GoSee Book Highlight : Alexandre Morvan 'Cherry Trees' – Traces of Transience and the Transfer of Fictional Worlds into Our Present (Kehrer Verlag)
French photographer Alexandre Morvan links the Japanese cherry blossoms with daily life during the pandemic and the dark worlds of dystopian anime. The photographs in Cherry Trees – recently published by Kehrer Verlag as a compact coffee table book – were taken in the spring of 2020 in Japan.
Spring, the time of cherry blossoms, symbolically represents the transience and fragility of life – and in 2020, this moment coincided with the outbreak of the Covid pandemic. Alexandre Morvan captures the invisible threat of the virus to daily life. Over the course of his work, he began to recognize parallels between the surreal situation of daily life and the dystopian worlds of anime and Japanese TV series that he had watched as a teenager. Some of these works turned out to be visionary, as they had already addressed major ecological and humanitarian crises. This book deals with the idea of transmission – not only the transmission of a virus, but also of fictional worlds from the past into our present reality.
From the foreword by Iizawa Kōtarō, photo critic and photography historian: "Nevertheless, it was evident that these photographs were captured through the gaze of a foreigner — in other words, a stranger. This is not to be perceived in a negative sense. (...) When you find yourself in an unfamiliar place, anything and everything that meets your eyes appears tinged with a fresh brilliance. This wonder and subtle sense of discomfort likely work well to imbue photographs taken by strangers with a character different from those taken by photographers living in that locality. (...) Japanese society is on the verge of a period of great change in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. Furthermore, that future is by no means bright but is enveloped in thick fog. In this situation, boys and girls are probably asking “Where are we?” and “Where are we going?” with their whole being. Morvan is engaging with those questions and is trying to find answers through his photographs."
From the foreword by Julien Bouvard, Professor of Japanese Studies at Jean Moulin University Lyon : "The elements of daily life presented here are all traces of the passage of time. They themselves echo the period when the photographs were taken: spring and the cherry trees so typical of Japan, whose pink hues are a sign of resilience in the face of disasters of all kinds, even global pandemics. If hope is perceptible in these photographs from an anxious period, it is resolutely found on the side of plants, omnipresent, surviving despite the cracked concrete, indifferent to viruses from the human species."
Alexandre Morvan Cherry Trees
Kehrer Verlag
16.5 x 22 cm, 128 pages, 108 color images
kehrerverlag.com
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