Seven Samurai

Artists like Hiroshi Sugimoto, Daido Moriyama or Nuboyoshi Akari are no strangers to no one, in fact these three were the main and only Japanese names in the contemporary art circuit until the early 90´s, they have become beacons and are regarded as the highest incarnations of Japanese art photography. During the last few decades Japan has produced a huge amount of talented artist that the west has come to embrace only recently. Takashi Homma, Rinko Kawauchi or HIROMIX just to name a few, are now well known artist not only in Asia, but in Europe and America.

Due to cultural and linguistic barriers, Japanese photography has historically been hard to digest from a western perspective, but with the geographical and cultural barriers becoming increasingly thinner the art landscape is becoming drastically different.

Unlike other countries that have had specific photographic approaches through history, or even “schools” pushing artist in one way or other, the main appeal of Japanese photography is the wide variety of approaches. A huge spectrum of works from the classic black and white pictorialism to the new digital possibilities of imaging and exploring the new medium can be found in contemporary Japanese photography.

Now a small sample of seven active Japanese artists who I consider to be a vivid example of the rebirth of the photographic medium in the land of the rising sun.

Kenji Hirasawa
Hirasawa is a quite young Japanese photographer who has been based in London since 2008.
In his series “Celebrity” Hirasawa comments on the absurdity of the idolization of celebrities in contemporary culture. The photographs are taken with a thermal camera in the Madame Tussauds wax museum in London. The lack of thermal emissions from the “dead-like” statues opposed to the living people works as a perfect conceptual metaphor for the banality of the idol culture.

Masato Seto
Masato´s Work tends to revolve around what could be called psychology of space. With a strange mixture of Tableu ads documentary photography, the photographs speak in a subtle yet powerful way about the relationship between a given space and the subject´s inner mind.

 

keiko Sasaoka
Through beautiful color landscapes Keiko Sasaoka approaches the idea of time and transitivity. Multiple times and the different speeds that flow through physical places, but cannot be seen with the eye. the immortality of nature opposed to the limited transitivity of human beings.

Maiko Haruki

Maiko Haruki works in a very minimalistic way, highlighting the few elements in her photographs by eliminating all secondary visual information. “More with less.”  In her latest work “View for a Moment” the artist focuses on the futility of time, the ambiguity between the subject’s actions and the act of photographing it.

Tomoko Yoneda
By the usage of two fundamental aspects of photography: observation, and recording, Yoneda creates bodies of work of immense historical and social power. Her work consists mainly on landscapes of places that once held historical or social significance but have now became victims of collective social amnesia.

Toshio Shibata.
Working with a large format camera, much in the way of Robert Adams, Shibata photographs landscapes that have been modified by men. One could describe his photographs as abstract collages made out of sky, grass, metal and concrete. Shibata coming from a background of oil painting and printmaking feels his work is more about esthetic and formal issues than cultural or social critique.

Hiroshi Yamazaki
One of the front runners of the Japanese conceptual photography of the 70´s, Hiroshi Yamazaki prohibited himself the process of selecting an arbitrary subject for his work instead he decided to explore the limits of the medium with what was visible through his window. His most important bodies of work show the sun moving through seascapes, in some ways his work quotes the infamous Sugimoto seascapes.