ABOUT

« Gûyu » in japanese, means « allegory ». For Maki, the figure of speech is a photographic category. At the core of his photography practice, lies the question of re-presentation, of the relationship to space... The involvement of known elements in new sets - or the opposite. During his travels in Japan of the past 15 years, Maki stayed tireless, circulating through metropolitan cities, from island to island, with a rear base in Tokyo, Shinjuku district - a point of "eternal return" for the Japanese photographers. During the Spring, you can meet him there, having a quick lunch in one of the countless izakayas of the neighborhood, a small camera always at hand - an analog compact most of the time, or a toy camera; that doesn't really matter to him. What is important is how he will immerse himself in the Japanese metropolis afterward. In the streets, Maki is a receiver, catching climates, going with the flow of passersby strolling to the rhythm of the local life. The discreet click of his camera in the crowd is hardly noticeable - perfectly in tune with the surrounding world. And so this life, and some Japanese memory, find their way to the film - and the furrow traced by the photographer as he wanders around finds a correspondance in the contact sheets piling up over time. Maki's photography is made of figures, and figures of speech, forming a kind of social novel of the Japanese territory. Here, photography is definitely not a transparent language: the photographer's work gives it its thickness, which is not that of an icon but that of the "demon of analogy," a skillful weaving between the allegorical mental world and the objective world around us.