I am planning my to publish my lecture in the future, but it will take some time since it will be a part of a larger essay on contemporary Japanese photography. Anyway, below you will find my abstract for the symposium with some images I showed during my talk (in no particular order).

Abstract: Contemporary Japanese Photography and Life Style
Ferdinand Brueggemann, photohistorian, Cologne

Japanese photography underwent some rapid changes during the 1990s. This was a result of external economic and social factors, as well as of developments within the Japanese culture and photography scene.

After the collapse of the so-called “bubble economy” (1989), a phase of recession began that was to last for over a decade. This had a far-reaching influence on the working world and the social structure of Japanese society. For example, it proved impossible to keep one of the main promises made by the Japanese labour market of lifelong employment with a company, and Japanese women began to question their traditionally allocated roles within the hierarchical, male-dominated social structures. As regards the cultural scene, it was primarily contemporary culture, thus to a large degree the photography scene, that was hit by the recession.

Changes were also taking place within the photography scene itself. Whereas the photography of the “Vivo” and “Provoke” era found itself in an area of conflict between Japanese avant-garde culture, the idea of a (frequently critical) documentation of Japanese society and cultural influences from the West, the theoretical field of reference changed in the 1990s.

A new generation of photographers were now active in a new sphere of influence poised between photography as a free artistic medium and the Japanese pop culture. A critical attitude towards society was primarily (although of course not exclusively) abandoned in favour of issues about individual identity and the description of individual lives.

A particularly incisive phenomenon for Japanese photography was the emergence of “girlie photographers”. Almost overnight, the visual medium, which had been dominated by men until the mid 1990s, was discovered by women, and photography advanced to a central medium of self-expression and means of establishing an identity for these young women.

As a result of the economic recession, the financing of free projects became increasingly problematic for photographers in the 1990s. A solution was found in the acceptance of elements of pop culture into photography for example in terms of the form and content of photo books and the medium now began to oscillate even more strongly between free artistic projects and purely commercial assignment work.

Thus photography succeeded in crossing the narrow borders of a comparatively isolated photo scene: photography books by photographers such as Kyoichi Tsuzuki went into high print runs for a primarily young public.
This change and the new developments in photography should be viewed against the background of the “father generation” (Nobuyoshi Araki et al.), using selected examples withphotographers such as Hiromix, Yurie Nagashima, Takashi Homma, Mika Ninagawa, Masafumi Sanai, Kyoichi Tsuzuki and Rinko Kawauchi.

Rinko Kawauchi had her first exhibition at the end 1990s only a few years after a new – not to say the first – generation of women photographer had emerged in Japan. Before the mid 1990s the Japanese photography scene was completely male dominated, but this changed almost over night when the first onna no ko shashinka (girly photographers) entered the scene. Those onna no ko shashinka mostly did a kind of subjective documentary photography influenced by Nan Goldin and Nobuyoshi Araki. These women, amongst them most famous Hiromix and Yurie Nagashima, talked mainly about their own lives. With their spontaneous and direct and dairy like style the young photographers opened a new narrative in the Japanese photography, but soon they reached their own limitations, because of their self centred approach on reality.

The photography I saw in Rinko Kawauchi’s book “Utatane” was different. It is much more open in terms of content and visual grammar. Her photography is more poetic in the way she depicts the (daily) live. It is personal in the way she describes the particular in the normal course of life, but her topics are universal at the same time. Rinko Kawauchi talks about live and death, the senses and the fluidity of reality. And sometimes, like in the book “Cui Cui” which observes the lives of her grandparents over a period of thirteen years, she mixes traditional documentary photography with her more personal and poetic approach on reality.

Rinko Kawauchi’s work focuses on ordinary things and everyday situations. Her photographs attain their specific quality through her use of cropping and choice of perspective as well as the subtle use of natural light in combination with often virtually transparent colours. Rinko Kawauchi works in series, which, in the form of open narratives, combine poetry and emotion with representations of mortality and occasional melancholy.

In the same year, 2003, I visited a small exhibition of Rinko Kawauchi’s in work in an off gallery in Berlin and a year later I saw her presentation at the “Rencontres de la Photography” in Arles where Martin Parr, as the head curator, put Rinko Kawauchi in the centre of the festival. In Arles took the chance for a longer talk with Rinko about her photographic work. 2004 I went to see her exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. In my opinion this was an absolutely superb and persuasive show, with the large walls devoted to her opus magnum “Aila”, with “the eyes, the ears” in small cubicle in the centre and with “Cui Cui” presented as a slide show.

