Kishin Shinoyama didn’t only shoot nudie twins in black & white, he also for instance did this wonderful early print campaign for Issey Miyake … in 1969!

Photos by Shinoyama Kishin

In 1993 Jaques Derrida curated Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, an exhibition at the Louvre of prints and drawings featuring depictions of blindness. In the coinciding publication, he considered blindness in art and the relationship between visibility and invisibility. A drawer cannot see at the same time both the thing in the world that is being drawn, and the drawn lines on the page. “Doesn’t one have to be blind to one or the other? Doesn’t one always have to be content with the memory of the other?” Derrida asks, concluding that “From the outset, perception belongs to recollection.” Since drawing is always instantaneous, always from memory, always a gesture made in the dark – the artist must be blind in order to draw.

In the same year as the exhibition, Derrida applied similar thinking to photography, images made directly from lightness and darkness, in an essay that was published in Japanese in the journal Shincho, with the title Aletheia (a Greek word meaning something like ‘unforgetting’ or ‘the state of not being hidden’, which Heidegger in the early twentieth century used in developing his concept of the disclosure or ‘unconcealedness’ of things).

Responding to a series of black & white images of the actress Shinobu Ōtake in a photobook by Japanese photographer Shinoyama Kishin, Derrida in this article makes some illuminating observations about the dark side of illumination, and the reversibility of seen and unseen. “Visibility itself is invisible, it is thus dark, obscure, nocturnal and it is necessary to be blind to it (immersed in darkness) in order to see,” he says, and continues, “Nothing is more black than the visibility of light, nothing is clearer than this sunless night.” On the reversibility of light and dark, he comments on  “the photographic ‘negative’ to be developed, the always possible inversion of the projected image, the nudity of the body unveiled by the veil itself which calls for and suspends desire …”

Attempting a deconstruction of the light-dark binary in a specific photo (showing Ōtake’s head and bare shoulders in dramatic Carravaggesque tenebrism with the English title Light of the Dark - see below), Derrida equates photography with skiagraphy – ie. ‘writing with light’ as ‘writing with shadow’ – and asks of the image, “Why does it appear not only to come out of and proceed from the night, as if black gave birth to white, but also to belong still to shadow, to remain still at the heart of the dark abyss from which it emanates?”

(The article was recently published for the first time in English in The Oxford Literary Review Vol. 32 No. 2)

The metaphor of light for knowledge runs deep in our everyday language: ‘bring to light’, ‘enlighten’, ‘see the light’, ‘dim understanding’, ‘shadow of doubt’ etc. But too much illumination can leave us imperceptive, as indicated by the notion of being ‘blinded by the light’. The sun’s great paradox is that while it allows all seeing, we can’t see it directly; and if we do try to look at it we damage our eyes (which, incidentally, Plato referred to as the most ‘helioform’ and thereby most divine of the sensing organs). For her acclaimed series The Sun (2005-), Rika Noguchi has used pinhole cameras to visualise the solar body’s obfuscating effects on the eyes of its mortal Earth-bound observers. She currently has a solo show at Izu Photo Museum in the foothills of Mt Fuji (until March 2012).

The above photographs are the result of Naoya Hatakeyama being commissioned to document the razing of Zeche Westfahlen, an old coal mining town in the Ruhr District of Germany, in 2004. Best known for his human-less images of undergrounds, mining towns and explosions on limestone quarries, Hatakeyama has an exhibition called Natural Stories showing at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography until December 4.

OVAR (Origin of Visual Audio Research) is a new collaborative duo formed in Tokyo earlier this year by two guest artists from the 2010 Big In Japan program – sound artist Mamoru Okuno and Kentaro Shimura of SHIMURABROS. The first work by OVAR, FCN001 ver.1-3 is being shown at Yuka Tsuruno gallery in Tokyo (as part of the Lumen・Sonus・Memoria show, which is on from this week until December 10), and as part of the video art exhibitions I curated for the 2011 Big In Japan events in Australia next week (November 15 and 16 at Paddington Town Hall in Sydney and November 18 and 19 at 1000 Pound Bend in Melbourne).

What we call motion pictures are actually, as we know, made up of many still pictures. Starting with the fact that most contemporary film achieves duration by using twenty-four frames to make a second, the artists constructed this disorienting video work from twenty-four still photographs. With a repeated sequence of stilted movements back and forth between different vantage points on the same scene, it attempts to visualise a multidimensional perception of time and duration that goes beyond the arrow of past-present-future.

The score is constructed from four tracks of sound (a field recording in the woods, a piano recording, and two digital sound files) which were switched on and off in every possible combination (2 x 2 x 2 x 2 patterns). Mamoru explains that since he and Kentaro do not believe in ‘pure random operation’, they experimented with various combinations of the audio and visual components, inserting subjectivity into the predetermined formulas by selecting patterns based on personal sensation.

The eye is an orb, an aquatic jewel with an aqueous humor lens.

The earth is an orb, an aquatic jewel washed in oceanic tides.

Between these two watery spheres, we place another: an aquatic jewel of glass.

Connected right behind your eyeballs, your brain generates consciousness. Through the watery spheres of your eyes, your consciousness projects upon the world as its screen.

This installation is modelled after your relationship to the world. The world just happens to be around.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, 2011

A special exhibition from Hiroshi Sugimoto at the 2011 Yokohama Triennale has his optical glass sculpture Five Elements (2011) erected between our watery eyeballs and his seascape photograph Lake Superior, Cascade River (1995).

Also on display here are meteorites, including this fine specimen that was one of several meteoric iron fragments discovered in 1838 in modern day Namibia. Nearly solid iron with minute traces of other elements, these would in the mid-twentieth century help to accurately establish the age of the universe (4.5 billion years) in accordance with the Big Bang Theory.

In the last room is the same pairing of Sugimoto’s electricity-photography experiments with the thirteenth-century sculpture of the Japanese god of thunder that I wrote about for the Sydney Biennale last year. As part of the Yokohama Triennale, the photographer / antique dealer / curator – who is now turning his hand at sculpture, architecture and traditional Japanese performing arts – also directed a Bunraku production and designed the sets for a Noh performance.

Sugimoto’s movements across and between temporalities including pre-modern Japan, the global contemporary and the pre-historic cosmos indicate a continuous exploration of continuity, and an approach to history and time as, to borrow Michel Serres’ handkerchief analogy (in Conversations on Science, Culture and Time), “folded and crumpled” rather than “flat and ironed out”.

“… it is the mask that has acquired a body” - Watsuji Tetsurō (Mask and Persona)

Between 1987 and 1999 Irving Penn photographed over two hundred and fifty Issey Miyake garments, never deviating from his formula of empty white backgrounds and frontal lighting that emphasised the pure geometric forms of the clothes. Miyake adhered to a self-imposed rule to never attend the photo shoots, and Penn never went to a Miyake fashion show – such was their respect for each other’s work. A new exhibition at 21_21, the Tokyo design museum directed by Issey Miyake, looks back over the relationship between the fashion designer and the late photographer, and the legendary images that resulted. The entire wall of the atrium space in the subterranean concrete Tadao Ando museum is covered in Ikko Tanaka posters from the archives while in the main room a seemingly endless procession of larger than life figures is projected on a thirty metre wide screen, resembling a silent infantry of hilarious beautiful aliens.

