Out Of The Ordinary / Extraordinary: Japanese Contemporary Photography

Out Of The Ordinary / Extraordinary: Japanese Contemporary Photography

When I first heard that there was to be an exhibition of contemporary Japanese photography staged at the Civic in Barnsley, I felt a mixture of excitement and trepidation. The very prospect of combining my passion for photography with the many intricate facets of modern Japanese culture, of which I gleefully experienced first hand whilst living on Okinawa for three and a half years, was enough to leave me figuratively salivating. However, the words contemporary photography in “fine art” environs were enough to negate that excitement as my experiences with this sort of photography usually left a sour taste in my mouth.

In the past, I have found that photography that falls in the contemporary art genre relies on a certain aesthetic, often bleak, gloomy and unrefined; and is usually tenuous at best conceptually. This is in sharp contrast to my personal preferences towards the glossy, highly polished images used in high-end advertising. To illustrate this point, it might even be worth noting that the only photography book of dozens I own that has gone almost completely unread is “The Photograph As Contemporary Art” by Charlotte Cotton as the tedium of the content, in relation to my tastes, left me largely un-stimulated. 

However, in execution, the exhibition itself proved to be the antithesis to both of my estimated possibilities.

“Out of the Ordinary / Extraordinary: Japanese Contemporary Photography” featured the work of eleven Japanese fine art photographers in an immaculate gallery setting.

Immediately upon entering the gallery, you were drawn to a series of A1 prints on the far wall. At first glimpse, you could have been forgiven for automatically assuming the series “In My Room” by Takano Ryudai was the typical contemporary art fare of which I referred negatively to above. A closer inspection; however, revealed something more intricate. Whilst the portraits portrayed bare posteriors, naked lower bodies with trousers at the ankle and the expected gloomy expressions, these shock tactics soon gave way to what I perceived as what may have possibly been unintentional satire. It quickly became clear that these were actually “fashion” images of a sort. All of the images in the series were photographed on a plain white background with the floor being either wooden boards or laminate. This aesthetic is not one that normally conjures images of Eastern culture. To further add to this, none of the wardrobe on display in the photographs was remotely Japanese in origin. Blue jeans, denim shirts and black stockings and garters, to name a few, all seem to point to the point that these are all Western stylings. I, of course, may be entirely off the mark with this supposition and I may indeed be drawing from my own experiences of a small Japanese prefecture that plays host to no fewer than 50,000 foreign troops, but in my mind’s eye that seems to be the most obvious intent. The ultimate result of this left me with much higher hopes for the rest of the exhibition and I am of the opinion that this particular artist flawlessly achieved an aesthetic similar to that of Terry Richardson’s much lauded and simultaneously, much ridiculed work.

With my prefabricated expectations dissolved, I devoured the rest of the exhibition. It was obvious that the Japan Foundation went to great lengths to choose extremely varied and equally eclectic bodies of work for this exhibition. From a mixed media installation involving the concept of pregnant men by Okada Hiroko, to a much more intimate study of personal objects in Ishiuchi Miyako’s “Mother” to the satirically scathing approach to social commentary in Sawada Tomoko’s series of self-portraits: “Cover” and “OMAI”.

Finally, I feel it’s important to point out a concept much more subtly illustrated in this exhibition. I, personally, find a lot of people either forget or misunderstand the magnitude of the fact that Japan is the only post-apocalyptic society on the planet. Even while living on Okinawa, which is hundreds of miles from Hiroshima and Nagasaki on mainland Japan, it was impossible to escape that this very fact is a very large part of modern Japanese culture. Everything from films, to television, to comics seem to more often than not result in some cataclysmic climax. I fully expected to see this in translation at some point in the exhibition.

Though possibly more conceptually related than literally, Yoneda Tomoko’s three images of a B-52 bomber, miniscule in relation to the sky, returning from a bombing run in Iraq easily conjure, in my mind at least, images of similar sorties in 1945 over mainland Japan.

In the end, this exhibition managed to shatter my preconceptions of contemporary fine art photography as each installation was brimming with conceptual brilliance and technical finesse. If nothing else, it reinforced to me the importance of subtlety in some instances when conveying a message in order to maintain interest in the viewer. It also helped to show that images can have shock factor to garner attention, but then have subtler messages underlying to convey the artists’ true intent.