Icon

Osamu Wataya
Icon

Photographs: Osamu Wataya

Publisher: Rat Hole Gallery

36 pages

Year: 2012

Comments: Illustrated hard cover in slipcase, 24,6 x 30,6 cm, color photographs. Limited to 500 copies. Traces of use on the slipcase with stains, especially on the spine. The book is in very good condition except from tears at the top and bottom close to the spine. Design: Osamu Wataya and Toshio Shiratani.

“Icons” provide archetypes upon which people can base their lives. They have the power to intimately evoke emotions and images in anyone that looks at them. They also provide groups of people with myths and inspirations. The word “icon” originally referred to images of gods of ancient Greece, saints of ancient Egypt, and Christian angels and god. For children and general people, representative images of gods were not only easy to accept, but also necessary.
Icons also arouse feelings of loyalty, authority, nationalism, admiration, and paranoia. The colors that these icons wear also symbolize various concepts such as victory, truth, and purity. In this sense, American cowboys and the star spangled banner are the ultimate icons.
The foundation of icons is visible form. At times even actually existing things instantly lose their form. As soon as their residual image is photographed, they take on characteristics similar to those of a photograph. For me, the blurred image of a cowboy, which the naked eye cannot see, is an ideal form and a photograph of an icon. It is, in other words, like an image reflected in the mirror.

– Osamu Wataya

The photographs in Icon are intentionally blurred and seem to expose the mechanism through which cliché images such as cowboys and the star spangled banner function as “icons.”