‘A Record of the Wind’, ‘A Weighing Machine After the Rain’ and ‘3pm When the Shadow Crosses the Border’. These three 1972 photographs by Genpei Akasegawa were kindly sent to me by my friend Leiko in Osaka, in response to my article on Hyper Art. Thank you!

“Everybody knows that the useful is useful, but nobody knows that the useless is useful too.” (Chuang-tse)

In the early 1980s, Genpei Akasegawa and some of his students encountered this useless staircase in Yotsuya, Tokyo. He recalls how taken they were by fact that it had “no entertainment, no utility, no ornamentation”. It appeared to be a mistake, since capitalism shouldn’t allow for such pointlessness. It had the form of a staircase without the function, and they decided that a staircase leading nowhere was in fact no longer a staircase. It was, by virtue of its new obsolescence, art. Hyper Art, to be exact: art that was made without any artistic intent. Art made by the city.

They set out in search of more architectural relics where planned utility had given way to accidental futility. This was as the crazed bubble economy was blowing up and Tokyo had money bursting out of its eyeballs: the built environment was in a constant state of redevelopment and flux. Akasegawa formed the Street Observation Science Society in 1986 with a group of students and Professor Fujimori Terunobu of Tokyo University, with the express purpose of seeking out the city’s inadvertent useless leftovers that were ready to be elevated to Hyper Art.

To label these urban vestiges, they settled on the name ‘Thomassons’ after the American major-league baseball star who played for the Yomiuri Giants in Japan. Gary Thomasson famously had a perfect swing, but never managed to touch the ball. In Akasegawa’s words, “he had a fully formed body and yet served no purpose in the world … It was a beautiful thing.” He was living Hyper Art; like the superfluous stairs they had christened le stairs pour le stairs, he was an inversion of Louis Sullivan’s modernist credo that form follows function. They were also pleased to find that if one wrote Thomasson’s name in Japanese characters it spelt the word for Hyper Art.

Akasegawa ran a column in the magazine Photography Times that chronicled all their documented finds, and encouraged reader participation. Thomassons soon became a cult hit, and at one point Akasegawa was offering to remunerate all reader submissions with one of his Greater Japan Zero-yen Notes. The articles (which became increasingly loquacious over the years) were published in English for the first time in a paperback last year.

I posted recently on Akasegawa’s 1000-yen Note Incident and his background in the radical Anti Art movement of the ’50s and ’60s in Japan. Thomassons were where his han-geijutsu ‘Anti Art’ gave way to cho-geijutsu ‘Hyper Art’, which was a different way of re-defining capital A art while carrying on the rejection of Art’s old notions of individual authorship and originality. Hyper Art was art that happens not in the making but in the finding. Art without an artist. In Akasegawa’s (Duchampian) words, “A work of hyperart can have an assistant, but not a creator. In the end, all hyperart has is the person who discovers it.”

This was a reader submission of a ‘full scale stamp of a home’, a two-dimensional relic of a building that no longer existed, which Akasegawa would refer to as an example of an ‘Atomic Thomasson’, in reference to the human silhouettes that were burned into walls in Hiroshima. And here’s a photo I took of some defunct architectural utility in Newtown, Sydney – possibly already too aestheticised to count as a Thomasson discovery. Kaya Press takes submissions for their online Hyper Art archive here. On more urban art made without intention see The Subconscious Art Of Graffiti Removal.

Akasegawa quotes from Hyperart: Thomasson, Kaya Press, 2010

Asuka Katagiri started photographing stars in a non-paparazzi way when he was twelve. Here are some (unaltered) heliolatry shots from his Light Navigation series.

Watch out Gerhard Richter. Kazuna Taguchi makes achromatic oil paintings of images she has assembled from found photographs, before photographing the paintings and then retouching the photographic prints with paint …

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who does ask me, I do not know.” - Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430AD)

Fascinated by the decay and deformation of a stack of cardboard boxes that were left under his house, Hitoshi Nomura was struck by the idea that “there are forms that exist independently of intention.” For his graduation work at Kyoto City University of Arts in 1969 he exhibited a precarious twenty-six-foot-tall stack of cardboard boxes that collapsed over several days under the indifferent hands of time, gravity and the weather. Naming the anti-monumental auto-destructing apparatus Tardiology, he consciously went against sculpture’s conventional pretensions of solidity and permanence.

In the years that followed, his work moved increasingly away from sculpture to root itself in photography, though he insists that his photographs are in fact sculptural because they are always the result of “movement in real space.” Nomura’s photography is essentially a means by which to document duration, disintegration, progression and transience. But from its beginning photography has had a complicated relationship with time – conceived of by Fox Talbot as “the art of fixing a shadow,” it entails the fleeting being firmly secured on a surface, the transitory being rendered immutable, the instant continuing into the future.

The marking of time in Nomura’s works over the last four decades has often taken him a lot of time to execute. In 1972 he embarked on a humble little project to “photograph ever visible thing.” For ten years he documented mundane scenes from his immediate surrounds with time-lapse sequential photography, finally publishing all the images in one hundred and twenty bound volumes. Referencing Brownian Motion – the seemingly random, erratic movements of particles suspended in water – he named the disjointed series of images The Brownian Motion of Eyesight.

The result of non-discriminatory obsessive compulsion, the catalogued photographs were supposed to “make clear the nature of the act of seeing,” but the most successful outcome of the project, it seems, is that it failed. The artist recalls he “eventually came to understand that a human being cannot photograph everything and that there is a limit to seeing.” This realisation coincided with Nomura turning his lens towards the sky: “Not everything one sees can be photographed,” he decided, “but it is possible to capture everything in a day by representing a day with the sun and moon.”

From this point on Nomura gets cosmic. I wrote last week about his Moon Scores, which like all his work came from this desire to find form that exists independently of the artist’s intention. Another stellar project is his The Sun on Latitude 35° N (1982–87), whereby he recorded the sun’s diurnal progress across the sky from a fixed position, using a fish-eye lens. With the curves of light signaling a single day, he made one of these images for every day in the earth’s cycle around the sun (aka a year). If the sun’s form was occluded by inclemency he would have to wait for the same day the following year. When he finally had 365 ‘days’ he lined up the curves, which varied according to the time of year, and was amazed to find this formation that swirls tightly through summer and winter, and stretches out at the intersecting lines of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

Another accidental encounter with the formation of celestial rhythm came out of Nomura’s Analemma series (see below). An analemma (from the Greek for ‘pedestal of a sundial’) is a form traced by an extraterrestrial body (in this case the sun) from a fixed position on earth at regular intervals over a calendar year. Nomura explains it by saying that if human perception was imbued with the ability to maintain an afterimage for a year, this is the image we would see in the sky. Remarkably, as with his Sun on Latitude 35° N, the inadvertant resulting figure resembles our symbol for infinity.

