The Birth of Ice Photography
The idea for Ice Photography had existed for quite some time. When I was working as a sailor, I used to think about my hometown while smoking cigarettes. The old photographs stored in Google Photos had somehow become so clear that they no longer felt like photographs from the past. Yet they no longer carried the sense of nostalgia I was looking for.
The hometown that existed in my mind seemed much more beautiful. Perhaps it had been beautified by memory. I wanted to use the ice and snow that had always existed naturally in my hometown, Hokkaido, to create photographs that would weather and fade over time. With that thought in mind, I told some photographer friends about the idea.
“What the hell are you talking about?” “What would be the point of doing something like that?”
I still remember those words vividly.
Even so, I decided to try and searched for existing technologies. At the time, I thought that printing had become something that could be done on almost anything. But reality was completely different. I could not find any method for fixing an image onto ice at a resolution high enough for it to function as a photograph.
Then I realized that I would have to create the method myself. Perhaps I could one day photograph the world I had seen through thin ice as a child. With that thought, I began working.
What followed was a hell of continuous failures. I incorporated technologies from fields unrelated to photography and even began experimenting with electrical work I had never done before. I am certain I failed thousands of times.
In 2024, I traveled to Hokkaido. That day, snow happened to begin falling. In that moment, I remembered something. To remember is not to look at a dead memory that has been turned into a photograph. I returned to Tokyo and continued facing the freezer in my home. I failed again and again, and hurt myself many times in the process. There were very few days when I could sleep properly. Then, one day, I found a photograph fixed inside the ice at the back of the freezer. Looking back, its resolution and gradation were by no means excellent. Even so, when I saw that ice, I felt as though I could see the future through it.