The subject of Rinko Kawauchi’s best-known work “Aila” (which means “family” in Turkish) is the depiction of the essence of life: animals, plants and people are shown in a sequence assembled by free association, which also includes both birth and death. Rinko Kawauchi’s fascination in fleeting beauty, the subjects of creation and destruction, and life and death are communicated in her images. “From the black ocean comes the appearance of light and waves. It helps you imagine birth. I want imagination in the photographs I take. It’s like a prologue. You wonder, ‘What’s going on?’ You feel something is going to happen.” (Rinko Kawauchi)

Since I work with Galerie Priska Pasquer, a gallery which has Japanese photographers in its program, it suggested itself to propose Rinko’s photography to the gallery.

After showing her work at last years Paris Photo fair, upcoming Friday Galerie Priska Pasquer will open an exhibition of Rinko Kawauchi’s photographs, and Martin Parr will do an introductory speech at the vernissage. The exhibition shows mainly works from the series “Aila”, “the eyes, the ears” and “Utatane”.

22 September – 22 December
Private view:
Friday, 22 September 2006,
6pm – 10pm, with an introductory speech by Martin Parr at 8pm

Matinee: Sunday, 1 October 2006, 11am – 4pm,
with a talk by Ferdinand Brueggemann at 12pm:
“Rinko Kawauchi and Contemporary Japanese Photography”

Biographical Summary:
Rinko Kawauchi was born in Shiga in 1972 and became interested in photography while she was studying at Seian Junior College of Art and Design. As is customary with Japanese photographers she began her career as an artist by publishing her work in her own photography books. In the year 2001 she became famous over night in Japan after the simultaneous publication of the three photography books “Hanako” (named after a disabled girl), “Utatane” (siesta) and “Hanabi” (fireworks). In 2002 she received the prestigious “Kimura Idea Award” for two of the books. In 2004 she published “Aila” (family), in 2005 “the eyes, the ears” (a book about the senses) and “Cui Cui” (which observes the lives of her grandparents over a period of thirteen years). Further publications by Rinko Kawauchi, which should be mentioned, are the photography books “Every day as a child” accompanying the film “Nobody Knows” by director Kore-Eda, as well as “No War”, a collaboration with Yoshitomo Nara about Afghanistan and her recently published diary “Rinko Nikki.” To date Rinko Kawauchi has published nine photography books.
[All quotes: Galerie Priska Pasquer]

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Recommended books:
Rinko Kawauchi: “Aila”
Rinko Kawauchi: “Utatane”
Rinko Kawauchi: “Hanabi”
Rinko Kawauchi: “The eyes, the ears”
Rinko Kawauchi: “Cui Cui”
Rinko Kawauchi: “Every day as a child” (photobook to the movie “Nowbody Knows”)
Rinko Kawauchi, Yoshitomo Nara: “no war”, Foil magazine, vol. 1, Jan. 2003

5 Japanese popular idols are asked to take self-portrait. They are given more than 50 films and few days for it. They are asked to take the cameras with them all the time, anywhere they go and anywhere they are. As if the cameras are their boyfriends or undetestable stalkers. The girls are Nao Oikawa, Aki Hoshino, Rei Ito, Kyouko Nakashima and Sora Aoi. Their mission is to keep on popping shutters until they get sick of doing it.[...]

(Later) we asked Sora to take pictures continuously. We were desperate to see more photographs she takes. Sora was kind and curious enough to take photographs with many cameras we provided, such as BabyHolga, Babylon4, Holga and GR. Most of the photographs taken by Sora with those cameras were very interesting. However, her photographs have been completely changed since she started using POLGA. (You know, POLGA is Holga Polaroid holder for Holga.)
[Quote: Hideki Ohmori/ PowerShovelBooks]

[Polgasun short review] Photography became the preferred medium of self-expression for young woman in Japan in the mid-1990s, giving rise to a veritable boom in girl photographers (onna no ko shashinka). For them, the camera represented a tool in their search for identity in a society that still offers women little more than the traditionalroles of mother and housewife or minor employee. The first book by a girl photographer by Yurie Nagashima in 1995 consisted mainly of self-portraits in the form of nude photographs à la Nobuyoshi Araki and Nan Goldin. Since then, the term “self-nude” for this kind of photography by young women has gained common currency in Japan.

Having been given a Polga (Polaroid) camera in the context of a photography project, Aoi Sora also chose the theme of the “self-nude”. The result is the book Aoisora Polgasun (Tokyo, 2005) containing nude self-portraits in both black-and-white and color which play with intimate and lascivious poses. And therein lies the decisive difference to earlier girlphotographers, whose self-nudes were rather timid, reticent, cautious. Not so Aoi Sora, who is a celebrated Japanese nude idol and well-known porn star, accustomed to showing off her body and all its details in public. It would appear that in Polgasun she is trying to swap the wretchedness and banality of the pornography genre for intimacy and authenticity, and, as Mariko Takeuchi a Japanese critic suspects, find a way back into the mainstream of society through this more accepted form of self-presentation.
(Slightly altered version of the review published in:
European Photography, No. 78, Fall/ Winter 2005)

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Recommended book:
Aoi Sora: Polgasun