In one of her more poetic moments, Susan Sontag equated looking at photographs with stargazing: “the photograph of the missing being will touch me like the delayed rays of a star” (On Photography). She was referring to the photographic image as being a material vestige of a now absent subject, but this is also a reminder that due to the fact that light (the medium of sight) has a speed (which happens to be the fastest speed at which anything can travel in the universe), we can all see the past. Looking into the night sky, we see images that are extremely old – stars as they were millions of years ago, which may well by now no longer exist, and yet their scintillating image remains in our present. This is the basis of Nomura’s recent Time and Distance series, where he placed photographs of light that was emitted from the Milky Way a hundred and fifty million years ago, next to Jurassic fossils of plants that lived on earth at the same time – thereby reuniting contemporary relics of primordial time and space.

All Nomura Hitoshi quotes are from the catalogue for his solo exhibition Perceptions-Changes in Time and Field at the National Art Centre, Tokyo, 2009.

Once, looking at a full moon behind street telegraph cables, Hitoshi Nomura saw music. Between 1975 and 1979 he made ‘Moon Scores’ by photographing the lunar body silently moving across the night sky on film marked with five lines, turning each subsequent image into an item of musical notation. Transferring the notes to staff paper, he then had the chance compositions performed by a chorus and a string quartet. He later did a similar series with birds – you can listen to the music here.

More on Hitoshi Nomura here.

An exhibition of Kohei Yoshiyuki’s series Koen (’The Park’) has just opened at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. It will tour to the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne (16 September–23 October 2011) and Adam Art Gallery in Wellington (24 January–25 March 2012). See below for the catalogue essay I wrote …

“Being seen by absolutely no one and being unaware of being seen were similar, yet basically different.”

(Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn)

Seeing Darkness

In one episode of the BBC TV series Planet Earth, thirty desperately starving lions kill an elephant in the middle of the night. It’s one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen. Knowing that their night vision is far greater than that of any elephant’s, the cats wait for their prey to be isolated from its herd before leaping up onto it and mauling its flesh until it collapses. The carcass will feed the huge pride for at least a week. We’re given an extreme close-up of one of the elephant’s useless eyes, and a lingering shot of a lioness gnawing its trunk. Lightning strikes in the distance. Figures lurk in the shadows. The score is unashamedly film noir. And the entire six-minute sequence is shot in the dark on infrared.

With wavelengths just beyond the red end of the visible spectrum, infrared rays are invisible to our eyes but can be made visible with the right equipment. The use of such technology thus reminds us of the inherent limitations of our vision. The cats’ eyes pierce much further through the enveloping darkness than the elephant’s can, while the prosthetic eye of the camera far exceeds the capacities of the eyes of the film crew. They were crouching in pitch blackness, but as this network of watching shows, darkness isn’t something objective – it depends on who is doing the looking. The scene was undetectable to the unaided human retina but not the privileged feline eyes or the camera’s lens, and thus as ultimate viewers we have the strange experience of seeing something our bodies are not equipped to see. Steven Connor describes a similar effect of visualizing the invisible with images produced by X-ray scans:

“Here, I seem to be able to see the ways in which I cannot see; I can see my own blindness. But, for this very reason, I also seem to see that I can sometimes see what I never in fact can; X-ray photographs provide the visible proof that vision can encompass a vision not its own. This of course is true only because the non-optical effects have been translated into the order of sight, most notably by being captured in some form of visible or material form – a photograph, or fluorescing screen … ”

Indeed, the X-ray is one of several 19^th century inventions that were paired with photography and led to a new conception of the camera as being not a tool for recording what we see, but a means for capturing what we can’t see. Telescopes and microscopes were also part of this shift in understanding. The relationship between seeing and knowing was becoming more complicated and the uptake of these technologies heralded a growing awareness of there being a lot more in the physical world than our subjective senses could detect on their own.

In a similar vein, the images in Kohei Yoshiyuki’s series Koen (‘The Park’) push the boundaries of human perception. They activate our vision where it usually fails – in the dark. Yoshiyuki obtained them by taking his camera on vespertine prowls of Tokyo’s public parks in 1971 and 1979, furtively capturing on film the Peeping Toms he found watching people engaged in sexual acts. Using infrared sensitive film and filtered flash bulbs, the amateur photographer was able to grant himself a gaze that penetrated straight through the very darkness that made him invisible to everybody else there. The levels of complicity, performativity and victimisation on the part of the subjects remain ambiguous – we know we are seeing something we are not permitted to see, but we have the sense that the amorous subjects audacious or desperate enough to have sex in these places must have been aware of the possibility of being visible.

Of course, there’s nothing especially Japanese about bonking in public parks. But in their localised context the photographs explore the limits of privacy in Tokyo of the booming 1970s. After WWII the Japanese love hotel phenomena had flourished, allowing couples to rent rooms for ‘resting’, charged by the hour. And even before these short stay hotels, sex in urban Japan had often been removed from the private home, where typically very little personal space was possible, and assigned to public chaya ‘tearooms’. Many 18^th and 19^th century ukiyo-e woodblock prints survive depicting a third party casually watching copulating couples in such venues, so Yoshiyuki’s series can be situated in a long aesthetic thread where artists have either recorded or imagined voyeuristic acts as the primary subject of their art.

Blown up and printed at life-size, the photographs were shown in 1979 at Komai Gallery in Tokyo where the lights were turned off and visitors were instructed to navigate the space with hand-held torches. The prints were destroyed after the exhibition, but the photographs were published in a book in 1980 before Yoshiyuki (a pseudonym, his real name remains unknown) set up shop as a family portrait photographer and vanished into obscurity. In 2006 Martin Parr’s publication The Photobook: A History included Yoshiyuki as an unknown innovator, prompting Yossi Milo Gallery in New York to track down the reclusive artist and convince him to reprint the remaining negatives.

The photographer’s sudden destruction of the prints and abandonment of the project suggests contention might have arisen over him showing the potentially incriminating photographs that had been so clandestinely taken, very recently, in the same city. Here, now, with the safety barrier of geographic distance and more than three decades firmly established between us and the images, we have greater anonymity. And yet their powerful capacity to involve us prevails. Paradoxically, it is when the figures have their backs to us and evade being identified themselves that we are most heavily implicated, no matter how much distance in space and time we have secured. As with the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s rückenfigurs, and their modern manifestations in the surrogate bodies seen from behind in video games, when we are positioned in the same direction as the figure depicted in front of us, our gaze is projected onto the same scene from the same angle and we are implicated as active viewers.

