“Mieko Tadokoro's images are the revenge of simplicity against the dizzying acceleration of technology. As everyone can see, this childlike simplicity does not exclude the quality of the vision behind the magic box.” Philippe Salaün, Paris, July 5th, 1995 These were the words given to me by French photographer/printer Philippe Salaün on the occasion of my first solo exhibition at the Kodak Photo Salon in Tokyo. My “magic box” is black on the inside when you open the lid, with a tiny hole somewhere in one of its walls, a fraction of a millimeter, that's all. “No lens?” and “No viewfinder?” But for my photographs, I need only three things: this box, light-sensitive materials such as film and photographic paper, and light. If people knew that they could take pictures with it, most people, not just the digital native generation, would call it a “magic box”. But if you were Gulliver who landed in Brobdingnag country, you would understand the magic of this box when you enter it and see where the light coming through the small hole goes. As was the case with Leonardo da Vinci, who drilled a hole in the wall of his own room to observe the phenomenon of small holes. Or the characters in Katsushika Hokusai's “Saiana no Fuji,” which depicts the light entering through a knot hole in a storm door and projecting upside down Mount Fuji on a shoji screen. After a few seconds to a few dozen minutes of waiting with the hole in this box pointed at the subject, the magic box, which cannot capture the past in an instant, is brought into the darkroom, trapping images of loose, vague time and blurred, soft contours, like the « imparfait » in the French tense. After the laborious and time-consuming process of developing the film and the exciting waiting time, the photograph that appears initially gives me the impression that I have met someone for the first time. Soon, however, when my memory is rewound to the time of the shooting, I realize that something unexpected happened inside the “magic box”. The name of this photographic technique, which is at the origin of all modern imaging equipment, is pinhole photography, and the “magic box” is a pinhole camera. This device, which is largely disconnected from technology, is almost nothing, but it gives me the freedom to try anything I want, without rigid rules or laws of the lens. This photographic technique, which is magical in its simplicity, is for me a very dear “magic box”.