Title: My Father's Album
Artist: Noguchi Rika
AKAAKA
27.6 x 21.6 cm
72 pages
Cloth hardback
Design by Kasai Kaoru & Adachi Yuki
Japanese & English
October 2022
ISBN: 978-4-86541-145-4
My father died in July 2013. My mother passed away in 1992, when I was twenty. A few years before my father died, I asked him if he had the negatives to any photographs of my mother, and he handed me a file. The whole thing was crammed full of negatives. It was only after his death that I set upon the task of sorting through it.
Those negatives, taken on a half-size Olympus PEN camera, added up to a substantial volume. I developed them in small batches in the darkroom, in the order of the dates they'd been given by my father. The photographs started from my parents' honeymoon, and went onto document my birth, and that of my younger brother and sister. The majority of the photos were ones I'd seen previously in albums, but being there in the darkroom, shining a light on the negatives and fixing the images onto photographic paper, I was surprised by how vital those images felt. At first, I only ever intended to print a few of them, then found I couldn't stop. In the end, I developed the photographs up to the point where I finished elementary school. It was a strange experience, tracing my father's perspective like that. The way that the moments seared into those negatives would never return. The experience of savouring those photos in the darkroom. I knew that my father had been interested in cameras, but I'd never thought about the question of whether his photos were any good or not. Now, though, as I went about developing his photographs, I began to think of him as a pretty talented photographer. That sense gradually morphed into a conviction.
- Noguchi Rika
My father died in July 2013. My mother passed away in 1992, when I was twenty. A few years before my father died, I asked him if he had the negatives to any photographs of my mother, and he handed me a file. The whole thing was crammed full of negatives. It was only after his death that I set upon the task of sorting through it.
Those negatives, taken on a half-size Olympus PEN camera, added up to a substantial volume. I developed them in small batches in the darkroom, in the order of the dates they'd been given by my father. The photographs started from my parents' honeymoon, and went onto document my birth, and that of my younger brother and sister. The majority of the photos were ones I'd seen previously in albums, but being there in the darkroom, shining a light on the negatives and fixing the images onto photographic paper, I was surprised by how vital those images felt. At first, I only ever intended to print a few of them, then found I couldn't stop. In the end, I developed the photographs up to the point where I finished elementary school. It was a strange experience, tracing my father's perspective like that. The way that the moments seared into those negatives would never return. The experience of savouring those photos in the darkroom. I knew that my father had been interested in cameras, but I'd never thought about the question of whether his photos were any good or not. Now, though, as I went about developing his photographs, I began to think of him as a pretty talented photographer. That sense gradually morphed into a conviction.
- Noguchi Rika
