Asako Narahashi is a Tokyo-based photographer whose work mainly focuses on the relationship between water and land. The main part of her work is shot from the water offering a different and unexpected viewpoint on the land. Whilst looking at Narahashi’s photographs they bring us the amazement of a reversed vision and the sense of disorientation. Although Narahashi also takes photographs on land parallel to her water photographs, they both resonate a unique sense of distance and instability. These images on the iconic Mount Fuji that she photographed between 2003 and 2013 both from the water and land are a good example of the ambivalent feelings of seasickness and floating comfortably Narahashi’s work evokes with the viewer.
Works from her series Half awake and half asleep in the water, Ever After, Towards the Mountain and Biwako are now shown at Ibasho Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium. Narahashi has made this body of work mainly from the water which has given a very different perspective to the genre of landscape photography. Since beginning the project in 2001, she has photographed over fifty locations worldwide with a Nikonos 35mm waterproof film camera. Narahashi floats chest deep in the ocean while facing back towards the shore, her camera held half-submerged in the water. By watching the waves without using the viewfinder, the artist times her pictures according to the swells of the ocean tide.
Narahashi began exploring photography as an art student and in the mid-1980’s she joined the photography group Photo Session led by the renowned photographer Daido Moriyama. In this period Narahashi solely worked in black-and-white. The nue in Japan is a traditional, mysterious creature. It’s a fictitious animal with a monkey’s head, the body of a racoon, the paws of a tiger and the tail of a snake. Nobody has ever seen it because it’s a figment of the imagination. This is the reason why the word “nue-like” in Japanese is used to talk about someone or something unidentifiable. The spirit of nu-e visible in the landscape of Japan can only be captured through photography, and years after the series began, one can feel strongly the wonder and eeriness of the unique world expressed in Narahashi’s early works.
Martin Parr, another figure of contemporary photography, described in Narahashi’s photobook Half awake and half asleep in the water (published in 2007 by Nazraeli Press, Portland) how “water” and “land” have served as two major elements in the history of landscape photography. In his essay, Parr wrote about Narahashi’s photographs of the water’s edge as follows: “Yet I have never seen these two components put together in such a compelling way.” And, “… this work shows so well photography’s ability to challenge our lazy ways of looking.”
Asako Narahashi, A retrospective
7 September – 15 October 2017
IBASHO Gallery
Tolstraat 67,
20000 Antwerpen
Belgium
