Ikko Narahara – Photographs from the 1950s to the 1970s

It’s the first solo exhibiton of Ikko Narahara´s work in Germany and the first time that his vintage prints from the 60s and 70s are on show in a gallery.

Ikko Narahara, born in 1931 in the Fukuoka Prefecture was self taught photographer. The response to his first (one week) solo exhibition in Tokyo’s only photo gallery was so positive that he decided to become a photographer. Soon after he took part in the groundbreaking photography exhibition ‘The Eyes of Ten’ in Tokyo in 1957. Two years later he became one of the co-founders of the legendary photo agency VIVO (in collaboration with Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Kikuji Kawada, and others), which was to be the epicenter for a new generation of Japanese photographers.

In his early work Narahara focused on people who were living in isolation from the everyday world, such as monks in a Trappist monastery or the inmates of a women’s prison. His work aimed at creating a ‘personal document’, he aspired to ‘a process of laying bare the inner form by thoroughly depicting the exterior’ (Ikko Narahara).

Walking a tightrope between description and abstraction, objectivity and a personal narrative, Narahara transcended the journalistic documentary photography then prevalent in Japan. Furthermore, Narahara displayed a particular facility for abstraction and the staging of everyday scenes in strict graphic compositions as in, for example, the series ‘Tokyo, the ‘50s’, which was only to be published in 1996.

The beginning of the 1960s and the 1970s were dominated by long stays abroad. From 1962 to 1965 Ikko Narahara took photographs in France, Spain and Italy. The results are picture essays in which Narahara evokes the ‘old continent’ within a timeless narrative, a fiction in which time has come to a standstill. Accordingly, one of his contemporary books was appropriately titled ‘Where Time Has Stopped’.

Following Ikko Narahara’s return to Japan, his previous confrontation with Europe then led to an increased interest in the particulars of his own culture. Photographic series, such as ‘Zen’ (published in the book ‘Japanesque’) were the consequence, in which the aspect of timelessness was also addressed.

At the beginning of the 1970s Ikko Narahara went to the USA. This was the location of his best-known series ‘Where Time Has Vanished’. During extensive trips across the country he photographed the mythic sites of the American Dream, vast landscapes, Indian reservations, automobiles, motels and casinos. In contrast to his fellow photographers Gary Winogrand and Robert Adams, Narahara did not take a critical approach to the American scene. Ikko Narahara’s photography is primarily poetic with surreal elements, such as the shot “Two garbage cans, Indian Village, New Mexico” in which Narahara found the fantastic and absurd in small-town America.

Time coming to a standstill is no longer the subject here, but rather the disappearance of time within a mythic space: ‘As I drove across the land in Arizona and Utah and New Mexico, I began to have hallucinations that this was not the earth at all and that I had been thrown onto some other planet’ (Ikko Narahara).

In 1974, his final year in New York, Ikko Narahara took part in the first exhibition of ‘New Japanese Photography’ at the Museum of Modern Art. Since then his work has been shown in countless exhibitions, amongst others: ‘Japan: A Self-Portrait’, ICP, New York 1979; ‘Ikko Narahara. Photographies 1954-2000′, Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris 2002 and ‘The History of Japanese Photography’, Houston 2004.
[Quotes: Galerie Priska Pasquer]

Ikko Narahara, selected publications:

• Where Time Has Stopped. Tokyo 1967
• Espana Grand Tarde. Japan 1969
• Japanesque. Tokyo 1970
• Celebration of Life. Tokyo 1972
• Where Time Has Vanished. Tokyo 1975
• Domains (Ôkoku). Tokyo 1978
• Venice – Nightscapes. Tokyo 1985
• Human Land. Tokyo 1987
• Tokyo, the ‘50s. Tokyo 1996
• Stateless Land – 1954. Tokyo 2004

Part II    (Part I of the interview here)

Ferdinand Brueggemann:
Speaking of institutions and the galleries I would like to ask about Rinko Kawauchi. She is highly successful in the West, with many solo shows in Europe, in the USA and even in Latin America, but so far she has had only one solo exhibition in a Japanese museum, and that was in the countryside a long way out of Tokyo. Do you have an explanation for this gap?

Mariko Takeuchi:
Perhaps it is not appropriate to judge an artist’s success only by his or her solo exhibitions in Japanese museums. Nevertheless it is still not easy for Japanese photographers to be recognized and promoted by Japanese museums. For example, Yutaka Takanashi, who played a leading from around Provoke Era at the end of the 1960s will have his first museum-scale solo exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo next January. As you know, even though there are several museums which collect and exhibit photographs, it is still not easy for a photographer to get a solo show in a museum. In spite of that, Rinko Kawauchi, for example, is amazingly successful in Japan. Her photobooks are very popular. The common way to success for photographers in Japan is to first publish a photobook.

