The past exists is a collection of works presented at Kenta Cobayashi’s solo exhibition at Mitsukoshi Contemporary Gallery in June 2022. In this exhibition, he selected portraits from Everything series of photographs.

Cobayashi describes the past as a kind of frame that constantly transforms according to the angle and quality of the memories that one looks back on. Photographs are always a reflection of past time, but editing the images and determining the layout of the exhibition is a variation on that point in time and a search for an expression that is appropriate to his current self. He also says that these works are like a parting gift to his twenties, and that they are a final farewell to a stage that will never be performed again.

In this book, Cobayashi expresses the accumulation of time from the past to the present by using the layering function of photoshop, which is indispensable in his production process, to create a layout in which the layers of photographs overlap each other as the pages are turned. In the form of a book, we practice a way of being in which each time is connected and a non-uniform image emerges.

Kenta Cobayashi

Newfave, 2022

29.5 X 21 cm, 92 pages