By Yasu Matsumoto

“Somewhere in the world, sometime in history, there is an alchemist.

Every coming day, he would sit in his lab, staring at the desk full of things that don’t mean anything, and start traveling in his daydream.

These images you see here are the fragments of such daydreams.”

“Alchemist’s dream” is a series of fairy tales without words.

I was in the midst of raising our first child when the idea of this series hit me.

Everyday as I opened up children’s books with my son, I was amazed by how each story brought us to the magical world of imagination all at once. 

I wanted to create such magic that crossed the boundary between real and imaginary with my photography, without words.

The reason why without words is because I think that would give viewers some room to start creating their own stories. Only a photograph and a title are given, and after that it’s up to you how the story goes.

For the same reason, I try not to complete my version of the story in the process of making an image. For example, I start making a scene with a blur image or just one sentence that pops up in my head.

Naturally, the details of the image get changed as the process progresses. Sometimes, the final piece becomes totally different from the beginning, and I enjoyed it too.

I have to mention here that as a basic way of making an image is that I actually construct the whole scene by hand (so, I have a collection of junks that don’t mean anything…), and simply shoot it with 8×10 film straightforwardly. No post-shoot manipulation should be done.

By choosing such a process, these imaginary scenes actually become real, and their existence is proved by films that can’t lie unlike digital.

Magic is more effective if there is less trick.

Besides, there is another reason why I choose film and handmade methods: the warmth and imperfection of analog.

I like art that lets you feel the temperature of the artist, and that is one of my main themes in my art. I always try to leave what I call “residue of my existence” in my works.

Of course, handmade is not perfect; however, that even emphasizes the non-fictionness and creates the strange feeling that crosses over the real and imaginary while CG is too perfect to be recognized as non-fiction.

I’d like to screw up people’s minds in a more humane way.

I hope this series will be a drop that makes a tiny ripple in people’s deep within, and take them to the wonderful journey of imagination.

Yasu Matsumoto studied at San Francisco Art Institute as a Photography Major with Linda Connor as a mentor. He now works as a Tokyo-based fine art photographer showing works internationally. With 8×10″ camera and Gelatin Silver / Wet plate collodion, the theme for his art is to “capture the invisible.” You can see more of his work at one-big-tree.com and on Instagram at yasumatsumoto