Talking about photobooks I would like to come back to the John Szarkowski’s show in 1974. In the exhibiton catalogue Shoji Yamagishi, the Japanese co-curator, made the very important observation that the photobook is the most important tool for Japanese photographers to communicate their work. He gave three reasons for this: the aesthetics of the book, the shortage of exhibition venues and a non-existing art market: “Japanese photographers have only a limited opportunity to present their original prints to the public and no opportunity to sell their pictures to public or private collections. [...] Japanese photographers usually complete a project in book form…”

Is Yamagishi’s observation that the photobook is the most important medium for a photographer still valid?

Yes! Even though the situation has changed with more galleries and museums which encourage young photographers to exhibit their works and to become more aware of how to install their works on the wall, it is still clear that the photobook is the most important medium for most Japanese photographers. Many photographers consider the book as being the final format of their projects.

There are several reasons for this. The main reason is that books and magazines have been central to the photography scene for decades while the market was and is still very weak in Japan. If photographers wanted to show their works, they had no other means than to publish them in the magazines or in book form. In this situation, many Japanese photographers naturally became keen on the reproductive nature of photography. The downside of the precedence of photobooks is that most artists have to publish them at their own expense. And also, historically speaking, in the Edo Era (1603 to 1868) woodblock prints of Ukiyo-e were highly popular with the public. This might not be related directly to photobooks, but there seems to be some historical parallel with the popularity of photobooks in Japan.

As you said, the number of galleries has increased and a quick look at the art guide Tokyo Art Beat confirms this; it lists 101 photography exhibitions open today, that’s a remarkable number. But why do galleries in Japan still only of minor importance in the career of a Japanese photographer?

It is true, that it’s not normal for most Japanese photographers to start their career with gallery exhibitions. There are many talented photographers who are not represented by a gallery in Japan. The main reason is that Japan has its own peculiar gallery system. There are many galleries, but most of them are rental galleries; they are rented by artists to show their works and do not work continuously with artists. There are company-managed galleries such as Nikon Salon or Canon Salon which are non-commercial galleries open to both professional and amateur photographers, and while the number of commercial galleries which operate similar to European or American galleries is increasing they are still not yet dominant in Japan.

You could please name some very recent photography books you find interesting?
Masafumi Sanai recently started his own label Taisho (Contrast) and he publishes what he really wants to show in his own way. This summer he published Trouble In Mind. Other must-see books are for example Canary by Lieko Shiga and I am by Atsushi Okada.

As a guest curator for the Paris Photo fair, I find it very important to have introduced these and other photographers outside Japan. Since many of the photographers are not represented by galleries and since the book is their main medium, we invited five Japanese publishers for the central exhibition at Paris Photo to present their programme.

How does a young unknown photographer find a book publisher?

Many photographers send their photographs to magazines. They show their works to small publishers, such as Sokyusha or Akaaka, though it isn’t easy to find a publisher nor for the publishers to finance a book .

Do awards like Hitotsuboten (“3.3 sqm”, the size of the space given to each photographer at the award exhibition) and New Cosmos of Photography promote the career of a Japanese photographer?

Yes, since the early 90s these two awards for young photographers have become important in photography scene in Japan. On the basis of the social, cultural, technical and institutional background as we have talked discussed, young people find these awards exciting and many young people enter the competitions. Winning an award does not guarantee success in a country with such a small art market. Actually, I have seen many young photographers who have won the prize who did not succeed afterwards, but there have been some very successful photographers who achieved recognition through these awards such as Yuki Onodera, Rika Noguchi and Tomoko Sawada.

These awards are important for another reason. Since the early 1990s they have provided a space where the young generation can see works by their peers and where they can communicate with each other. Hitotsuboten for example throws the final selection meeting open to the public, with artists’ presentations and discussion among judges in front of the audience. New Cosmos of Photography has award exhibitions and offers lectures. This did not happen before these awards were established.

Does this communication space apply to the photobook as well? And are the photobooks only of interest for the photography scene insiders, like in Germany, where you will find photobooks only in specialized book stores?

Generally speaking, photobooks as artist’s books are not available in many bookstores, other than a few popular ones like Umeme by Kayo Ume.

Could you please explain about Kayo Ume’s book Umeme?

