Because You Want To
A few dozen steps south of the gate of Shin-Yakushiji, along a narrow lane, a single large tiled roof comes into view, seeming to float just above the ground. This is the Irie Taikichi Memorial Museum of Photography, Nara City. Most of the galleries are set underground, and only this low roofline sinks quietly into the old rows of houses without disturbing them. Kurokawa Kisho, who designed it, is said to have thought first of all about the breadth of the sky over this ground and the ridgeline of the roof.
What is kept here — more than eighty thousand pieces of it — is the Nara that one photographer spent his whole life photographing. After the war, Irie Taikichi came back from a burned-out Osaka to the town of his birth, and while it was still dark he would shoulder his heavy equipment and walk out to the temples. At first, the story goes, he had heard a rumour that the Buddhist statues would be carried off across the sea, and he wanted at least to keep their forms in a photograph. In time the rumour proved to have no root at all. Even so, for more than forty years, he went on walking the same roads.
The morning light in the Sangatsu-do, the haze lying over the Yamanobe-no-michi, the sparks on the night of Omizutori. Each time the seasons came round, he stood again in the same places. Those photographs, piled up over a lifetime, he entrusted in his last years — all eighty thousand of them, copyright and all — to the city of Nara; and the quiet building opened the year after.
When we set out to do something, isn't it often out of a sense that "I have to do this"?
But if that is so, the days grow hard and wearing.
And it often happens, too, that the outcome of that action turns out poorly.
If we can change this into "I do it because I want to," the heart grows a good deal lighter, and the results improve as well.
Beyond the glass wall, the great tiled roof hangs in the air again today. Go down into the underground galleries, and the Nara of half a century ago stands along the walls, one print after another, every print holding a softened light. The one who took them is gone. And yet, standing before a single photograph, you seem to catch even the smell of the morning air in which it was made, and for some reason you linger there a little longer than you had meant to.