Taketo Muroi - Afterimage 1

Technique: Promptography on Hahnemühle Fine Art paper
Image size: 45 x 30 cm
Edition: 3 + 1 AP
Year: 2025

Afterimage 1 forms the conceptual basis of Taketo Murois's Afterimage series. The image is divided into two distinct but interdependent areas. On the left, a dense, rugged mass appears—dark, tactile, almost geological—as residue, accumulation, matter that has already undergone a transformation. On the right, a muted, almost monochrome surface opens into emptiness, interrupted only by a faint vertical line.

This separation is not decorative, but structural. It marks the moment when the image splits into origin and continuation, event and echo. What may once have been a coherent photographic scene can no longer be reconstructed. Instead, we encounter its aftereffects: sediment on one side, atmosphere on the other.

As the first work in the series , Afterimage 1 presents photography more as a temporal condition than as a representational act. The image doesn't hold together; it drifts apart. AI functions here as a force of redistribution—processing, diluting, and shifting visual information until its meaning becomes unstable.

This logic is repeated and modified throughout the entire Afterimage series. But here, at the beginning, the gesture is clear: the photograph no longer ends at its frame. It continues as matter, memory, and absence.

Afterimage 1 is not an image of something.

It is the moment after the picture.