My friend Akiko Tobu's new book of photography is at the final stage of its production. It will surely be published in December. The book's title is Memoraphilia, and it's a series of photographs following the daily private life of the Dutch media artist and archivist Tjebbe van Tijen. You can take a glimpse at his artistic activities at http://imaginarymuseum.org/.
But Akiko's photography focuses more on Tjebbe as a person who lives, thinks, forgets, thinks about forgetting, thinking forgetting, and living loving. It's a surprisingly fresh album, filled with tender lights, warming colors, and a sense of quietude after turbulent years.
Tjebbe is also a seasoned essayist. I was fortunate enough to translate his essay "The Arts of Oneself: Eighteen Observations on Personal Memorabilia" for this volume. Talking about how one's memory and anti-memory is organized using different props, the essay makes its readers rethink and examine how they move about in their own lives using their own (each respectively) arts of forgetting and of remembrance finally to shape their own selves.
Akiko's first book The Hotel Upstairs was well received last year. It told stories and hidden beauty that filled a rather run-down apartment hotel in San Francisco. Here comes another surprise from this former-painter-turned photographer. She constantly teaches me another way to look at ordinary people's extraordinary lives. Ours, that is.
