Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Photography Today 2: Site/Sight

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Photography Today 2: Site/Sight

by John McGee

Yoshihiko Ito, from "Patrone," 1999-2002, gelatin silver print
(Photo: ©Yoshihiko Ito)

In Japan, photography is either a job or a pastime pursued with religious fervor. But Rei Masuda, curator at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, says photography has an image problem. Though there are abundant galleries and a few museums dedicated to the craft, he feels that photography lacks the respect given other media in the Japanese art world. So, in 1998, Masuda started the exhibition series "Photography Today." 

"Site/Sight," the second in the series, shows recent and new work by eight Japanese photographers (three women and five men) ranging in ages from 31 to 51. The title refers to visual experience, as well as the sites of execution (where the photo is taken) and display (where it is shown).

Rika Noguchi, New Island, 2000, 
type C print (Photo: ©Rika Noguchi)

The artists, too, take a conceptual approach. Forget the 1990s-era Hiromix-brand cute-girl genre that crowds bookstores with volumes depicting the weary ingenue. The artists here use landscape to delve into cultural issues, and experiment with photographic processes of time delay, light sensitivity and motion. 

Kunihiko Katsumata uses his camera as a time machine. In four different series, he tracks the effect of the sun's angle on a waterfall at different times of day; the varying weather and atmospheric conditions in one location over the course of a week; the changes in an urban environment (a parking lot before and after resurfacing, or a new office tower before and after occupation); and plays optical tricks with long exposures. 

The staccato movement of figures in Yoshihiko Ito's long, scroll-like black-and-white "Patrone" series recalls Eadweard Muybridge's 19th-century diagrammatic records of human and animal actions. Ito, however, maps the poetry—not the science—of motion. From a static position, he takes successive photos of horse hooves or a funeral procession, then tears the prints into jagged narrow strips that he then pastes next to each other. Time and motion overlap in a deliberately disjointed manner—backgrounds remain fairly continuous but figures reappear in different places. 

Norio Kobayashi studies people moving around his kitchen. He is the only artist to use a digital camera in this show, and the free dynamic of his large color prints is disrupted by a hint of surveillance.

Both Hiroyo Kaneko and Chihiro Minato dig into the political and historical strata of landscapes. Kaneko's photos of banal street scenes around modern-day Nagasaki are interwoven with historic images of post-atomic bomb destruction and close-ups of survivors. Minato's more convincing work uncovers the complex overlap between the Japanese religious past and the US military present in the bases on Okinawa. In one shot, two giant white torii serve as the entrance and exit gates to a military communication station, muddying concepts of the sacred and the forbidden.

Tsukasa Yokozawa, post map, 2000, type C print on acrylic board
(Photo: ©Tsukasa Yokozawa)

Risaku Suzuki revisits Cezanne's well-studied Mont Sainte Victoire in southern France. Within each image, he uses limited depth of field to focus on one tree in a forest or a portion of the rocky cliffs, portraying the gray-green peak as segments and close-ups.

Unconnected pinpoints of yellow tungsten, white fluorescent and red neon warmth piercing an underexposed, seamless black night confirm human presence in Tsukasa Yokozawa's cold and lonely suburban lightscapes. 

Rika Noguchi's photos, "New Land," show the open promise of land reclaimed from the sea near Amsterdam. 

Such conceptual diversity within a narrow theme is refreshing and portends a promising future for Japanese art photography

The Photography Today 2: Site/Sight exhibition was held June-Aug 2002 at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT) in Kitanomaru Koen (Takebashi), Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

©2006-2008 John McGee. All Rights Reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission.