Issue #29 / What's Next? / Lieko Shiga

Photography is usually linked to death rather than life, as if Medusa's eye penetrates a vibrant body to turn it to stone. A reversal of values occurs in Lieko Shiga's photography. To her photography is life, the only thing we can grasp at in despair of being unable to evade the death that must come to us all. She made a dead plum tree bloom with paper flowers, returned seawater to the sea that weighed the same as a stranded whale and collected many flowers from graves before burying them in the ground. These actions have only one meaning: giving life to reality, in other words to bodies that are supposed to be dead. Her work is therefore neither an interpretation of her own world nor a documentary about the real world. This seems to be her vocation: to save numerous, anonymous lives and loves that are fated to be forgotten and universally ignored.