Japanese photography student, Izumi Miyazaki, first created her Tumblr account in 2012 as a way of sharing her compositions with the virtual world, allowing us to fall down the rabbit hole of her wonderfully innocent and playful imagination, one in which I’m sure we would all rather live.
The 18-year-old artist manipulates her images to forge abstract realities and make us question what is fact. As an only child, she uses the selfie as a vehicle to fabricate a sense of company. As mentioned in a feature in Ignant, Miyazaki explains “I don’t feel lonely when I make and watch photos of a double me.” Her selfies revolve around herself, although there is an alluring mischievousness in the way in which she often constructs multiple personalities within the same photo. For example, in one of her images at a first glance one would think it were a portrait of two sisters, however upon a double take you realise that she has merely duplicated herself. This technique appears in much of her work and I for one find it captivating. I don’t just want to know her; I want to know all the different “hers” that she portrays.
The surreal quality of her photos is almost crudely juxtaposed against the banality of everyday reality, making them relatable to the viewer. Albeit vicariously, Miyazaki creates an escape from normality by letting us enter this whimsical paradigm where one can find humour in the simple things. It is not possible to look at her work without a smile. With each image, she creates a story that one cannot help but want to be a part of, and her always-unreadable expressions make her all the more intriguing.
