Noriko Yabu : “Kasou”

In her series Kasou, Japanese photographer Noriko Yabu captures flowers with a film camera. Next she rewinds the roll and photographs her naked body, keeping the flowers in mind. “Flowers don’t wear clothes, so I decided not to wear anything either to perfectly overlap with them.” Noriko overlays these images to draw an analogy between the human body and flowers – both inherently create a progeny. Humans make children, flowers disperse seeds out of the necessity to nurture the cycle of life. Noriko’s typical nude self-portraits are inserted here in a layered double-image. “I think that the beauty of this work stems from the contingency that exists in the mechanism. I don’t leave it to chance, I plan the process and I can control everything on a screen,” she tells us, “however, when I rewind a roll of film and set up the scene again, therein lies a certain degree of chance.”