Japanese photographer Shin Noguchi chronicles the daily life of his young family through candid color pictures. In his series titled One Two Three, Noguchi’s daughters are the stars: nine-year-old Yumeji, four-year-old Kotoyo, and two-year-old Hikono. Each image highlights different moments in their lives, from their everyday explorations to special occasions to epic meltdowns.
Unplanned and captured in a split-second, Noguchi demonstrates his skills as a photographer to snap compelling scenes that would otherwise go unnoticed. They feature small moments of beauty, like the iridescent colors of a bubble creating a halo around his girls. But more often, Noguchi photographs the humor that small children bring. In one picture, his toddler has fallen asleep behind a large uneaten cheese pizza. Another image shows Noguchi’s daughter as she stares at the camera with a beard made of ice cream.
Intuition plays a large role in One Two Three. “I just click the shutter when the moment is right during the life of my family,” Noguchi explains to My Modern Met in an email. “I definitely hear a kind of music while clicking the shutter—the unposed, unstaged moments that exist. It’s like improvisations in Jazz. Like Eric Dolphy said, If I missed it, it’s gone in the air, I can never capture it again.”
“They show me such beautiful moments, I think it’s a gift, the gift of a beautiful moment they gave, these extreme gifts appear in front of me, I can’t help but catch them.”
Noguchi’s ongoing series was inspired by the death of his father in 2017. As he was packing up his dad’s belongings, he found never-before-seen photos of his own childhood that were captured by his mother. This gave him the idea to follow in his family’s footsteps. “If someone asks me, ‘Are these photos then art, or life?’ I want to say that ‘life is art,’ ” he says. “I never called my photography ‘art,’ but definitely they show me what I feel art to be.”
Follow Noguchi on Instagram to see more of life with his charming family and his other photography work.
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