Looking at Yoshiyuki’s images induces an uneasiness that has something to do with seeing the seer looking while seeing ourselves being seen looking. Paintings depicting the Biblical story of Susanna and The Elders, where an innocent woman bathing in a garden falls victim to exploitative male desire, can have a similar effect. The scene was depicted by the likes of Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Tintoretto and Gentileschi – its popularity being easily attributed to the justification it offered for a prominent fully exposed female nude, sanctioned under the categorical label of ‘historic painting’. While a sanctimonious position is superficially implied for the viewer, we can’t condemn the invasive gaze of The Elders without indulging in moral hypocrisy, knowing that we ourselves have gone on to perpetuate the same gaze so prolifically.

When we move from painting to photography the image’s capacity for implication is even stronger, because the photograph asserts irrefutably that its subject at some point existed physically before the camera’s lens. It is a curious feature of the history of photography that long after the daguerreotype was superseded by cheaper and more efficient techniques, pornographic daguerreotypes continued to be produced and sold. The historian Geoffrey Batchen has linked this to the status of the daguerreotype as a hand-held non-reproducible one-off tactile object. The private act of opening the daguerreotype case (as with the nominally ‘sealed’ section of a men’s magazine, sealed only from those incapable of tearing the edge of a page) must have been part of the ritualised process of stimulation. The extremely long exposure time the sexy daguerreotype image was known to have required could also have invested it with a sense of intimacy that enhanced its eroticism.

In contrast, these gritty candid images suggest anthropological distance on the part of the photographer. Whether we like it or not we are lined up right behind Yoshiyuki in the chain of voyeurism, while in many of the images (the most compelling ones, I think) the final object of vision (the erotic act) is out of shot/sight. They are hardly suitable masturbation material: we are granted proximity while being denied any illusion of intimacy. Rather than removing traces of the photographer and the photographic process to suggest we are seeing directly, they make us intensely aware of the photographer and his precarious position, as well as the photographic act. In this sense they are less photographs about sex, and more photographs about photography. The photograph (photos + graphé = ‘drawing with light’) was for a long time an image made with light that paradoxically needed to be developed in a darkroom. These images make visible what is supposed to invisible – sex, yes, but more interestingly, darkness itself.

Images courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery

As if responding to Vilém Flusser’s claim on the eve of the digitization of photography that “Photos are worthless as objects because the information they carry is stored elsewhere and may be transferred easily from one worthless surface to another”, Yuki Kimura gives primacy to the physicality of her photographs over their content. She reminds us that while we might consider photographic images to possess width and breadth without depth, they cannot exist in a truly two-dimensional sphere because ours is a world of three dimensions and images always need a physical thing to substantiate them – even an unmaterialised digital image needs a material medium to make it visible. The enigmatic Kyoto-based artist’s work has developed over the last decade as a continued examination of the physical superficiality and posteriority of photographs, and her recent exhibition at Izu Photo Museum marked a promising maturation of her enquiry into the relationship between an image and the medium that carries it.

Tables are used to support images throughout the show, starting at the at the museum’s entrance with a small table that has blank white canvas covering its top. On close inspection a barely distinct image of a landscape is seen to lurk beneath the surface, bringing to mind mountains shrouded by thick snowfall. What we have here is information carried on the surface of a thing – which is in essence what every photograph is – but the additional surface layer gives depth to an image that would otherwise be thought of as flat. With photos mounted on tabletops instead of on the gallery walls we are invited to navigate our way around them, experiencing them from varied vantage points and giving up the illusion that they don’t occupy material space. This strategically non-vertical display also means we have to maintain close proximity in order to perceive the images, because if we stand back all we see is the supporting object.

The only two wall-mounted images in the main room have their surfaces obstructed by living plants, literally foregrounding their existence in the world of matter. The horizontally displayed photographs are also partially obscured, with found objects like stones, pieces of wood or a melted candle making contact with them and drawing attention to the fact that the photographic image has (is?) a palpable surface. The three-dimensional (object) interacts with the two-dimensional (image) by touching its surface, which is reminiscent of how the ‘Spaceland’ entity visits the depthless world of ‘Flatland’ in Edwin A. Abbott’s strange and brilliant 19th century novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. These items don’t directly reproduce the photograph’s content but on close examination there is often continuation and interaction between the image and the thing. Our eyes compare the actual roughness of the stones, for example, with the simulated textures in the glossy image – they violate the monotony of the photograph’s surface and the hermeticism of its content.

The point is that the images are supported by the pieces of furniture and they in turn support the found objects, whose shadows and reflections are cast back down on the surface to further confirm the photograph’s tangibility. A generic chair, something made for the purpose of supporting a person, sits on the floor of one room holding up an image of another floor that in turn supports carefully arranged dried peppercorns on its surface. Elsewhere an image of a worn leather chair is rendered a glossy tabletop upon which a Poloroid photograph rests, and nearby another glossy photographic tabletop image is interrupted by the live reflected image of an actual chair. The exhibition is titled Untitled and by not assigning names to anything, the artist gives rise to an ambiguity about where one work stops and another starts. With each cluster treated as a multi-layered system of image / object support, the museum’s rectilinear rooms also come to be seen as bigger support bases for the assemblages that are arranged within them.

In the museum’s back room an anonymous sepia image of passengers boarding an airplane is displayed next to a black-and-white image of people approaching an airplane-shaped papier mâché building. Made by photographing old photographs, the diptych exploits the discontinuity of the scenes while unifying them within the same space and time. The artistry here lies not in the making of an image but in the selection and presentation of it: very few of the photographs in the exhibition were taken by Kimura – they were largely sourced from flea markets and her grandfather’s albums, or sent to her by friends. An underlying appeal driving this current trend for unauthored found images is the enigmatic gap they maintain between us and them; we don’t know exactly who or what they depict, who created them, or how they made their way to us. Traces of the unknown histories of these found photographs can be located in their worn edges or surface scratches and marks, reminding us of their entropic physicality and their past, while at the same time binding them to our present.

Images courtesy Izu Photo Museum

In rendering the world of space and time as a surface image, one thing photography rarely achieves (or aims for) with accuracy is scale. Naoya Hatakeyama exploits this gap with his with his recent series Scales, commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). Currently showing at Daiwa Foundation Japan House in London, the body of work comes from the artist’s thinking about perception and our incapacity to grasp the world around us in its entirety. In his own words: “What is embodied in photography is not a clear ‘knowledge of the whole’, but, rather, a ‘longing for the knowledge of the whole’.”

Images © Naoya Hatakeyama

Since the late 1970s Hiroshi Sugimoto has travelled to oceanic horizons all around the world and photographed them in monochrome. Taken at different times of day and night, under varying climactic conditions, the images are always composed of exactly half sky, half water, and nothing else.

Sixteen of these Seascapes are on permanent display under the open sky on the terrace of Benesse House Museum, as well as in several surrounding inaccessible cliff faces, one of them just visible from the museum if you know to look for it. The decision to install them amongst the elements like this came from Sugimoto’s desire to let the images fade into nothingness over the years, while the original sea they represent will endure right behind them.

