Taketo Muroi - Afterimage 2

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

Taketo Muroi — Afterimage 2

Afterimage 2 develops the central logic of Taketo Murois' Afterimage series through a carefully balanced double composition. Two areas of the image are juxtaposed: on the left, a rugged, eroded surface reminiscent of geological matter, fracture, and decay; on the right, a dense, granular field of shimmering fragments evoking sediments, crystals, or compressed memories. Between them, the image holds its breath.

This separation marks a threshold rather than a contrast. The left side suggests an already collapsed origin—a pictorial space characterized by loss, abrasion, and subtraction. The right side does not restore coherence but offers an accumulation without clarity. Meaning does not return; it dissipates.

Muroi treats the photograph here more as a temporal process than as a stable record. AI functions as a system of redistribution, breaking down visual information into residues that drift, settle, and recombine without hierarchy. What we find is not a representation, but the material afterlife of images after they have been processed beyond recognition.

Throughout the entire Afterimage series, this structural tension recurs: between what was once visible and what persists as a trace. Afterimage 2 makes this condition tangible. The image no longer points outwards. It turns inwards – towards its own erosion.

In this sense, photography is not disappearing.

It disintegrates – and yet remains.