Koto Ezawa: History of Photography Remix

Harvest of Death, 2005 (from “History of Photography Remix”) © Koto EzawaHarvest of Death, 1863 © Timothy O'Sullivan Two lectures in one day. After seeing Laurel Nakadate speak in the morning at MassArt, I saw Koto Ezawa speak at the MFA.

Working at the cutting edge of contemporary art, Ezawa takes movie or news segments and rather than “filter” the original to make it look like animation, as digital technology permits, he reconstructs it by hand. “I drew all the hands, eyes and figures using drawing software and re-created all the motions, trying to simulate the motions of the people in the video,” Ezawa said. “What results is very stylized, but it’s an honest effort at translation.” – Haines Gallery

In his lecture, Ezawa refers to his animations as paintings. He focuses on the process of creating shapes and colors and how they relate to each other as being synonymously linked to elements of painting. He talks about being a visual DJ, mixing images. His more known works are made from “monumental” film documents of pop-cultural highlights and significant events or people American history, which he then turns into graphic animations. The Simpson Verdict, Who’s Afraid of Black, White and Grey, and Lennon Sontag Beuys were ones that he showed, not to mention scenes from the infamous Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee “Honeymoon” video, an internet phenomenon. But after all of his animations he showed a project which as soon as I saw it I realized I needed to share here for those who have not seen it. For History of Photography Remix, Ezawa has taken photographs from the slide library at SFAI based on what he felt to be important, interesting, or essential images in the history of photography and recreated them digitally, made new slides from the digital files, and presented them on lightboxes. Ezawa noted that he has been incessantly asked how one can decide the history of photography or, more specifically, what is necessary to highlight. In response Ezawa says he feels this is, in a way, part of the charm of the work. See a few more examples here and here. Unfortunately, I can’t find my favorites from this series online but if you’re interested, Nazreli Press has released a book of this project.