an act of the eyes touching the world. When the eyes touch the world, the world comes alive.

ZA :

I notice a strong colour palette of dreamy blues and stark reds that adorn your bodies of work. Do the colours come from a conscious decision within you? Or are they more incidental in your larger act of photographing?

HT :

A lot of my colour works are born from my darkroom, and I consider that a “physiological” (instinctive) preference when it comes to colour. I have come to think that physiological preferences are attached to the core of a person. To me, “physiology” is a balance in life and a barometer of the current state of a person’s mind. For a long time, I had a physiological preference for the colour “red” but recently that has changed, and change seems to be the only constant.

ZA :

Die of Love seems to be a love letter to photography. What prompted you to create a whole book about this visual medium?

HT :

I do not have the concept of a ‘subject.’ The people, things, and events I encounter in my life are all my own reality and actuality, as I mentioned earlier. In the real world, it is impossible to be in one body with a loved one except for when in the mother’s womb. I thought about becoming one with my photographs, and that’s when I came across the phrase “Love is the elimination of the self.” If losing oneself is love, then I tried to lose myself through photography. I was at the mercy of my imagery, and it moved me to take pictures with a broken camera. And when the broken camera stopped working, I stopped photographing. I tried to eliminate the act of photography from my life. Ironically, it was a spiritual suicide, and its death represented a state of spiritual self-loss.

ZA :

Your work “SHINING WOMAN #cancerbeauty” is a vulnerable, and honest collection of portraits of women who are living with the challenges of cancer. Their eyes seem to hold the weight and simultaneous power of their emotions, and I was hoping you could speak about the process of making these gentle portraits.

HT :

This series began in 2019 when I was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and was struck by the brilliance of the women that I saw in the gynaecology ward of the hospital where I was admitted. As the anaesthesia wore off after the surgery, a black-and-white portrait of a woman came to mind. This vision is what revived my photographic practice after I stopped photographing post Die of Love. Through this work, I came to confront my own life and the lives of others. I was fascinated by photographing faces because I realised that a person’s life, and reality, which is here and now, is manifested in the face. However, as I continued to photograph, women began to ask me to photograph their scars as well. One woman said it was a way to embrace her disease. Another said it was to validate her wounds. When I photographed the wounds, I heard voices like a scream coming from the women’s bodies. The wounds of the women had a beautiful voice. They were saying, “This is my life. This is the proof of my choice to live.” I strongly feel that I am touching the lives of people when I photograph them. And I feel that femininity is equal to acceptance. Men have femininity too. With acceptance, love comes from within and can be free. This project is a way to bring the women’s personal messages into the world and help liberate them from their insecurities. It is a way to free them from the image of themselves that they have in their minds, and to change the perception of cancer patients. I am still working on this project under the slogan “Art For Change.”

ZA :

What are your thoughts on people using the terms “women artists” or “women photographers” while describing one’s work? What do you think about the terms “male artist” and “male photographer?” Distinction and separation are two different things. We are all human beings. Follow more of her work at @Hideka_tonomura on instagram.