Kimiko yoshida/tasveer

ken kitano/tasveer
Yuji Obata/Tasveer

Five Japanese photographers explore the grey

areas of reality, says Sonam Joshi.

s a focus for a show of photography,

light is a fairly open-ended theme.
After all, light is photographys one
necessary element whether reacting with
sensitive chemicals layered on metal or
glass plates for the earliest blurry images,
on paper, on celluloid film, or through digital
image sensors. The word photography literally
means light-writing. Yet Hikari (Japanese
for light), Tasveer gallerys new exhibition,
brings a fresh, poetic perspective to the
basics of the medium through the work of five
contemporary photographers, each with his
or her own distinctive lens.
The photographers are not recording
light, but rather using it as a painter might
use his brush, Nathaniel Gaskell, who cocurated the exhibition with photographer
Shiho Kito, told Time Out. Kito and Gaskell
chose images that use light to manipulate,
describe and deceive, playing with the idea
of what light reveals and conceals and skirt-

ing between the real and the imagined.

Conventionally, photographs are thought to
document reality, but the 30 photographs in
Hikari demonstrate how light can be moulded
to create an image that is quite different from
what is in front of the camera, or visible to
the human eye. On the one hand, the camera
can immortalise what is naturally fleeting and
transient. Yuji Obata captures the ephemeral
through his photographs of the intricate geometric shapes of snowflakes in the Homage
to Wilson A Bentley series.
On the other hand, the camera can often
miss or misunderstand what is in front of it.
This comes across in Tokihiro Satos playful
landscape photographs, which are illuminated by what look like electric fairy lights from
a distance, and fireflies up close. They light
the base of a tree in Shirakami, #4, a shed
in the middle of a field in #170, Manji, and
a rocky isthmus at the foreground of a vast
sea in 339, Yura. Although trained as a

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FOB Hikari 002.indd 16-17

[as I used to do] in my girlhood, she said.

Less literally linked to the central theme,
Ken Kitano and Kimiko Yoshidas works fall
within the genre of portrait photography,
which is often a site for manipulating public
identity. Yoshida taps into this transformative potential of photography in her stark
Cindy Sherman-like self-portraits, posed as
famous art historical characters: Picassos
mythological minotaur, the female character
from Vermeers Officer and Laughing Girl
and the Emerald Buddha from the Royal
Grand Palace, Bangkok. Kitanos mysterious,
blurred metaportraits share these social
and political overtones, but evoke the quality of early portraiture. Theres a uniformed
soldier standing at attention in Tiananmen
Square, the face of a Chinese day-labourer,
a burqa-clad woman from a Bangladeshi village. These individual portraits are actually
composed of multiple negatives of different
members of an ethnic, social or religious
group, painstakingly superimposed during
the analogue printing process. They are part
of Kitanos Our Face project, which seeks
to create an icon of a particular community
(as Kitano wrote in the concept note), and

shiho kito/tasveer

Light play

sculptor, Sato told Time Out that he shifted

to photography to explore how he could create non-existent sculptures by lights. Sato
achieves this effect with a large-format camera and a long exposure of up to five hours.
While the shutter is open, he enters the frame
to draw shapes with a torch. What I would
like the viewers to see is this idea of the
missing part in my images, Sato wrote in
an artist statement for the exhibition. I want
them to imagine that something which they
cannot actually see in the picture does exist
by means of showing my own absence.
The luminescent images made by Sato,
the oldest in this group, enter into a lively
dialogue with those of Kito, the youngest.
Satos student at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Kito also uses
long exposure, but with different results. Both
of her series in Hikari were taken during an
exchange semester at the National Institute
of Design, Ahmedabad, but the black-andwhite daylight portraits in Walls and the
night landscapes in Pikari present a striking
contrast. In the first, Kito looks at walls as
a metaphor for interpersonal barriers, hinting at the walled old city in Ahmedabad and
communal tensions after the Gujarat riots of
2002. Pikari, which is Japanese for flashing lights, emerged from Kitos desire to
map the places shed travelled to. I embar
ked on collecting and gazing [at] lights in
England and in India as if I were repeating
star-spotting to find my location and direction

tokihiro sato/tasveer

On thin ice Yuji Obatas Bekkai

Star crossed (Clockwise from top left) Ken Kitanos Metaportrait of 24 soldiers guarding
Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China, Kimiko Yoshidas Painting (Minotaur by Picasso),
Shiho Kitos Untitled (Bogmalo Church, Goa) and Tokihiro Satos Shirakami, #4

which includes metaportraits of over 150

groups from Asia shot since 1999.
Kitanos series is compelling, though its
inclusion illustrates why it can be handy to
have a theme as catch-all as light for a
group exhibition. What is common to all of
these photographers is a playful disregard
for reality the idea that truth isnt necessarily expressed through physically accurate

representation. The photographers in this

exhibition each considertheirmedium much
more openly, Gaskell said. They are not
documenting the world as it is, but rather the
world as it exists through their interjections,
performances, ideas and embellishments.
Hikari: Contemporary Photography from
Japan is at Gallery Art Motif from Fri Aug 10.
See Art.

August 3 16 2012 www.timeoutdelhi.net 17

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