The prints had been in exhibitions in Pittsburb, Bordeaux and Brussels before made their final stop here, so they hold histories already as they continue into the future. The image of the sea, says Sugimoto, is possible the most consistent thing in the history of our planet. Tadao Ando’s concrete walls obstruct our view of the real ocean, while the photographs re-present it – when they are placed alongside each other, the line of the horizon extends through them so all these seas of different times and places become the one continuous sea.

The museum is part of Benesse Art Site, a complex built by Tadao Ando in 2004 on the remote island of Naoshima as a museum and luxury hotel in one – the museum is open to the public but guests who can afford the whopping overnight rates can enjoy the juvenile pleasure of snooping around after hours. At the end of last year the basement of the hotel lobby (above) was rendered a dark Sugimoto-Ando catacomb where the confined glow of the artist’s aptly named ‘light coffins’ subtly illuminate a series of photographs from his career, including his six-panelled Pine Trees:

A tribute to Hasegawa Tohaku’s iconic ink painting Shorinzu (ca. 1590), this manifestation of the image is at first barely visible in the shadowy space. It takes several minutes for the eyes to adjust to the darkness, and even then the forms of the trees remain elusive. But as with sumi-e, the black ink and wash painting imported to Japan from Song dynasty China, we find there is not one black but astonishing variations of tonality to be found within blackness. Sugimoto says the nuanced expression achieved through the interplay of light-dark tonalities in ink painting spoke to his own continued investigations into black and white photography, and he treated this work as an exercise in ‘ink photography’. He describes his process:

“In Japanese cultural traditions, the act of emulating works of great predecessors is called honka-dori, ‘taking up the melody’. Not scathed as mere copying, it is regarded as a praiseworthy effort. I travelled the length of Japan, visiting the so-called meisho ‘famous sites’ for pines: Miho no Matsubara, Matsushima, Ama no Hashidate. All verged on succumbing to the ravages of encroaching modernization. Only at the very last ‘vanishing point’ of perspective Japan, the Imperial Palace – there in that manicured nature, that ultimate in artificial beauty – did I find my anticipated pine image. After studying each and every pine bending coquettishly this way and that, I synthetically composed this imaginary pair of six-panelled screens. Here, then, is a painting in photographs, though the site photographed escapes any actual location. This is everywhere and nowhere, a fiction of pictorial idealization – as was the original painting.”

Displayed alongside the photographer’s recent stints at furniture design, Sugimoto’s black and white images are perfectly at home on Ando’s grey untreated concrete walls, where the dense rectilinear lines are offset by the continual interplay of intangible and evanescent shadows. Also on display are examples from the artist’s famous Seascapes and Theatres bodies of work, and a series of images from his architecture studies, including his photograph of Ando’s Church of Light in Osaka (above). As with all his photographs of buildings, they blur the boundaries between the structures and their surrounds, challenging our illusions of the permanence of architecture.

The space culminates with a contained courtyard garden designed by Sugimoto. The green moss is the only interjection to the achromatic spectrum of the rooms and photographs, and its incredible colour is enhanced because of this. In the centre of the garden is the artist’s Conceptual Form 003, an ‘onduloid’ sculpture based on a mathematical formula for a surface of revolution with a constant non-zero mean curvature.

Currently dividing his time between New York and Japan, Sugimoto currently has a solo show at The Pace Gallery in Manhattan as well as the inaugural installation of his major new exhibition series, the ambitiously titled The Origins of Art, at the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, not far from Naoshima. With his personal works (like his recent Polarized Colours series, below) presented alongside examples from his private collections of antiquities and curiosities, the annual program is structured around four parts: Science, Architecture, History and Religion.

Top image by Amelia Groom, all others © Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Having spent the last two years in a small village next to Sendai Airport, the up-and-coming photographer Lieko Shiga produced her new body of work, The Annals of Kitakama Village, in collaboration the local residents.

As with all her photographs, there is not a trace of natural light to be found and we get the sense the images are letting us momentarily see in the dark, onto a nocturnal world where there is more than could ever meet the eye.

For her installation at the recent Aichi Triennale the artist treated the mysterious images very much as objects, arranging them upright along the floor so they appeared like tombstones or things elevating, as things often do in her elaborately orchestrated photographs.

Lieko Shiga’s acclaimed series Canary will be presented as part of the video art program at Big In Japan in Sydney and Melbourne next week.

Following leads from relatives and family friends, photographer Shitamichi Motoyuki traced the whereabouts of all the portraits and landscapes that were left behind by his grandfather, who had been a ‘Sunday painter’, and set about photographing them in their current domestic environments.

The paintings, representing various people and plein-air sceneries once seen by the late grandfather, have now been documented in their fixed positions within these new interior settings, then reproduced as photographic prints, and are now on temporary display as part of another living space at Tokyo Wonder Site’s artist residency complex in Aoyama.

Screening the bathroom mirror, sitting on chairs or straddling unmade beds, the images are treated as new physical objects amongst the generic furniture – the homely spaces they depict standing in sharp contrast to the impersonal and distinctly un-lived-in rooms housing them.

As with his other bodies of work, the Sunday Painter project considers questions of memory and its relationship to images, and prompted the artist to conduct research while trekking all over the country.

For his first peripatetic series Bunkers (2001-2005), he travelled around on his motorbike documenting deteriorating WWII ruins in ordinary settings, some of which had become playgrounds and garages; in another he recorded neglected torii gates at ancient Shinto shrine remains from Japan’s former colonies that have been incorporated into the natural landscape, or in some cases used as public benches.

Roaming around mapping these near-forgotten spaces, he is making an inquiry into how memories are contained in landscapes and in what ways the act of photographing them, placing them within new images, changes their status.

Giving yet another layer of re-presentation, Michi’s Sunday Painter exhibition at Art Tower Mito – now recreated for the Tokyo Wonder Site open studio – is accompanied by a beautiful new self-published book, where the artist’s own sketches of his grandfather’s paintings appear on folded pages that can be cut open to reveal reproductions of the ‘original’ canvases behind them.

Yuko Kamei’s images provide a meeting point for the motion and temporality of dance and the freezing of movement and time that characterizes photography. Focusing on release-based techniques and contact improvisation, she had spent many years training in classical ballet, martial arts including aikido and capoeira, and modern dance schools of Limón and Cunningham before she moved into photography.

“Initially I was working with video,” she says, “but my works gradually became short and looped, and finally settled in a photographic space.” This photographic space she conceives of functions as a stage for exploring the interaction between bodies and built environments. In 2009 she took to the new ‘burbs of Tokyo for her Brand New Town series (above), intervening the excessively paved and planned lifeless streets by walking through them, armed (legged?) with wooden stilts.

Prior to that her in the grid project (below) focused on the ubiquitous straight lines of urban spaces with the lines of the human body. “I think both human body and architecture are intentional constructions which reflect our ideals,” she says. “The built environment regulates how we move and behave, but at the same time we can be active and creative in utilising the structure. The simple presence of a human body can bring up numerous unexpected aspects of any given space.”

