During the conversation, it was interesting that Kawauchi recommended us to flip through her photo book instead of observing each pages carefully. The way she flipped her book as a flip comic book reminded me that the beginning of motion pictures was the continuous pictures of a running horse by Eadweard Muybridge in 1800’s. I wondered whether Kawauchi’s photography had a motion picture-like approach.

I found a wonder of time-related art in this “flipping”. There are lots of mysteries to find out a shape and structure of memory and image in our brains. However, when an artist outputs the image as an artwork, they are expressed as a sequence of images. Kawauchi’s “flipping” images seems like “ a form” of something which was pulled out from memory. This is a reason which makes Kawauchi’s work attractive and mysterious.

Each image from the sequence is not just a still image from a video. We could feel that there was a moment she released the shutter one by one to capture our unstoppable world. The following words of Kawauchi indicates how she is facing to the world with sincerity by photographing.

— I am obsessed with the idea that we all still have a memory from our childhood and live with the past (…) Since it is very difficult to explain the connection between the body and memory, I try to face and assimilate it by producing work while I want to escape from the mystery and fear. It helps me to concentrate on a moment when I photograph. It is a moment I can be free without thinking about the future or past. I might just want to be free from the inescapable stream of time.

Through the procedures of shooting, selecting from the contact sheets, printing and editing, she projects her memory and experience on her photographs. Kawauchi calls this procedure as “tidying up” and it is her ordinary behavior to balance her life. The act of taking photographs might be essential for Kawauchi, and her subjects must be stupendous.

The work she called as “producing” is a series of sequence of post-production. It is a procedure to make her captured images visible like an alchemy. “After I repeat persistent work such as rethinking the composition and reshooting, the answer I was looking for comes to the surface of the picture” Kawauchi said. As she also stated that printing is a work to arouse her sense, a secret of her production is concealed under this depth. At her studio, undifferentiated matters such as timeless memory, reality and photographs are treated equally as materials. This chaos might be a factor of the attraction of Kawauchi’s work.

The photographs which are produced from her methods start to connect the fast-pace sequence. The continuity seems similar to the wonder of human memory. A “memory” is a wonder to make us think whether it is based on reality, whether it is edited by ourselves, whether we created it or imagined it.

Although anybody could take a picture, Kawauchi expresses something bigger in her photographs as she sees this world bigger. In her exhibition, among the images of ordinary landscapes, there are some images which were captured by the astronomical point of view and which indicate eternity. We glimpse the timeless landscape in which we forget time during the sequence of “timeless” landscapes.

“Illuminance, Ametsuchi, Seeing Shadow” at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and “Light and Shadow” at TRAUMARIS were both held in Yebisu and I had a fulfilling experience seeing these two exhibitions. I would like to thank Rinko Kawauchi for giving me a chance to interview her, and Mariko Asabuki and Chie Sumiyoshi for giving me the benefit of their speeches. If you have a chance to hear Kawauchi’s voice in person for some events, I recommend you to participate along with her exhibition. I hope you could take a glimpse of “Iridescence”.

Rinko Kawauchi: Illuminance, Ametsuchi, Seeing Shadow
Date: May 12th – July 16th, 2012
Opening Hours: 10:00 – 18:00 (Thursday & Friday till 20:00)
Closed on Monday
Place: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
Address: Yebisu Garden Place, 1-13-3 Mita, Meguro-ku, Tokyo
Tel: +81 (0)3 3280 0099
https://www.syabi.com

Rinko Kawauchi: Light and Shadow
Date: May 16th – July 1st, 2012
Opening Hours: 16:00 – 24:00 (Sunday 14:00 – 22:00)
Closed on Monday
Place: TRAUMARIS I SPACE
Address: 3F NADiff APART, 1-18-4 Yebisu, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
Tel: +81 (0)3 6408 5522
https://traumaris.jp/space/