"Feverish Space of Tranquility"
MOTOAKI HORI　(Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura)

　Tens of thousands of complete strangers gather at horsing racetracks and baseball stadiums. There is a peculiar atmosphere to the din and bustle created in these places.
　Each word has a meaning for the people that are talking to each other, but the reverberations of sounds that have completely harmonized is similar to an unknown language. But at the same time, there is an odd communication among the spectators, as they all have the common interest of following the course of the event and finding out the results. At a racetrack, there are as many expectations, desires and dreams that are intermingled as the number of betting tickets that are sold, yet the center of attention of all the spectators is the same. Deafening cheers are raised, and after the cheers abruptly fade away into the distance, then comes the strange silence. Then, once again, comes a roar of joy and a disappointment that cannot to be put into words. Sharing the same place, time and purpose can generate the kind of excitement that enables us to confirm that we are alive. Makiko Koie clicks the shutter of her cameara to capture people's resonating reactions that reflect their unseeable feelings.
　Needless to say, the medium of photograph does not simply capture objects as they are, but aim to signify something beyond the objects. For instance, Jeff Wall's works imply issues related to race, politics, society and sex through scrupulously calculating his compositions and models. Beat Streuli and Philip-Lorca diCorcia both utilize the framework of a documentary photograph, and show glimpses of the various phases of life of people today. Andreas Gursky's works such as Autosalon, Paris, 1993, Chicago, Board of Trade, 1997, and May Day, 1998 are comparatively close to Koie's images of the crowds of people at racetracks and stadiums.
　However, unlike the fashionable nonchalance found in Gursky's photographs, Koie's works, which slightly shift and overlap print and film images, contain a feeling of a continuous, slight "fever." The feeling applies not only to the works taken of crowds, but also to the photo taken of green leaves that are spread across an entire surface. In this work, instead of the din and bustle of people, the whispers of the leaves, as if they are whispering to each other, convey the lives of nature. But then, all of her works give the impresshion that they are dominated by complete silence. The act of visualizing an invisible world, by contrast, erases every sounds. Her works that aim to jolt the existence of the visual world to its foundation might have some similarities with psychic photography. Koie is no doubt pursuing "the something" that is paradoxical, essential and transcendental through the techniques of stratifying and creating vague images. It is also a fact that the other world she aims to create to symbolize "the something" which could also be called spiritual, could truly save today's world beyond marely escaping realities, because this is a special privilege bestowed upon only to works of art.