Yuko’s most recent series (below) has focused on the movement of balance, which she defines as a continuous adjustment between structure and gravity. The act of balancing requires you to get the right alignment and then settle on it, allowing your attention to travel outwards. “You can see what is out there while the body anchors you where you are,” she says, “and I think the experience of looking at the photographs is similar – you see what the body does, then look at the space around it and come back to the body again, making connections in between. The body continues to balance in the same position while the viewer’s eyes travel across the surface, and the brief moment of performative action expands as long as the viewer’s attention exists.”

Yuko is currently completing a one-year residency at Tokyo Wonder Site.

All images copyright Yuko Kamei:

1. Brand New Town, Mogusaen, Japan, c-type print, 2009.

2. Brand New Town, Higashimurayama 2, Japan, c-type print, 2009.

3. in the grid_#2, silver gelatin print, 2008.

4. in the grid_#3, silver gelatin print, 2008

5. in the grid_#4, silver gelatin print, 2008.

6. Untitled, c-type print, 2009.

7. Untitled, c-type print, 2009.

Shadows exist on surfaces as pure image without detail, colour or mass. Immaterial, elusive and ungraspable, they were mistrusted by Plato as representing fraudulent imitations of reality, distractions from truth and knowledge. To be liberated, the prisoners in his cave would have to come outside and face the fully dimensioned world of sunlight – the opposite of darkness, the antithesis of deception. But actually light and dark exist only in and through each other – a shadow needs a source of light from which to be cast and stars cannot be seen in the day because only darkness gives form to light. Arlo Guthrie said in a few words what Samuel Todes and others have said in many: “You can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in”.

For Yukihiro Taguchi’s recent installation at Gallery αM in Tokyo, the Osaka-born Berlin-based artist likened the configuration of the basement gallery space to those enclosed subterranean realms never reached by daylight, caves. With this as his starting point, he created an interwoven, participatory system of shadows, lights, found domestic junk precariously arranged, and ongoing photo documentation. It seemed to extend in several directions from Tu m’ (1918), where some of Duchamp’s icons – the wheel and hatstand – were used to “do a painting with cast shadow” by way of exploring the relationship between two dimensionality and three dimensionality, image and thing.

Plato thought the light of the sun was the ultimate, unpolluted truth and anything else was secondary, but as this exhibition showed, the relationship between light and authenticity is more conflicted than we might assume. The nature of light is such that it can be propagated through projection and reflection endlessly without suffering any loss to the source. The moon, for example has no light of its own; its illumination is a forgery, borrowed from the sun. In the intricately built space the illegitimate shadows of Plato’s cave became their own authentic fakes, independent of sunlight and indifferent to the notion of originality.

The title of the show, Cave, was projected near the entrance to the gallery via a methodically placed hand-mirror that picked up light from outside the room. Second-hand light was also recorded live by camcorder and transmitted to a projector which then cast the shadow of a representation of a horse from the Lascaux complex of caves (estimated to be 17,000 years old) via a page from a second-hand book of reproductions. Sources of origin were consciously made indistinguishable from the interacting forms of reproduction.

As with the young artist’s other recent performative installations, a camera sat on a tripod for the duration of the show silently working away at time-lapse documentation of the perpetually incomplete set-up. The thousands of photographic images will later be compiled in an autonomous stop-motion video work, forming yet another layer of representation. Besides the common analogy of photography and shadows (dating way back Fox Talbot who described the first photographic images as skiagraphy, meaning ‘shadow writing’), the camera’s presence brought to mind Susan Sontag’s statement that the power of photography has “de-Platonized our understanding of reality”, making it no longer plausible to distinguish between images and objects, shadows and realities, copies and originals.

In one corner of Taguchi’s cave the passing of time was documented by the shifting shadows of a tall, single stem pink tiger lily that stood in an emptied wine bottle on the floor before a spot light. On the first day of the exhibition the artist traced the cast silhouette of the freshly cut flower on the wall in pencil, and over the weeks that followed the growing distance between these marks and those of the real live shadows made evident the drooping flowers’ more salubrious past, as well as their imminent extinction. It was a simple gesture of marking duration, and death, through the interplay of artist’s impression of shadows and ‘original’ shadows.

While at first glance it appeared to be a cacophonous and arbitrary arrangement, the evolving space was executed with great skill, exactitude and wit. As with any visual trace of a shadow, what it amounted to was a representation of a representation, but under Taguchi’s apt hands the reconfiguration of time, layering of shadows and interweaving of copies ensured any pretence of originality (the sun) was eclipsed.

Photographs by Amelia Groom

When Yu Ogata and Ichiro Ogata Ono are not busy building buildings they take themselves to places like China, Mexico, Italy, Greece and Nambia to photograph buildings others have built. They’ve found some pretty good ones.

“For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches – and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.” (Roland Barthes)

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Faraday Cage is currently ticking away in the old Power House on Cockatoo Island – the former convict prison and dockyard for shipbuilding in the middle of Sydney Harbour. Following on from his recent experiments with electricity, the new site-specific commission is a clear highlight of the 2010 Biennale of Sydney.

The artist had been working with early William Henry Fox Talbot negatives, buying as many as he could and making his own positive images with them, true to the original techniques. This Photogenic Drawing project then led to the Lightning Fields body of work, where he applies electric charges directly on to film with a 400 000 volt generator. The resulting formations rely on chance and suspend the electric charges in time as still images.

For this ode to Michael Faraday, a pioneer of electromagnetism and electrochemistry, a series of light-box mounted prints from the Lightning Fields series line a staircase where visitors ascend towards a thirteenth-century sculpture of the fierce Raijin, the Japanese God of Thunder. Nestled amongst the beautiful, dusty and redundant machinery the artist had added an apparatus that gives off intermittent volts of electricity, adding an element of shocking sound that makes the silence in between all the more eerie.

Sydneysiders were also fortunate enough to have Sugimono give the Biennale keynote opening address. He spoke about his extensive background as a collector and dealer in Japanese and Asian antiquities as being driven by an unshakable desire to “see with ancient eyes”. He also outlined his recent architectural work for the Izu Photo Museum at the foothills of Mt Fuji in Japan, and his building plans for a theatre space at a nearby mountain. So is he becoming less interested in photography? The performing arts are a natural progression from the medium, he said, theatre is much closer to photography than painting.

Izu Photo Museum opened in October last year at the picturesque foothills of Mt Fuji. Hiroshi Sugimoto designed the understated interiors and gardens using traditional Japanese materials and techniques, and the inaugural show presented his recent work with original prints from Fox Talbot’s earliest negatives, along with his Lightning Fields series of experiments with electricity on film (above). The current exhibition traces the relationships between photography, death and time through vernacular and largely anonymous photos, under the curatorship of historian Geoffrey Batchen (see my review for Frieze here); and the next scheduled show focuses on the work of Japanese contemporary artist Yuki Kimura. So we expect the museum will continue the exploration of photography at thresholds of presence and absence, then and now, life and death.

