When I saw her work from “Ametsuchi” and “Seeing Shadow” series, I got a glimpse of the simple fact which she described. When we asked ourselves that what this photographer captured, we would start to trace the simple fact. This photographer just felt this world and photographed it. That’s all. And that is the great fact.

A photograph from the “Ametsuchi” series, 2012. © Rinko Kawauchi

After I saw the whole exhibition, I felt like I passed through a morning and night. The exhibition is filled with the totality which comprises all kind of light and shadow such as morning and night, implicitly and explicitly, and life and death. Kawauchi’s way of capturing time is not a one-way. There is a stream of time which forms a circle and let us feel the path connected from our bodies to nature, and to the universe.

At the exhibition “Light and Shadow”, Kawauchi presents the simple fact in a different way by showing the landscape of the stricken area from the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami. At the beginning, she was not planning to photograph the scenery of the stricken area, but ended up photographing by attending her fellow photographer’s visit to Tohoku. When she visited the area after the disaster, she strongly realized the fact that we were standing on the crustal plate along with unexplainable shock. An author, Mariko Asabuki, who was a guest for the opening conversation, described the feeling of being alive in this big world as “cruel” and “forlorn”.

A photograph from the “Light and Shadow” series. Courtesy of TRAUMARIS SPACE. © Rinko Kawauchi

At the exhibition space, there is a small booth covered with black curtains. The viewers enter the booth one by one and see the slideshow of the landscapes of the stricken area. I could not stop chasing the images of two doves in the slideshow. Kawauchi said that she felt the duality in these black and white doves – for example, black and white, good and bad, light and shadow, man and woman, and beginning and ending.

While I was watching the slideshow in the booth, I felt a slight shock. But the shock I felt was not from the impression. It was more vague sense as I saw something universal.

A photograph from the “Light and Shadow” series. Courtesy of TRAUMARIS SPACE. © Rinko Kawauchi

As Kawauchi stated that she was just tracing this world without an intention of expressing her feelings through photography, she might hold her camera without being limited with her emotion. However, even though the camera is just an inorganic machine or the image is just a reflection of the simple fact, I was shocked that I, as a human-being, tend to have every eye fixed on other living thing. I could not take my eye off from the black and white doves.

The reason I could not call this feeling as an impression was because there was cruelty and the fact that I saw the universal sense of being alive in these two doves, rather than an impression or lyricism. Moreover it was the shock to see miracle that Kawauchi’s camera captured the moment.