Exhibition dates: 6th February – 11th May, 2025

Curator: Enrique Juncosa

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
Night flight 017
2008
Chromogenic copy
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery
© Sakiko Nomura

 

 

This photographer was unknown to me before starting to assemble this posting.

I love Japanese photography. In Nomura’s photographs I particularly like the “shadowy atmospheres” contained and revealed in her work, the fact that a female has turned the camera lens on the nude male body, and how the artist has combined bodies “with other nighttime views of animals, urban and natural landscapes, airplanes, ships, empty roads, streets, trees, flowers, fireworks, cemeteries, the sea, the sky, weather events, and bedrooms. The photographs are dark, grainy, and even blurry; they depict a world of ambiguous and mysterious, albeit celebratory, shadows.”

The press release puts it more eloquently than ever I could:

“The black and white male nudes, barely illuminated or sometimes silhouetted against nocturnal and shadowy atmospheres, are the best-known pieces in her body of work. The subjects are young and attractive, like the protagonists of Tender Is the Night, the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald that is explicitly referenced in the title, as power and erotic tension in these images are wrapped in an air of tenderness and certain mystery. These portraits (a real challenge to certain taboos and traditional stereotypes in Japanese culture) alternate in the exhibition with images of animals, still lifes, urban landscapes, atmospheric phenomena, lights and shifting reflections, creating a series of fragmented narratives with a cinematic quality, rich with allegorical meanings about the fleetingness of existence.”

Making a lateral connection, the idea of “atmosphere” can be related to the theatrical work (both landscape and portrait) of the German born British photographer Bill Brandt (1904-1983) who in his landscapes “aimed to introduce an atmosphere that connects with the viewer in order to provoke an emotional response from contemplation of the work.”1

“When these landscapes started to include stone constructions such as tombs and crosses Brandt considered that he had achieved his aim: “Thus it was I found atmosphere to be the spell that charged the commonplace with beauty. … I only know it is a combination of elements … which reveals the subject as familiar and yet strange.””1

In his book Literary Britain published in 1951 “an explanation of his somewhat imprecise concept of “atmosphere” can be found: the moment when the different elements that make up the landscape (nature, light, viewpoint, weather conditions) converge in an aesthetic canon rooted in a cultural tradition.”1

Extending this principle we acknowledge in Nomura’s photographs of nudes, animals, still lifes, urban landscapes, atmospheric phenomena, lights and shifting reflections et al an aesthetic canon rooted in the Japanese cultural tradition, photographs so Japanese that they could be no other, so utterly familiar and yet so magnificently strange.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

 

1/ Text from the exhibition Bill Brandt at the Fundación Mapfre, Madrid, June – August, 2021

Many thankx to Fundación MAPFRE for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

 

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
Moonlit Night 015
2023
Chromogenic copy
© Sakiko Nomura
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
Fate in spring 001
2020
Gelatin silver print
© Sakiko Nomura
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
Hotel Pegasus 030
2013
Chromogenic copy
© Sakiko Nomura
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
Black Darkness 061
2008
Gelatin silver print
© Sakiko Nomura
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
Black Darkness 017
2008
Gelatin silver print
© Sakiko Nomura
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
Naked Time 053
1997
Gelatin silver print
© Sakiko Nomura
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
On Love 229
2017
Gelatin silver print
© Sakiko Nomura
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
GO WEST 011
2019
Chromogenic copy
© Sakiko Nomura
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (1967) is one of the most outstanding Japanese photographers of her generation. She worked for 20 years as an assistant to Nobuyoshi Araki and since 1993 has exhibited regularly in Japan and other Asian countries, as well as in Europe and Mexico. This exhibition is her first major retrospective.

The black and white male nudes, barely illuminated or sometimes silhouetted against nocturnal and shadowy atmospheres, are the best-known pieces in her body of work. The subjects are young and attractive, like the protagonists of Tender Is the Night, the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald that is explicitly referenced in the title, as power and erotic tension in these images are wrapped in an air of tenderness and certain mystery. These portraits (a real challenge to certain taboos and traditional stereotypes in Japanese culture) alternate in the exhibition with images of animals, still lifes, urban landscapes, atmospheric phenomena, lights and shifting reflections, creating a series of fragmented narratives with a cinematic quality, rich with allegorical meanings about the fleetingness of existence.

