Dates｜February 27 – March 14, 2021
Venue｜MEM　map
Open hours｜13：00 – 19：00
Closed on Mondays

【Requests to visitors】
• Please refrain from visiting the gallery if you have a fever or cold symptoms such as cough, sneeze, and a runny nose.
• Please practice good etiquette by wearing a mask, and disinfecting your hands. Visitors who do not wear masks will kindly be refused entry.
• Up to five people are allowed to visit exhibition at any one time.
• Please keep social distance from other visitors inside the gallery.
• Please do not touch the exhibits.

From 2018 to the spring of 2020, Fugo and Uomoto have worked together on this project where they have taken photos of their surroundings synchronizing when they press the shutter. They have consolidated these photos into 40 pairs and titled this series, at the same time. There are juxtapositions of distant lands and domestic scenes but also some taken in the same city.
People are born in different places; some extend their roots while others move to different places. Life goes on but there are infinite number of perspectives existing simultaneously looking upon an infinite number of scenes.
In a COVID-19 world in which the distance between people has created existential anxiety, we hope that at the same time will create an opportunity to imagine these other perspectives in this world where we share time.

When traveling in Nepal, about to fall asleep, Fugo wondered what his friends and family were doing at that very moment. In that day and age, it was not possible contact them through the internet so all he could do was think of them from a distance. That was when the idea for this series first struck him.
For Fugo, a photographer for half a century, this series was something outside of the style that he had established for himself. Uomoto fortuitously came into the picture at the photography workshop that Fugo sponsors. They became partners in crime and teamed up to embark on this project.
Business trips became opportunities. As one went to Europe or left the Tokyo area, the two of them pressed their shutters at the same time. They hardly made arrangements to decide what the subject of their photos would be but mysteriously the images that they captured were in concert with each other. The first time they realized this when Fugo took a photo of the morning scene of his hotel room in Bologna, Italy. A small tree inhabiting the veranda could be seen beyond the window. At the same time, Uomoto had taken a photo of a fallen tree in the middle of a wooded area after a typhoon. It was actually an artificial garden in the middle of Shibuya. At that moment the two of them were responding to the flow of energy in each location transcending their cameras. After that, between Wakkanai and Okinawa, between Tokyo and Brussels, between Siena and Tokyo, the images were in conversation with each other. There is a synchrony in the composition, the people and the actions that are the focal point of the images.
These occurrences are quite common and happen in our lives. They are called synchronicity and serendipity but it might be an inevitability. at the same time might be something that affirms life as a continual journey which invites coincidence.

Hitoshi FUGO
Born in 1947. After his graduation from the Department of Photography at Nihon University College of Art, he studied under the photographer Eikoh Hosoe. He became a freelance photographer in 1973. He received the Ina Nobuo Award in 2010. Fugo’s representative works include Floating Around, Blackout, Flying Frying Pan, Game Over, Watchers, Kami/Demolition, On the Circle, Body and Horizontal Bar, etc. His photo books include Flying Frying Pan (Shazow Inc), On the Circle (AKAAKA Art Publishing Inc), Blackout (L’Artiere), Watchers (Fugensha) and a collaboration book with the poet and novelist Natsuki Ikezawa, The Time Given to Man Shall Lapse Sometime And…… (Kawade Shobo Shinsha). He has held numerous solo exhibitions and also participated in group exhibitions both in Japan and abroad.
Public Collections:
Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; Kushiro Art Museum, Hokkaido; the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto: the National Library of France; Los Angeles County Museum of Art: the Museum of Photographic Sciences, San Diego; the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington

Katsuyuki UOMOTO
Born in 1960. After his graduation from Kuwasawa Design School, he is working as a graphic designer. He established Uomoto Photo and Design Office in 2015. He started to make photographic works on his own in 2006. His work, Catch me if you can, received the Excellence Award in Canon’s New Cosmos of Photography Competition in 2007. He joined a photography workshop by Hitoshi Fugo in 2009. He has been creating artworks on the theme of a city and people.