Ryoji Akiyama is a Japanese photographer. 36 years ago, he photographed the most innocent appearance of Chinese children, recording the childhood of the next generation.
"Life is not what we live, but what we remember."
It has been said that childhood experiences can deeply affect a person, to a large extent, determining his present and future. In Ryoji Akiyama's eyes, these children unleash their unique nature, dressed in brightly colored clothes, with curiosity about the things in front of them flashing in their eyes, insight into things that adults can't find...
They are sometimes ghostly, sometimes like a small adult imitating the posture of an adult. Children are children after all, and their bodies will always maintain the purity and simplicity that we have never been. People will slowly grow up to understand that sometimes we become smart and complex, but we are only conquering the world, and simply conquering the soul.
The children of a generation reflect the childhood of an era, and Akiyama is like Peter Pan searching for the happiness of these children. When lying on a small table to write homework, when crouching on a stone slab to eat, when jumping in the air, when the inadvertent action in life becomes a simple happiness, we finally find a simple happiness like a child.
Akiyama does not choose to deliberately pose, he will play with these children, because what lurks in his heart is a lost and regained child's heart. He constantly tosses and turns, using childhood as his journey to find the true meaning of fate, and children are the cute faces in the childhood fragments. Recording is not the same as recording itself, in fact, there is tenderness to it at this moment.
Gibran wrote this:
Your child, in fact, is not your child.
They are the children born of life's desire for itself.
They came into this world through you,
But it is not because of you,
They are around you, but they don't belong to you.
Children are independent, childhood is also created by individuals, it is the first half of life in our memory, we can't choose what kind of childhood, just like why Akiyama chose to capture the childhood of these children. He is not the ultimate expression of their purity, not to call for the missing childhood, but more to return to the satisfaction of childhood. He saw that it was what he was looking for, and he was waving hands with his own childhood.
Today we are far away from the past and go home together, play games together, run together in the fields and sing together. Electronic products break through the bond of friendship, children no longer go around in a circle, wandering freely; children no longer enjoy nature, sucking in fresh air; children no longer weave the colorful colors of childhood, leaving behind a single tedious growth experience. The gradual disappearance of childhood makes more people want to "return to the baby".
"Childhood is the force that makes you endure your twilight years."
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