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“Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it” (Brecht). An earlier series from Lieko Shiga, where she photographed her brother in his boxer shorts learning to play piano, sans piano.

The prolific and perplexing Tatsumi Orimoto first gained recognition for his Bread Man performances where he travelled the world binding his head in baguettes, but more recently he has been developing his ‘Art Mama’ body of work, in collaboration with his Alzheimer’s-suffering octogenarian mother, Odai.

When he was rejected from artschool and discouraged by everyone around him, it was his self-determined mother who relentlessly encouraged his work. Now after a 30-year career he has moved back to Japan to live with and take care of her, and she remains his biggest fan.

Just in time for Mother’s Day, Orimoto is coming to Sydney for a one-off performance of his Oil Can work on May 13. With his unique brand of uncomfortable hilarity, it will see the artist and 15 volunteers standing solemnly in 44-gallon steel drums, everyone in close proximity but disconnected from one another. Want to volouneer to stand in a can? Contact the gallery.

One of the most promising young photographers to rise from the land of the rising sun in recent years, Shiga Lieko presents inexplicable images from a nocturnal, semi-supernatural other world. Her acclaimed series Canary is currently on show in Tokyo for Mori Gallery’s Roppongi Crossing exhibition, displayed on tripods arranged in a perfect circle. As with all her work, the fragmented, highly orchestrated images here show photography to be a as means of distorting reality, rather than documenting it.

­­­­Many fundamental questions about the nature of time remain unanswered. We still don’t really know what its relationship to space is, whether it exists independently of the mind, whether it can stop or move in other directions, or whether there can be other times besides the present moment.

Having explored the temporal through the medium of photography for over three decades, Hiroshi Sugimoto has concluded that time is an exclusively human construct, which no other animal has any sense of.

In 1978 he took a black and white photograph of the sea. With the horizon in the dead centre of the image, it became the first in his ongoing Seascapes series that now includes photographs from all over the world – taken at different times of day and night under varying weather conditions – always with exactly half sky, half water, and nothing else.

At Benesse Museum on the island of Naoshima in the south of Japan, a selection of the achromatic seascapes is on permanent display outside on the terrace, as well as in several surrounding inaccessible cliff faces, one of them just visible from the museum if you know to look for it. The decision to install them amongst the elements like this came from the artist’s desire to let the images fade into nothingness over the years, while the original ocean and horizon they represent will endure right behind them. The image of the sea, says Sugimoto, remains as the most consistent things in the history of vision on our planet.

On the other side of Naoshima, in a bamboo forest on top of a hill, stands Sugimoto’s reworking of an ancient and decrepit Shinto shrine. The staircase of roughly cut pieces of glass represents the threshold of material and immaterial. The steps lead from a modest wooden structure through the ground to a dark, subterranean cave accessible by an extremely narrow passageway with the aid of torchlight.

It takes around five minutes for the eyes to adjust and detect the steps continuing downwards, and on the way out through the tunnel a real life Sugimoto seascape, with half sky and half water, can be seen. To mark the opening of the shrine a traditional Noh theatre production was staged at night by candle light, and in keeping with the time-honoured teachings of the cycles of decay and renewal, the Go’o Shrine will be taken down and rebuilt every 20 years.

The artist has recalled discovering both Zen Buddhism and hallucinogenic drugs upon moving from Japan to California in the 70s, saying both helped the early formation of his practice. It was evidently during a hallucinogenic episode that he had the idea to photograph cinema, by keeping the shutter of his camera open for the duration of a film.

He has since developed his extensive Theatres series with dozens of prolonged exposure photographs from indoor and drive-through cinemas across America. By reducing the moving images to blank white screens he defies duration, makes time stand still, and harks back to the Zen and Shinto ideals of empty space and the infinite possibilities of nothingness.

The series also raises interesting quetions about the relationship between photography and cinema. Film dictates how long we look at things; we can only perceive what the editing permits – but a still image can be looked at for as long or as short as we like. In the words of Roland Barthes, “in the Photograph, something has posed in front of the tiny hole and has remained there forever (that is my feeling); but in cinema, something has passed in front of this same tiny hole: the pose is swept away and denied by the continuous series of images.”

Along with the Seascapes and Theatres, the other ongoing series Sugimoto classifies under his Time Exposed body of work is his Dioramas. Photographing wax figures and recreated scenes from Madame Tussauds and natural history museums, he makes representations of representations that appear more lifelike than their ‘originals’ and are often mistaken as photos of the real thing. The success of the illusion, the artist says, relies on his use of black and white photography. Colour would give away the artifice, but without it people have to use their imaginations and in so doing project more accurate colours into the image.

Hiroshi Sugimoto will be appearing in Sydney this May for the 2010 Biennale, where his recent experiments with electricity on film will be featured in a Shinto shrine structure.

In the 18^th century Benjamin Franklin conducted extensive research into electricity, selling his possessions to fund his work. In 1752 he is said to have attached a key to a kite and flown it in a thunderstorm, proving – at great danger to himself – that lightning is electrical.

Electricity at the time was perceived as a mysterious force that could kill, revive life, or otherwise bend the laws of nature. Luigi Galvani’s experiments with making dead frogs twitch on application of electricity in 1771 led to reports of electrically revitalised human corpses in the medical literature – ideas that Mary Shelly was familiar with when she wrote Frankenstein in 1818. While she didn’t name the electrocution method in the birth of the monster she described the doctor being witness to electricity’s potential when he saw a tree get struck by lightning, and electrical revitalisation of monsters became stock theme in later film adaptations of Frankenstein and the modern horror genre.

In 1831, Michael Faraday established the basis for the electromagnetic field concept, leading to the invention of electric generators and transformers, dramatically improving the quality of human life forever. Interestingly, Willian Fox Talbot – who was a botanist and the inventor of colotype photography – had collaborated with Faraday on several experiments with static electricity and it is by analogy with electrical terms that he named ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ photographic images.

Fox Talbot’s frustration at being unable to draw had led him to construct a ‘drawing machine’. While on holidays at Lake Como (where, incidentally, Mary Shelly had spent time and set part of Frankenstein) he noticed how the Italian sun burned his skin and he began thinking about how light might be able to mark other surfaces.

He discovered the photosensitive properties of silver nitrate, a substance known to change properties when exposed to light, and he began transferring plant shapes directly onto the surface. Then he began putting the paper into a camera obscura, creating negatives which, unlike the daguerreotype (the Polaroid of its day), allowed for multiple prints of each photograph.

In recent years Hiroshi Sugimoto became fascinated with these early Fox Talbot negatives, embarking on a project to buy as many of them as he could and make his own prints with them, true to the original techniques. Appropriately, this Photogenic Drawing project then led to his experiments with electricity for the Lightning Fields body of work (pictured here), made by applying electric charges directly to film with a 400 000 volt generator. The series marks the artist’s desire to return to the inventions of these 18^th and 19^th century scientific pioneers, and to retrace the early relationship between discoveries in photography and electricity.