The exhibition also devotes special attention to her photobooks, which constitute a significant part of her career.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
Naked Time 025
1997
Gelatin silver print
© Sakiko Nomura
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
Flower 055
2015
Chromogenic copy
© Sakiko Nomura
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
NUDE/ A ROOM/ FLOWERS 001
2012
Gelatin silver print
© Sakiko Nomura
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture, 1967) is one of the most prominent Japanese photographers of her generation, the first to include a significant number of women. In 1990 Nomura graduated in photography from the University of Kyushu Sangyo (Fukuoka), known for its innovative artistic and cultural programs. Upon completing her studies, she became the assistant of Nobuyoshi Araki, the renowned Japanese photographer, with whom she worked for twenty years. Nomura’s career began in 1993, exhibiting and publishing photobooks. Now numbering close to forty, these publications have always been carefully produced by the artist herself and represent a key aspect of her work. This exhibition constitutes her first retrospective in Europe.

Sakiko Nomura is best known for her dark and nocturnal photographs of male nudes in black and white. She alternates these works with other nighttime views of animals, urban and natural landscapes, airplanes, ships, empty roads, streets, trees, flowers, fireworks, cemeteries, the sea, the sky, weather events, and bedrooms. The photographs are dark, grainy, and even blurry; they depict a world of ambiguous and mysterious, albeit celebratory, shadows. Seen together, these images form temporal narratives that are reminiscent of cinema. Although she also makes portraits of women, as a woman who photographs male nudes, Nomura breaks Japanese stereotypes, taking on feminist perspectives. 

The 1990s are known as the “lost years” in Japan: the economic bubble and the financial crisis of 1989 had stifled the growth of Japanese society. Conversely, photography and art experienced a period of internationalization and change. Museums and galleries opened, while infrastructures surrounding photography were strengthened and both public and private institutions began to collect photographs. Nevertheless, Japanese society, at that time, harbored enormous discrimination against women, which was no different in the world of photography. There were outstanding women photographers, but they were few and far between, and it was difficult for them to abandon anonymity. It was precisely in this context, within a traditional society, that women’s consciousness changed radically, and a true blossoming of new women artists emerged. Nomura was part of this wave and began to pave her way as an important Japanese photographer.

This exhibition presents the works of Sakiko Nomura in thematic categories, which may be specific, such as flowers, nudes, animals, and portraits of a renowned kabuki actor. Likewise, the show features the artist’s photobooks, including Night Flight, and photographs grouped together based on technical characteristics, such as the series Another Black Darkness. Lastly, a selection of photographs produced in Granada during the summer of 2024 that were commissioned by Fundación MAPFRE on the occasion of this exhibition will also be on display.

Night Flight

Night Flight is the title of a photobook produced by Sakiko Nomura in 2008; one of her few publications in color. In this instance, the artist alternates photographs of nude men – who look directly at the camera as they pose on beds in dark hotel rooms and are either smoking or with their lovers – with images of airplanes taking off or landing, out-of-focus night lights, fuming industrial chimneys, and fireworks that acquire obvious erotic undertones. These images appear to be the memories of different sexual encounters and are centered on the moments before or after said encounters, as if ultimately each one were a journey.

The photobook includes a text authored by the filmmaker Tatsushi Omori, in which he recalls posing nude for Nomura ten years earlier, in a dark room with orange light. According to Omori, Nomura places her subjects in a melancholic, chaotic, and seemingly fleeting world of light and shadow, with no precise boundaries, in which the beds are a representation of the sky. Everything is shifty and unstable, conjuring a metaphor of memory as something emotional that is simultaneously precise and inaccurate.

Flowers

Many of the motifs photographed by Sakiko Nomura evoke the intrinsic relationship between life and death. Likewise, the staging of her compositions, the darkness of their atmospheres, and the monotony of tonalities also suggest the coldness of death, as if – despite the artist’s restraint – they were expressing hidden notions of tenderness and intimacy. An example of this can be found in her series of flowers, in which orchids, lilies, roses, chrysanthemums, and other decomposing flowers are placed in vases in the middle of a room; together their form an extension of baroque vanitas and represent allegories of the fleetingness of existence, its beauty being purely transitory.

