Kensuke Koike: Nothing Added, Nothing Removed

Discarded photographs from yesteryear are given new life in the photographic project ‘Single Image Processing’ by Japanese artist, Kensuke Koike.

In the stacks of weathered old photographs, worn albums and bundles of vintage postcards so often found at flea markets, Koike finds inspiration for a different kind of photographic practice. Using a scalpel, Koike meticulously crafts his work from these original photographs, reconstructing them by a collage process where he states, there is “nothing added” and “nothing removed.” These pieces are nostalgic for a pre-internet age when graphic work was done by hand and creation was a laborious, skillful process. As faces float from the heads they were once attached to, and people become terrifying arachnids that float off-page, you can’t help but notice the surrealist edge with which Koike crafts his pieces.

Koike began his journey into image manipulation using his own photographs but found the challenge of altering a vintage image more enticing. In an interview with LensCulture, he remarked: “I wanted to try something more challenging and delve deeper into the meaning of an image. More risk means that I have to think twice before cutting the originals, and that is important.”

All images © Kensuke Koike