Marcel Winatschek

Back Into Memory

Chino Otsuka photographed her childhood in 1970s Tokyo and Photoshopped herself back into the images as an adult. It’s one of those ideas that feels obvious the moment you see it, the kind of thing you wonder why it took someone until now to think of.

She was born in Tokyo, works in London now. The Photoshop process becomes a tool for what she calls time travel—a way to become a tourist of your own history. You stand in your childhood world as you are now, looking back at yourself from a place that only exists in memory. There’s something disorienting about it, something that gets at what memory actually feels like.

I don’t know why this simple idea moves me as much as it does. Maybe it’s because it captures something true about what happens when you live far enough from where you grew up. The past becomes a foreign country you can visit.