Lieko Shiga
Canary
HC, 28 x 42 cm., o.pp.
Akaaka 2010
The young and talented Ms. Shiga compares the world captured by her camera to a canary enclosed in her stomach. In the paragraph "Be Shot and Die" on her website, she writes, "Look upon people or scenery that have been sacrificed through photography as offerings to the next world." Somehow her photographs, saturated with electric color and presented breathlessly one after the other in a larger-than-life rectangular book, echo with the violence of this camera "shot." The viewer can tell that Ms. Shiga sees her subjects as photographic results even before shooting them, capturing them in her mind like specimens in a jar. The subjects themselves reflect this style of victimization: the cow is already butchered and bloody, and the zebra already caged, before being shocked by the inconceivable camera flash. The photos, one after the other, are passionate and active as a lightning storm in the dark.