PHILOSOPHY

THEO JOURNAL is a fashion photography ZINE by Tokyo-based photographer and painter TISCH. Each issue centers on a single fashion model, weaving together portraiture, landscapes, still lifes, and painting into a work that unfolds like a small photobook.

The subjects are selected from the world of fashion modeling. Models are neither actors, artists, thinkers, nor activists; they are the people whose profession is most purely defined by "being seen." At the same time, amidst the discourse of feminism, they are perhaps the ones who have most heavily borne the historical burden of the "Male Gaze." While the concept of the Male Gaze originally pointed out that the definition of "beauty" has long been shaped by a dominant, male-centric perspective—reducing women to objects of consumption through the values of beauty and stripping them of their dignity—the questions surrounding the gaze are not limited to situations where men are subjects and women are objects. The power dynamics of the gazer and the gazed upon, of the wrongdoer and the wronged, are constantly scrutinized and debated wherever looks are exchanged. The artist’s first intention is to establish a platform for dialogue around the dignity of the subject—an issue that continuously evolves over time, where yesterday's right answers become today's wrong ones.

Secondly, the project references Jakob von Uexküll’s A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. Uexküll proposed that even the smallest living creature possesses its own Umwelt (perceptual world)—acting as a subjective entity that perceives and interacts with its environment. In other words, there is no single, "shared world" in existence. Drawing upon this idea, we can imagine "the world" not as a single entity, but as a constellation of individual worlds held by individual subjects, coexisting like parallel universes. The paradise we look upon may well be a desolate wasteland to another living being.

Using this imagery as a catalyst, THEO JOURNAL incorporates layers of ecology and phenomenology. It connects feminist discourse with long-standing questions in modern and contemporary aesthetics regarding the nature of the subject in relation to "beauty," seeking to break through the conceptual deadlocks that each field faces on its own.

TISCH studied aesthetics at Tokyo University of the Arts and trained at the Nippon Design Center, where he mastered commercial photography. Today, he maintains a unique, multidisciplinary practice that spans photography, painting, and product design. For the artist, this publication represents an ambitious attempt to provide readers with a new mindset in the fields of contemporary aesthetics and gender studies—the intellectual languages that feel most native to his practice. It is a venture to create a playground governed by its own set of rules, situated at the outermost veins of a diversifying landscape of values in fashion photography. Presented to a fashion audience yet extending beyond the conventional boundaries of commercial photography, this series marks the first comprehensive expression of TISCH’s most radical artistic essence.