Through his work, David Favrod explores themes of identity, culture and memory. His work is informed by his own memories of traveling around Japan as a child, stories his mother told him and memories of a conversation he had once with his grandparents about the the war in Japan. “I guess my education and all that I lived through when I was young, all the experiences I had, affect in a way the man I am today and so also how I take pictures” (Favrod 2014).
The girl with the watermelon is Mishiko, she was the sister of my grandfather. She fell ill during the second war, doctors diagnosed poor hydration. In Japan, watermelon is a very popular fruit and holds much water. So his parents gave it to her regularly. But the diagnosis was wrong; it was a salt deficiency and she died shortly after.
In his series, Hikari, Favrod visits an important time in Japanese history, and its impact on him and his family, through memories, resulting is a “poignant and compelling narrative positioned somewhere between the personal and the universal” (Boothroyd 2014). Hikari is a Japanese word meaning, light, which references the intense flash of light emitted by the atomic bomb. Some images are titled and have captions which help direct the meaning, while other don’t and remain open to the viewer’s own interpretation.
Born in Kobe to a Japanese mother and Swiss father, Favrod moved to Switzerland at the age of six. As his father had to travel for his work a lot, Favrod was mainly brought up by his mother, who taught his Japanese principals and culture. At eighteen, he applied for dual-citizenship, but the Japanese embassy denied his request. In the series, Gaijin, meaning foreigner, Favrod uses his sense of rejection to explore and prove that he is as much Japanese as he is Swiss.
I like Favrod’s work. He very cleverly blends and borrows from different mediums. The sound of Bombs falling while hiding in the dark bomb shelter was one of his grandparents strongest memories. In order to “introduce sound in my picture? It’s why I decided to use onomatopoeias (that were found in manga/comic) and to paint them on the prints” (Favrod 2014).
In the interview with Sharon Boothroyd, I was very interested in David Favrod reply to a question about his creative process. “When I want to start a new project I think about what I want to show and what I want to speak about. Before taking any picture I write the general idea and I start to draw the images on my sketchbook. That allows me to construct the series and to see if there are too many landscapes, enough portrait or still life and to have a balance in the series from these different type of photographs. For each image I think about how I can produce it. I try to find the best solution to speak about the story behind each images. And for sure I think about the series and how the images can work together. It’s a quite long process but I like to work like this” (Favrod 2014).
Reference
Boothroyd, S. (2014) ‘David Favrod’, Photoparley Blog [online], 23 Sept, available: https://photoparley.wordpress.com/2014/09/23/david-favrod/ [accessed 10 Jul 2018].
Favrod, D. (2018) David Favrod [online], available: http://www.davidfavrod.com [accessed 10 Jul 2018].
Identity Place Photos 