Taro Karibe – Observer of Human Destinies

This story of a ‘perfect’ relationship is embodied in Saori, a series of photographs by Taro Karibe, a Japanese photo- grapher. For three years, Taro watched and photographed the daily life of his hero, Senji Nakajima, 65, and his life-size love doll Saori. Senji is married and has two children but his family lives in another city. At first, he only used the doll for sexual pleasure. Later on, though, his attachment grew into a relationship of a different kind.

This story visualizes and foregrounds a whole range of issues facing society today: the identity crisis in the global world where everything is accessible; the crisis of relations and communication between partners; loneliness as a marker of our time. Today, love dolls are so perfect that a real person with their array of ailments, inevitable aging, their own opinion, and nasty temper can hardly match them. Initially, silicon dolls were designed to provide sexual pleasure and boost the economic development of the sex industry. They gradually, however, started to push out not only real sexual relationships, but also real people. On the one hand, it’s the crisis of communication reflec- ted on the screens of our gadgets and in the eyes of the perfect silicon fellows, but on the other hand, it’s a path toward knowing oneself and accepting one’s other self in the space of social rules and restrictions.

Taro, a documentary photographer working with the pressing issues of our time, uses direct images in his stories, without interfering authorial associations or reality reconstructions. He focuses on the post-traumatic syndro- me—on visualizing the consequences of a particular event rather than the reasons or the process of their emergence. His bachelor’s degree in psychology contributes to such an in-depth analysis. Taro’s photographs demonstrate the way he studies and observes people’s behavior in critical situations, be it cross-border Rohingya refugees who fled northern Myanmar to Bangladesh or the Japanese after the earthquake on Kyushu island in 2016. It’s a fixation of consequences—this time in the form of journal entries on a digital carrier. In his latest series, Incidents, Taro Karibe combines, however, pixelated, vague images ripped out of context and the ever-changing reality. Integrating an abstract series into a physical gallery space and mixing it with documentary photographs, he seems to place a greater emphasis on the indefinable limits of real-life events and a variety of unpredictable scenarios of human life in our world.

All images: Taro Karibe, Saori, 2016–2019

Text: Kateryna Radchenko