Three Photobooks

Black Darkness (2008), NUDE / A ROOM / FLOWERS (2012), and Fate in spring (2020) are three of Nomura’s most cherished photobooks, perhaps because they all include photographs that bear the artist’s hallmarks: dark photographs that convey an epic of intimacy.

Black Darkness – a Buddhist term that is related to hell – was jokingly proposed to the artist as a title by the master photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. This book includes images of male nudes, skyscrapers that become visible through the fog, empty bedrooms, flowers, and the seafoam created by crashing waves, all depicted in black and white. The photographs are rather dark, conjuring a variety of dreamlike meanings and ancient emotions.

NUDE / A ROOM / FLOWERS includes a number of photographs in colour and broadens Nomura’s vocabulary with images of trips through different cities – such as Venice, Berlin, Beijing, and Krakow – combined with interiors of hospitals, churches, cemeteries, and a few daytime scenes.

Conversely, in Fate in spring the artist presents pairs of images – which are not necessarily related to one another – that evoke unexpected ideas when combined. 

Another Black Darkness

After participating at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival in 2016, Nomura published her first experimental works utilising the technique of solarisation. These images were printed with glossy black ink on matte black paper under the title Another Black Darkness.

Dark and hermetic at first sight, on this occasion the viewer is forced into contemplating this untitled and undated series. One must make a considerable effort to decipher the content of these images, which is practically hidden. The figures appear as landscapes flickering in distant memories – the silhouette of a naked man laying on a bed, another of a man sitting down and smoking with his back turned to the viewer as a woman exposes her buttocks, a kiss, the outlines of a city, a forest, a car, a flower, and a tree can all be spotted amidst the shadows – akin to images found in the work of Junichiro Tanizaki.

Nudes

Nomura’s male nudes first appear in her 1994 photobook titled Naked Room. She has since produced this type of portrait recurrently in private or semi-private spaces. When she published her book in the 1990s, Japanese society exerted much discrimination towards women, which extended into the world of photography. Then it was common for women to be the protagonists of nudes, exhibiting themselves for the patriarchal gaze. Nomura subverted the norms that had been tacitly accepted for decades by featuring males as her subjects, despite her work being distanced from the cliché of the naked body as a sexual fantasy. Hiroki Kurotaki was the first model to pose nude for her. The artist portrayed him over the course of twenty years, until his death. Through Kurotaki, Nomura conveyed one of her main beliefs regarding the medium: “Photography is taking pictures of nudes, confronting bare existence,” as she pointed out in an interview in 2022.

Miscellaneous

Koshiro Matsumoto X is another individual who Nomura has portrayed for decades. Born into a family of male Kabuki actors – a genre of Japanese theater that originated in Kyoto in the early 17th century – dating back to his great grandfather, Matsumoto began his career as Kintaro Matsumoto at the age of six. Two years later, he changed his name to Somegoro Ichikawa and acquired his current name in 2018 at the age of forty-five, which he inherited from his father and had been previously carried by nine actors in his family. Nomura published My Last Remaining Dream in 2018, documenting the actor’s career through 593 photographs.

In the photobook majestic, published in 2022, Nomura gathers images of tattooed men who are part of the Edo-choyukai association in their yearly pilgrimage to Mount Oyama. Along with these photographs, this room also includes images of animals – which the artist is interested in as symbols of instinct and desire – combined with others that capture the precise moment when sight is about to vanish at dawn and dusk.

Exhibition texts from Fundación MAPFRE

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
Naked Room 006 – Nude / A Room / Flowers #041
1994
Gelatin silver print
© Sakiko Nomura
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

There seems to be no consensus online about the title, which is either Naked Room 006 OR Nude / A Room / Flowers #041

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
majestic 012
2022
Gelatin silver print
© Sakiko Nomura
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
My Last Remaining Dream 460
2018
Gelatin silver print
© Sakiko Nomura
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

 

 

The 1990s are known as “the lost years” in Japan: the financial crisis of 1989 and the bursting of the economic bubble inhibited Japanese society’s growth. Conversely, photography and art experienced a period of change and internationalisation. Museums and galleries opened, while infrastructures surrounding photography were strengthened. Public and private institutions alike began to treasure collections that featured this artform. Nevertheless, Japanese society, at that time, harboured enormous discrimination against women, which was no different in the world of photography. There were outstanding women photographers, but they were few and far between, and it was difficult for them to abandon anonymity. It was precisely in this context that women’s consciousness changed radically, and a true blossoming of new women artists – whose work was often disrespectfully referred to as “girl photographs” – emerged.

