In My Idol, I revisit childhood fantasies from an adult’s perspective, expressing the disappointment from broken promises, and clings to the hope of finding an “Ideal” state of life that once dominated my dreams. My photographs stand in for the action I could not fulfill in my life, they represent desire unbound from the repression of practicalities.
Using toys, dolls, and props from fantastic or romantic stories, My Idol hysterically fantasizes the concept of the ideal scenarios by overlapping childish desires with adulthood. These funny, ironic, and psychologically complex images also suggest my desperation to regain the lost innocence of childhood.

Ex Post Facto is a photographic narrative that traces my family history back over sixty years and revisits my childhood fantasy of bringing back my grandfathers who were killed during WWII. As soldier in the Japanese army my maternal grandfather died in combat in Papua New Guinea in 1944. My paternal grandfather was killed as a civilian in a B-29 bombing attack on Osaka around the same time.  Both sides of my family have suffered from their deaths for a long time, emotionally and economically. The lack of a matriarch in both families still haunted my parents --they were too young to lose their fathers. As a small child I was all too familiar with this loss and I fantasized about going back in time and rescuing both grandfathers. As I grew older, I sympathized with my grandmothers’ loss, they never recovered, they never remarried, and they never fully escaped the past.
The images in Ex Post Facto portray a parallel narrative and visualize and hold tight to my childhood fantasies. Rural landscapes, as portrayed through panoramic images of open space and vacant woods, evoke memories of destruction and sacrifice on the battlefield. Female portraits pay tribute to all who suffered from the loss of a loved one. In several images Girl solders, dressed in vintage Girl Scout uniforms from the WWII era, run through empty battlefields, never fully engaged with an enemy but constantly searching for their invisible grandfathers. In the dimly lit formal portraits that accompany the landscape images, I reference the women in my family from different timelines affected by the loss of my grandfathers. In one image I portray my grandmother, holding an old rusted helmet, which could belong to my grandfather. In another image, my mother is portrayed as a teenager, she holds tight to a postcard she wrote to her father long after his death. In the last image in the series, portrays myself as a young girl building an imaginary grave for my maternal grandfather --his body was never recovered.
Knowing the futility and the impossibility of changing history and the ironic “grandfather’s paradox” that would erase my own existence from history if my fantasies were ever realized, I am interested in creating a version of family history which focuses on my grandmother and mother’s strength rather than simply lamenting and perpetually memorializing their loss. Ex Post Facto reinvents the relationship between retention and loss, and explores the possibility of altering a past family history by re-visualizing family dynamics and creating an alternative course of history where the women --often invisible in tales of war and battles-- are front and center through my re-imagined past. A past which recognizes the role women play by heroically retaining the memory of all that is lost, reflect on how their loss has affected their lives and recognize the strength they provide to move the past forward.

Final Address
What does the immigrant dream when he/she first arrives in this country? Freedom? A better life? The American life as seen on TV? What is the ultimate American dream for the immigrant?
For the past two years I have been collecting images of funeral homes. Funeral homes are the icon of the ultimate American way to finish one’s life. In Japan, there is no equivalent – funerals are usually held in public religious places, such as Buddhist temples, or churches. Here funeral homes exist as comfortable and relaxing spaces designed to ease your experience of death.I am obsessed with this formula and believe that “American funeral homes” fulfill my vision of the ultimate “American dream”. In this series I have photographed homes from a specific time period -the fifties to the seventies, and searched for architecture styles that present a modern, amusement park like, funeral home of my dreams. To enhance these images and push my perspective, I have played with the processing in order to find a color balance that compliments the unrealistic aspect of this fantasy.

© 2009 Mayumi Lake - all rights reserved.