The book by Kayo Ume describes witty or slightly perfidious moments that you come across by chance in ordinary life. Over 100.000 copies have been sold. To understand why Kayo Ume’s book is so amazingly popular, we have to be aware of the amateur photo culture in Japan. We have such a huge number of older and younger amateur photographers. Ume’s humorous and slightly ironic work embodies the most popular aspect of Japan’s photo culture in her visual style and her motifs. For the audience Umeme is not seen as art, but rather as something to share and to enjoy. There’s a certain amateurish aspect to Japanese photo culture.

We have talked about how young photographers became attracted to the medium. How important is in this context the role of art academies and photo colleges?

There are no specific schools or colleges which are recognized in Japan as offering an outstanding education. On the contrary, many photography schools and colleges have recently been facing a fall in student numbers. One reason is the drop in population due to the low birth rate. But in fact there are more and more young people who are interested in photography. The recent technical developments and the popularity of the medium encourage increasing numbers of young people to work with photography more freely than ever. Some who want to become photographers do not deem it necessary to attend a photography college or a university. Others cannot find an appropriate school which meets their demands. Often the schools focus too much on teaching the technical side of photography and do not pay much attention to the intellectual and cultural potential of the photographic medium. In my opinion it is important for the future of Japanese photography that photography education be reformed. This is the reason why I am currently spending six months as a research fellow in New York. I am researching photography education in the USA with a view to developing a new approach to teaching photography in Japan; an approach which includes the appreciative aspect in photography education: how to look at and discuss photographs on different levels. The Japanese are said to be not very good at debate in general, but I think we should make more efforts to develop dialogue and discussion around photography at the photography colleges and universities in Japan. I’m sure it’s important for photographers, curators and everyone living in this visual society.

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Born in 1972, Tokyo, Mariko Takeuchi has curated exhibitions including “Charles Fréger: Rikishi (Art Gallery of Yokohama Museum; A.R.T. Tokyo, 2005). She has written numerous texts for catalogues and photography books including “Ryudai Takano: 1936-1996” (Sokyu-sha, 2006) and “Ryuichiro Suzuki: Odyssey” (Heibonsha, 2007). She is a regular contributor and photography critic for various magazines such as Asahi Camera and Studio Voice. She is also in charge of the Japanese photography section and writing for “The Oxford Companion to Photograph” (Oxford Univ. Press, 2005). She is Associate Professor at the Kyoto University of Art and Design.

The 2008 edition of Paris Photo – one of the world’s most important fairs for still photography – took place in the Carrousel du Louvre in mid-November. This year Japan was Guest of Honour, an exceptional opportunity to present an overview of Japanese photography. Photography has been a major feature of Japanese culture since its introduction in 1848, attracting wide international attention in the 1990s and growing world interest ever since.

We asked Ferdinand Brueggemann, Director of Galerie Priska Pasquer in Cologne and passionate founder of the photo blog Japan-Photo.info to discuss the current state of Japanese photography with the Guest Curator of the show, Mariko Takeuchi.

Ferdinand Brueggemann:
After decades of practically ignoring Japanese photography, why do you think the Western art world is suddenly developing a strong interest in learning about it?

Mariko Takeuchi:
I don’t think that it happens so sudden. It seems that the interest in Japanese photography in the Western countries grew in the 1990s especially, with a focus on individual artists like Nobuyoshi Araki, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Daido Moriyama. Then curators, collectors and researchers gradually became aware of the richness of Japanese photography and turned more attention to their background – this seems to coincide with the growing interest in the Japanese culture and subculture in general. The exhibition “History of Japanese Photography” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 2003 was on a monumental event. And now we have the Paris Photo fair with Japan as guest of honor at the Paris Photo fair.

But the 1970s saw two major exhibitions on Japanese photography; in 1974 “New Japanese Photography” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski and Shoji Yamagishi, then “Japan: A Self-Portait” at the International Center of Photography in 1979. These two exhibitions, taken together, introduced virtually every leading Japanese photographer of that time. Nonetheless these seminal exhibitions did not have any impact on the Western photography scene.

I wouldn’t say that there was no impact. But it’s true to some extent. Perhaps these exhibitions were too early; both were ahead of their time for two reasons:

When we think about the success of Japanese photography in the West since the 1990s, we have to be aware of the cultural and historical context. In the 1970s very few people knew about Japanese culture. People were not ready and there were still very few galleries and museums seriously devoted to photography, and research and educations on photography were still in their infancy.

I would say that in a sense the Western photography culture had to become more mature to accept Japanese photography.

It’s also very interesting that the huge interest in Japanese photography now coincides with a radical change of photographic medium, mainly due to the development of digital technology since one of the characteristics of the modern and contemporary Japanese photography is, in my opinion, that it often questions the nature of photography itself.

Do you think that the Japanese photography has a different character to Western photography, especially compared to main trends in the US and in Europe over the last two or three decades?

