The other night I was having dinner with Yamaguchi-san, one of the coordinators of Gallery éf. Present at the dinner was Hideki Shiozawa, as well as Ian Everard. Shiozawa and Everard had met years ago, and Shiozawa presented Everard with a gift; this photograph he had taken near the border with Afghanistan in Pakistan. Instantly, upon seeing the image, all of us ‘felt’ the resonance of the piece, and I knew exactly what we needed to do. The following day it was included in the Gallery éf venue.

Here is a portrait of a young man in 1990, who can’t be much more 16 years old, if that, who makes guns for a living. We might speculate where some of his proudly crafted weapons ended up, and what has come of this young man and his industry in the wake of September 11, the American overthrow of the Taliban, and continuing violence that occurs especially in the border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan in the quest for Osama Bin Ladin. This young man’s hands especially strike me, they seem usually ‘adult.’ They seem, at least for me, to ‘tell the truth’ of this young man’s life. The image, with all its details – the young man’s hands, the riffle, the stain on the wall – at once ‘tells’ the story of this precise moment, but it might just as well be published in tomorrow’s newspaper.

See Shiozawa's website:

http://www.shiozawahideki.com/