Shin Noguchi: Something Here

Shin Noguchi: Something Here by Daniel GeorgeApril 5, 2018

©Shin Noguchi

With camera in hand, photographer Shin Noguchi navigates through Japan’s bustling cities while observing others who are simply going about their everyday lives. Through patience, careful framing, and a click of the shutter, he creates photographs that appear more like constructed scenes—compositions within chaos. His subjects feel fully integrated, yet strangely detached from their surroundings. They are performing tasks that perhaps they themselves will forget instantaneously. They are caught in moments of pause and action. They are unaware of being examined and that significance is being given to their menial activities. Through his images, Shin is reminding us of the understated richness of the quotidian, and that complexity can be arranged by simply waiting to see.

©Shin Noguchi

Shin Noguchi (born 1976) is an award winning street photographer based in Kamakura and Tokyo, Japan, and is a member of the iN-PUBLiC street photography collective. He describes his street photography as an attempt to capture extraordinary moments of excitement, beauty and humanism, among the flow of everyday life and has a discreet, poetic and enigmatic approach that is sensitive to the subtleties and complexities of Japanese culture without using posed/staged and no-finder/hip shot. “Street photography always projects the “truth”. The “truth” that I talk about isn’t necessarily that I can see, but they also exist in society, in street, in people’s life. and I always try to capture this reality beyond my own values and viewpoint/perspective.” He is also featured in MAP Talent, Liberation, The Independent, Leica Camera and many others, and you can find one of his photos on the back cover of Prestel’s new book “100 Great Street Photographs.”

©Shin Noguchi

Something Here

People are living life desperately. Sometimes lonely, sometimes helping each other, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing. I capture people going about daily life because there are moments that they themselves do not realize are more beautiful and full of human touch than the carefully choreographed movies of Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini or Shakespeare’s plays. I attempt to visualize Mark Twain’s words “Truth is stranger than fiction.”, and prove that it is true as a visual language in photograph that: fantasy moments where children show, and hope and possibilities for the future; adults are running on the society time semi-forcibly, but still, they shows individual strength sometimes painful, and sometimes fun; and the moments can see their footprint they lived in. I want to share these beautiful moments with other people and, at the same time, I want them to understand that that extraordinary moments exist in our daily lives and that they can happen anywhere and at anytime. “I’m here, just here. You’re here, just here. There is something here, something beautiful something special. It may last but a moment, but we are always connected to each other. I want you to feel that, when you see my work. You are not alone. There is always someone in the world keeping an eye on your struggle.”