I do not think that Japanese photography in general has a defined characteristic or a certain style which distinguishes it from Western photography. Rather I would say that Japanese photography has an amazing diversity. Japanese photography is not easy to understand by examing style. This is partly because there is neither a strong art market nor there are schools who push a style or trend like in Western countries. For one thing, photography is, unlike other art forms, difficult to explain in terms of a particular style or other. Japanese photography has also had a close relationship with the development of domestic camera companies like Nikon or Canon. This has lead in general to a strong interest in the technology of the medium rather than producing art. These conditions encouraged Japanese photographers to develop the potentialities of photography in various ways.

In the “New Japanese Photography” exhibition catalogue John Szarkowski gave a definition of Japanese photography of the end 1960s and early 1970s which is probably the most quoted definition to this day. He wrote that the “quality most central to recent Japanese photography is its concern for the description of immediate experience” [emphasis added] and that many pictures are not a comment on experience, but “an apparent surrogate for experience itself”.

I still see this quality of immediate experience today in the works of certain photographers like in the claustrophobic street scenes by Osamu Kanemura or the poetic color photographs by Rinko Kawauchi and Mikiko Hara.

“Immediate experience” remains a valid characterization and you are right that it applies to artists like Rinko Kawauchi and Mikiko Hara. But at the same time we have Naoya Hatakeyama whose work is an intellectual exploration while Yuki Onodera’s and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s works are more about imagination or imaginary. And we also have artists like Ken Kitano or Tomoko Sawada whose work is more about the manipulative reflection on identity.

The photographers you mentioned have very diverse different concepts and topics, can you identify any major trends in the current Japanese photography?

I do not think that pointing out major trends would make much sense here because it seems too easy for me. I would like to say that there are many photographers in Japan whose works shift some borders or boundaries at a social or mental level in various ways. Ryudai Takano, for example, deals with the ambiguity of sexuality and Ken Kitano reflects the relationship between ‘me’ and ‘us’ by overlapping portrais of members of a specific group. In the context of photography being a tool for to reflect our society and our life, Asako Narahashi’s series “half awake and half asleep in the water” is in some ways symbolic. Her work, made by floating in the sea with a camera, gives the impression that we are looking at our world from the outside, shaking the reality and stability we take for granted in everyday life.

We have named several women artists already like Rinko Kawauchi, Tomoko Sawada and Asako Narahashi. But if you look back in the history of Japanese Photography there have been almost no female photographers until the mid-1990s. Only a few earlier women artist come to my mind like Miyako Ishiuchi and Michiko Kon. This seems to have changed completely; today I have the impression that Japanese women photographers are overtaking their male colleagues in numbers and in the levels of their success.

When we talk about women photographers, we should be aware of the socio-economic context of Japanese society. From around the late 1980s the consciousness of women’s social rights grew much stronger than ever, especially with the revision of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law of 1985 which encouraged many women to search for new roles in society besides being housewifes and working only in low-paid jobs. The young generation of women grew up with the new ideas about their roles in society. And we should also think about the technical background. The development of easier-to-use cameras was a huge step which made it much easier for non-professional photographers to produce better images. Being freed from necessity of concentrating on the technical side of photography has appealed very much to young women in since the 1990s. And there is also an institutional reason: museums, galleries and photography award exhibitions like Hitotsuboten or New Cosmos of Photography became very popular among young people. All of this together led to a boom in female photography.

Could you explain how the institutions and awards gave a boost to women photography?

Before the museums and galleries emerged in the 1980s and 1990s the main tools for the promotion of photography were the traditional Japanese photo magazines like Asahi Camera or Camera Mainichi which were key to the Japanese photography scene for decades. These magazines were macho places, I would say. Compared to them, the new institutions and awards are more open to female photographers.

Part II of the interview

Some time ago I became director of Galerie Priska Pasquer, Cologne, were I am responsible for the program of Japanese photography. Already in the years before we had some solo shows with Japanese artists at the gallery: Iwao Yamawaki (Modern photography), Eikoh Hosoe (his first solo show in Germany), Daido Moriyama and Rinko Kawauchi. In the beginning we did not receive much response, but this changed very much in the recent years, because Western curators and private collectors alike became more and more aware of the history of Japanese photography and of the quality of the works coming from Japan.

In the last 12 month our gallery intensified the program in regard to Japanese photography with a series of shows: Rinko Kawauchi “Utatane” produced by our partner Antoine de Vilmorin in Paris; the group show ‘Review / Preview: Japanese photographs by Osamu Shiihara, Shomei Tomatsu, Daido Moriyama, Nobuyoshi Araki, Issei Suda, Asako Narahashi, Rinko Kawauchi and Mika Ninagawa; a solo show with Asako Narahashi’s great series “half awake and half asleep in the water”; the first solo show since many years in the West of Issei Suda’s in my opinion still undervalued photographs and lastly the overwhelmingly colorful works by Mika Ninagawa.