As part of Sugimoto’s ongoing inquiry into the scientific and philosophical implications of the medium of photography, a Lightning Fields installation is planned for the Biennale of Sydney this May. The director David Elliott announced the project at the program launch last week but as yet no further information has been released.

“No matter how many photographs I take every day, the actual landscape keeps moving faster than what is in my head.” (Takashi Homma)

The Japanese word for “photograph”, shashin, comes from sha (“to reproduce or reflect”) and shin (“truth”). The act of photography, then, implies taking the truth and making a copy of it on a surface.

Gazing at the Contemporary World: Japanese Photography from the 1970s to the Present looks at documentation of Japan’s changing social and geographic landscapes over the last four decades, through the gaze of twenty-three internationally renowned photographers including Nobuyoshi Araki, Shomei Tomatsu, Daido Moriyama and Takashi Homma.

Curated by Rei Masuda (Chief Curator of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), the exhibition is divided into two sections: ‘A Changing Society’, focusing on figures, and ‘Changing Landscapes’, looking at urban, suburban, rural and natural terrains.

Masuda says that it starts in 1968 because that was a year that marked several turning points in Japanese photography. While the student riots were generally shaking things up around the world, the landmark exhibition 100 Years of Photography: History of Photographic Expression in Japan took place, the photography magazine Provoke was founded, and the konpora sashin or ‘contemporary photography’ school emerged with a focus on documenting ordinary or insignificant everyday scenes.

Since ’68 Japan has seen the bubble economy and the effects of its dramatic burst, the rise of a hyper-consumer culture, the information revolution, the devastation of the Kobe earthquake, the exponential increase of population in urban areas and the loss of traditional communities – all of which can be found in these “reproductions of the truth.”

Having traveled to Lithuania, Germany, Uzbekistan, Italy, Egypt, Latvia, Jordan, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, the collection of 76 images will be at Sydney’s Japan Foundation Gallery from 22 February – 4 March.

To call it understatement would be an understatement. The Cosmic Wonder headquarters in Tokyo is a supremely minimalist space in the back streets of Aoyama, where everything is perfect and perfectly placed. While it houses their men’s and women’s lines, they’ve overcome the predicament of cluttered display with a technique of ‘non-display’: putting all items behind the white walls. Said white walls are opened up for visitors who are deemed worthy, and the centre also houses their artworks and flawlessly designed publications. On display until the end of this week are original prints from their Cosmic Wonder Free Press Sunday Edition for the current Light Source collection (see below), featuring photographers Laetitia Benat, Takashi Homma, Henry Roy and Mark Borthwick.

A selection of Cosmic Wonder Light Source and Cosmic Wonder Free Press are available in Australia from Via Alley.

Seasoned in the art of nomadism, Fumiko Imano spent her early childhood in Rio de Janeiro before her family moved back to a small town in Japan. She went on to study art and fashion photography at Central Saint Martin’s and since then has been living between London, Paris and Hitachi.

With two self published titles and a series of exhibitions to her name, she has been gathering a devoted following for her cute and seemingly candid photographic self-portraits, which tie in with all sorts of issues about identity and self image.

Her lo-fi photocollaged ‘twin self portraits’, in particular, continue an ongoing practice amongst female artists who have given representations of split or mirrored selves over the last century.

From Claude Cahun of 1920s Paris, 1960s Yayoi Kusama, Cindy Sherman of the 1990s, Julie Rrap of contemporary Australia or countless other examples, self portraiture has been a particularly important point from which to explore issues of female identity and body politics – and fragmentary or multiple self images have been recurring in this tradition.

I caught up with Fumiko to ask her about the desire to self-duplicate, the nature of photography, the relationships between fashion and art, and how she came to be her own favourite subject …

You have moved around a lot throughout your life, how has that effected your outlook?

I used to live in the memory of past when I was a kid. I just couldn’t forget Rio de Janeiro ‘cause I didn’t like Japan. I think I have huge tendency for missing past life, and that might explain why I was drawn to photography.

Do you identify with being Japanese?

I feel very Japanese if I go to abroad. Probably everybody has that national aspect even when you don’t notice it. Especially with food, I love Japanese green tea, rice and salty food. My body needs them.

Do female artists in Japan have particular difficulties?

Yes. But I guess it’s more hard to be a male artist in Japan ‘cause Japanese men have a huge complex about being male. It is hard to survive self sufficiently … it would be lovely to have a partner or patron for support like Ms. Coco Chanel had.

Your recently put out your second book I Hate Photography [available through Art Tower Mito and NADIFF], was it important for it to be another self-published venture?

I just haven’t met any good publishers interested in my work. So, what do you do? You have to publish yourself, innit? It’s a DIY spirit. With the more recent one I didn’t have any budget so I used b&w photo copy machine to complete the mission. It wasn’t bad, it wasn’t about quality but more about realization. Maybe a statement to people saying “I’m here!”

Do you hate photography?

I used to love photography so much; I was always taking my reflex camera with me, developing in the dark room, dreaming about romanticism in photography too much. I was totally addicted. While studying fashion photography, I had to question ideas about photography and subject, and since that time, I started to hate it. I especially hate to be called “photographer” ‘cause it is so limited, and somehow people imagine all this professional and technical stuff, expensive camera, lighting system, studio, you know? I don’t believe in “photographer” with only technique and expensive camera and fame. I prefer being an artist without heavy guns, so I can do anything!

Are there other artists who have influenced you?

I used to like Juergen Teller, Terry Richardson, and Homma Takashi. I like very flat and simple photography. The most influential photos are my family album photos taken by my parents during their stay in Brazil in the 80’s with a Konica camera, and printed by Kodak: very strong yellow, green red.

What do you think the relationship between fashion and art is?

Both seem unnecessary, but somehow we need them. Sometimes there is no boundary in between, if I’m nude in photo posing, is it art? If I’m wearing clothes posing, is it fashion?

How did you come to be your own favorite subject?

Once upon a time in Amsterdam, I went to a gallery with my student portfolio. The gallery assistant said, “The strongest thing in your portfolio is your self-portrait. You should keep taking photos of your self!” It was a surprise ’cause I only had one self-portrait, but I started taking pictures as a 24 hour model, stylist and photographer. It was suitable for me as I wasn’t good at asking people to collaborate, and I wanted to posses my work completely.

Would the world be a better place with two Fumikos?

Yeah, it looks cheerful two together. It’s such a shame it could only happen in photo or video, not in real life.

[Images copyright Fumiko Imano. 1.Star wars chic twins, Hitachi, 2005. 2.We are here! Hitachi, 2003. 3.In broccoli flowers, Hitachi, 2008. 4.Green bear twins, Tokyo, 2006. 5.Pret a porter?, London, 2001. 6.Charles Anastase & twins, 2004, Paris]