Sakiko Nomura (Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture, 1967) was part of this current and began to shape her path as a relevant photographer in her country, with interests that would differentiate her from her contemporaries. Nomura worked as Nobuyoshi Araki’s (Tokyo, 1940) assistant for twenty years, one of the most prominent Japanese photographers. In 1993 she began to exhibit her work frequently in Japan and other Asian nations, as well as in Europe and Mexico. Aside from her images, photobooks make up a large portion of her artistic production, publishing close to forty to this day.

Presented by Fundación MAPFRE, this retrospective borrows its title from the renowned F. Scott-Fitzgerald novel Tender Is the Night, published in 1934. Much like the book, the protagonists that make up the artist’s photographs are young and attractive. Likewise, Nomura’s images also convey the power and tension of erotic desire, albeit with much tenderness.

Portrayed almost exclusively in black and white, in mysterious nighttime settings that are full of shadows, and often grainy or out-of-focus, Nomura’s male nudes, which she is best known for, alternate with images of animals, still lives (particularly flowers), views of cities, hotel room interiors, weather events, lights, and moving reflections, to name a few of the motifs developed by the artist.

As a whole, these images have temporal connotations that are reminiscent of cinema. Scenes that the viewer can infer and are loaded with allegorical meanings, such as the transient nature of things and the fleetingness of time; in other words, the passing of life.

Photographs often serve as a registry of events or people. They refer to a date, or to the place where they were taken; they speak of one or several specific individuals. However, Nomura avoids these inquiries. Thus, a chronological order encompassing all of her works does not exist.

For this reason, most rooms have been organised according to the photographs that make up the artist’s photobooks. In others, works are grouped thematically, with occasional overlaps. The show also features a selection of images produced in Granada during the summer of 2024, commissioned by Fundación MAPFRE on the occasion of this exhibition, along with eighteen photobooks and a film created from three shorter films – HIROKI, FLOWER, and, SEA – directed by Nomura herself.

KEYS

Nudes

Titled Naked Room, Nomura’s first book was published in 1994 and includes a cover featuring the silhouette of a young man’s naked chest. The image is grainy, low in contrast, and out of focus. These are some of the traits that would define the artist’s work from that point onward. Alternatively, the history of nudes in photography suggests that this genre has been geared toward a male perspective and is often produced by male photographers, who use the female body as an object to portray. By focusing on male bodies, Nomura has subverted the rules and has challenged the stereotypes of an entire tradition that is greatly influential in both the West and the Far East, particularly in Japan.

Journey Into the Night

Attracted to darkness as the counterpart of light, Nomura’s photographs feature out-of-focus nighttime scenes, shadows, and dim light, as if the artist were seeking a way out, or the light at the end of a journey. The elements and subjects that she captures seem to appear within the magic brought about by darkness, which the artist occasionally discovers only after the film is developed.

Photobooks

Sakiko Nomura has published close to fourty photobooks throughout her career, which is still far from the 450 published by her mentor, the renowned photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, yet play a key role in Nomura’s work. The artist herself supervises their publication with great care and often finds meaning in her work through this process. Viewed from a different perspective, perhaps it is the audience who discovers their meaning, since her photographs – which are undated and do not include specific references – are not always easy to decipher and require some effort. Viewers must be committed to their role as active subjects.

Information and texts from Fundación MAPFRE

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
Naked Time 052 – Nude / A Room / Flowers #166
1997
Gelatin silver print
© Sakiko Nomura
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

There seems to be no consensus online about the title, which is either Naked Time 052 OR Nude / A Room / Flowers #166

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
Black darkness 072
2008
Gelatin silver print
© Sakiko Nomura
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
Granada
2024
Gelatin silver print
© Sakiko Nomura
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

 

 

Sakiko Nomura (Japanese, b. 1967)
My Last Remaining Dream 578
2018
Gelatin silver print
© Sakiko Nomura
Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery

 

 

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