In general 2008 was truly a marvelous year for Japanese photography, with exhibitions like Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan at the International Center of Photography (ICP)1, with artists like Hiroh Kikai, – a year which finally culminated in the fair Paris Paris 2008 with Japan as guest of honor. Never before so many Japanese photo galleries exhibited outside their home country and I presume that the number of works exhibited at the fair set a new record outside Japan as well.

We had an exciting time at the Paris Photo fair with the presentation of our Japanese program and during the fair I had the pleasure to participate in a conference on Japanese photography together with Etsurô Ishihara, founder of Zeit Foto Salon (Tokyo) and Anne Wilkes Tucker, curator for photography, Houston Museum of Fine Arts and author of  The History of Japanese Photography. The talk was moderated by Mariko Takeuchi, guest curator of Paris Photo, who by the way wrote a very good essay on “Photography in Japan” on occasion of the fair.

Besides doing shows and art fairs I published some articles on Japanese photography: On contemporary Japanese photography books (Experiment und Spiel. Anmerkungen zu japanischen Fotobüchern der Gegenwart) for a special edition on photo books by the German magazine Photonews (on request available at Schaden.com). I did an interview for Foam magazine (#17) with the Mariko Takeuchi on contemporary Japanese photography and last month I published an essay on Issei Suda in Photonews (issue Feb. 09, in German language). In addition to the conference at Paris Photo I did some other talks on Japanese photography, most interesting and funny was a talk for journalists with Nobuyoshi Araki at the opening of the Araki’s “Kinbaku” exhibition at Jablonka Galerie, Berlin.

Looking back at the last decade it is really amazing how differently Japanese photography is regarded today. I still remember well the situation when I went to Japan as research fellow on Modern Japanese photography. At the end of the 1990s only a fraction of today’s English sources on Japanese photography were available and the history of Japanese photography was almost completely unknown outside Japan. At that time I had to spent months in museum archives and libraries for to learn the basics about the Japanese photography of the 1920s and early 1930s. And as I wrote before this was the time when I came in contact with more recent Japanese photography. But during my lengthy stay in Japan and even 5-6 years later when I started this blog I did not anticipate at all that I would be involved in so many exhibitions on Japanese artists…

PS: I have just added a page with my writings and lectures on Japanese photography.

I know I wrote a few times about Rinko Kawauchi – with whom I had a very pleasant dinner in Tokyo a few weeks ago -, but since this is the first time that her famous series “Utatane” from 2001 is exhibited in a solo show outside Japan, I thought it is worth to mention it.

Rinko Kawauchi “Uatane”, at Art77, presented by Antoine de Vilmorin (until May 3).

As far as I know there has not been much written about the series and book “Utatane” (in contrary to “Aila”)  and which has lead to Rinko’s national and international breakthrough. For “Utatane” (and for her book “Hanabi” [Fireworks]) the artist received the prestigious Kimura Ihei Award and the book was included in the “The Photobook: A History. Vol. 2″ by Parr and Badger. Badger wrote a very interesting comment on Rinko and “Utatane” in the photobook anthology:

Just when it seems that everything has been photographed, in every possible way, along comes a photographer, whose work is so original that the medium is renewed. Such a photographer is Rinko Kawauchi, who makes simple, lyrical pictures, so fresh and unusual that they are difficult to describe or classify.

Her images documentary everyday things, yet could not be described as documentary. They are generally light in tone, yet somehow dark in mood. They are almost hallucinatory, yet seem to capture something fundamental about the psychological mood of modern life.

To be sure, Utatane, the title of her book, means ’siesta’, which brings in the notion of a dreamlike state, and each image in the book could plausibly be considered as a still from a movie about a dream. The presence of a number of animals – insects, seagulls, koi carp, rabbits – might suggest some kind of Freudian interpretation.

If Kawauchi in conjuring up a dreamlike state, she is also creating a powerful metaphor for life in the contemporary metropolis, which, at least economically, is comfortable for most people, on the surface. The dream evoked in Uatatane is not nightmarish. Nothing much untoward happens, yet there is enough off-kilter to awaken us from our nap feeling vaguely confused, depressed and anxious.
[Quotes: Gerry Badger]

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Recommended books:
Rinko Kawauchi: Utatane (2001)
Martin Parr, Gerry Badger: The Photobook: A History. Vol. II