展覧会「Photography? Why?」
Photography? Why?
Concepts, Experiments, Gaps, Illusion, Playfulness & Hyper-Sensation. Humor and possibilities born in a “Perfect” Mastered Digital Era. The greatest japanese contemporary photographers.
I met the five photographers (except Yuki Onodera) in Aix-en-Provence in 2015 when we were invited to exhibit at “Regards Croisés Japon-Provence/Photo Aix 2015” at Galerie Zola de la Cité du Livre. We spent a week together, every day discussing the lighting and hanging in the exhibition space, photography, our own work (from creation, conception and materials to technique and distribution), other people’’s work, the contemporary era, our preoccupations, and ourselves. We are all aged from 40 to 56 years old, albeit belonging to different generations.
Typically, in festivals or exhibitions, people meet and then move on as soon as the event ends, but our meetings and conversations have continued up to the present day. We get together and enjoy speaking with each other as photographers, artists and as people. As Ken Kitano says, artists cannot create alone, but are supported by many people”. Our meetings are like a casual study group, where we inspire each other and think further about photography.
The works of these six artists are representative of my own questioning with regard to photography: Photography? Why? The essential question arising is: what is the potential of photography in today's world, with today's perceptions? It seems to me important that the artist’s’ work be shared with the public, especially in Morocco, where the link with Japan is historically rather tenuous. The two countries remain shrouded in mystery for each other. My aim is to present their work as “potentialities of contemporary photography“, rather than to enclose them within some definition of “Japanese photography“ that would segment them, prejudging their potential and the diversity of their practices.
Their works are extremely different from each other, with the exception of one common aspect: we are faced here with the current context of photography, in the digital age, which can be seen as tending to produce personal, figurative, and technically perfect photographs. Such rapid evolution in photography has not yet sufficiently encouraged exploration of the relationship between conception, theme and exhibition of work during the creative process. Photography has arguably become a support based on the expectations of the viewers, as if it were the artist’’s role to realize the language of photography as expected. This vision would tend to preclude the need of photographers to experiment and to question the relationship between medium and technique, as if the nature of visual perception could be taken for granted.
Nowadays, we largely produce images in what may be termed a dematerialized, “capitalist“ way, without considering the materiality of the works. Many exhibitions are made possible by simply sending a digital file, without any consideration being given to the notion of an original image. This could in a way be seen as a democratization of photography — and yet such an approach amounts to a limitation of the idea of photography and the possibilities of its materiality.
In Japanese photography, we are frequently faced with street snapshots, considered mainstream. These are easy to view, essentially amounting to a representation within the frame (comprising composition and tone), and often sensational. This tradition presents almost no challenges to possibilities in photographic technique. It is a photographic approach that can be said most often to provide the viewer with a description rather than a question. It is moreover an approach that has also been repeated so often that it has become a standardized language.
Since 2011, the 'Fukushima rush hour' has burgeoned, with photographers flocking to shoot Fukushima after the nuclear disaster, seeking to show how tragic it is for people to have lost everything, as if there were only one voice in this context. Such a trend is fine on first viewing, but after repeatedly seeing the same perspective, viewers are left feeling as if looking into an empty nutshell.
The photographers I have chosen to present at the Marrakech festival are independent artists, quite removed from what is commonly recognized as “Japanese photography“, and their way of operating is equally autonomous. Although not part of mainstream “Japanese photography“, they are nonetheless successful. They are now known for their specific approach to photography, through which they continue to question their potentialities and the notions that we hold of them — indeed, such questioning can be seen as the very basis of their work. They do not stop experimenting with their medium.
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2019年 10月14日（月）〜10月19日（土）
