Description
Slash is one of those photobooks whose premise sounds simple until you start thinking about what Nomura actually did. Rather than carrying a camera through the landscape, he traveled through Google Street View, selecting images produced by Google’s automated cameras, then uniformly processing and cropping them. Nomura considered the resulting images photographs. What emerges is a strange road movie made by a photographer who was never physically standing on the road—a meditation on looking, authorship, surveillance and the increasingly uncertain boundary between the photographer and the machine.
Published in 2010—while Street View itself was still a relatively new way of experiencing the world—Slash now feels remarkably prescient. Nomura described his interest as an attempt to discover the world’s “borderlines,” and the book repeatedly occupies those uneasy spaces between public and private, intentional and accidental, human vision and technological vision. The physical production is equally compelling: a beautifully restrained Japanese photobook designed by Satoshi and Hikari Machiguchi, presented in layered protective packaging and produced in an edition of just 500 signed and numbered copies. Nomura has since become an established figure in contemporary Japanese photography, with Slash recognized among his major publications.
A terrific early photobook about a question that has only become more complicated since 2010: when a machine takes the picture and an artist chooses the frame, who exactly is the photographer?
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