Based on Japanese photographer Mikiko Hara’s recent book Change, this exhibition features twenty of her color photographs spanning over two decades from 1996 to 2009. Hara’s square color snapshots involve no noticeable high drama. Her portraits – men and women, adults, adolescents, and children are often alone hovering in the bay of everydayness: a schoolgirl at a train platform, mother and daughter asleep in a subway car, a middle-aged woman sternly looking off-camera. Although these scenes were shot in Tokyo and its suburbs, the settings and activities have an ambiguous quality, the images evoke emotion and mood through nuanced facial expressions and body language. Hara’s landscapes and still-lifes complement her portraits in an even more nonchalant style. They reflect the artist’s practice of accumulating fleeting moments in daily life.
One of Hara’s technical characteristics is a habit of not using her camera’s viewfinder, partly because the camera she uses was manufactured in the 1930s and does not serve the purpose well mechanically. But she turns this to her advantage by allowing her to casually and boldly approach her subjects with empathy, while avoiding being influenced by a premeditated vision. Hara explains that she tries to grasp “empty” moments in the blink of an eye before they form any meaning. As a result, the people and places in her work seem free from geographical and historical reference. They are somewhere as well as nowhere, they are both at a particular moment and any moment. These paradoxically intriguing images are printed from color negatives made with a classic black-and-white camera originally designed for monochrome films, adding a distinctively soft tonality and texture.
Mikiko Hara, In the Blink of an Eye
September 14 to October 21, 2017
Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery
547 W 27th St
New York, NY 10001
USA
