One-Way or Round Trip?: Speaking in Pictures with Fumi Ishino
The clapboard siding and vinyl blinds to the left are recognizable, but not the stepped white forms floating and casting shadows over the right. The gray ovals register as vending machine buttons, but the fact that the entire display of sodas has been vacated makes you less sure. Fumi Ishino’s photographs always seem to have more they want to say; they test your familiarity with the quotidian, leaving the context slinking just out of frame. Perhaps that’s why his work is usually found in photo books rather than exhibitions, because it needs to be seen together, the rhythm and pause in page-turning a necessary reset. The setting is usually Japan or America, with small details of language, food, and pop culture that become evidence of diaspora, of the experience of having two homes: one literal, the other cultural. There’s the coloring book page of what looks like the Jetsons’ garage overlaid with sliced bitter melon (familiar to this writer’s distracted, bilingual childhood), and the doubled afterimage of English-language neon signs, typical to late-night izakayas, or tapas bars. […]
originally published in Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, issue 33.1 (Winter / Spring 2021)
