Madrid,
A chest, a low table tray, a lacquer shelf decorated with ground gold may seem striking, squeaky, even vulgar; But let’s do the following experiment: let’s leave the space that surrounds them in a complete darkness, then replace sunlight or electricity with the light of a single oil lamp or a candle and we will immediately see that those striking objects charge depth, sobriety and density .
They are words of Junichiro Tanizaki in The praise of the shadow; Under the thesis of this essay, and its keys to approach Japanese (light) culture, it is feasible to interpret the production of a good part of the photographers of this country. Also that of Sakiko Nomura, whose work can already be seen at the Madrid headquarters of the Mapfre Foundation under the commission of Enrique Juncosa, who now sees his efforts fulfilled because these works were exhibited in Spain.
Assistant for twenty years of Nobuyoshi Araki, a fundamental figure of the Japanese image and member of Provoke, Who was interested in his pain collection, Nomura began to star in samples, especially in his country but also, in 1993, although his creations have had more dissemination through photolibros: so far he has published more than thirty. The first of them, Naked Room (1994), points out what would be fundamental characteristics of his photograph onwards, both in the thematic and in his technique: his models were naked men, who in his words did not seek but found and with whom he established -when they were not known, most common circumstance- a certain relationship of complicity, even though it consists but in sharing the time of taking images; He offered them unfocused, in coarse grain compositions and little contrast. In our time too, but above all thirty years ago, these scenes came to subvert a photographic tradition – both Western as oriental – in which they are the ones who portray female bodies more or less directed, for that reason, to the male look.
Except in few compositions in which the color introduces, almost always surrounded by blackness, the works of this author lead us to the dark; It looks at this as a back of light and its luminosity is always dim: these scenes suggest the search for an exit in which, finally, it is possible to see all the contours. Some details of their photos, in fact, only discover them name after the revealed or even after the publication of the corresponding photobook, whose editions she supervises with care. Although they have a lot of documentary, and are closely linked to the specific moment in which they were captured with all their nuances, they do not date their works or aim context references about them: those details do not distract a spectator from whom an active look at the time to decipher, or start imagining.
The flowering, in the nineties, of this artist’s career coincided with a period of economic crisis in his country and internationalization of his art and strengthening the initiatives linked to the photo, public and private; The moment seemed suitable for the takeoff of her career, but she was nomurad to have more movie: if the women photographers faced more challenges in a culture attached to her traditions, she was traveling far away from those of her contests; I wanted to photograph everything that surrounded her, the beautiful and the sad, life and death, and had the ability to find them close.
The anthology of the Mapfre Foundation, entitled “Tender is the night” in reference to the atmospheres of Scott Fitzgerald (young attractive young people, exaltation at a time of desire and tenderness), brings together a set of enigmatic nudes and never clean in Its execution, lifetry natures, some images of animals, urban views, interior and captures of atmospheric phenomena that, ultimately, attract it for the same reason as the rest of their motives: they represent the fleeting and transitory, a passing of the life that this author has admired in her film capture.
Since it is not possible Fundación, in Granada, a city that had already visited in 2015, by invitation of the García Lorca Center, and in which he has confessed to having thrown his camera hundreds of times.
The assembly, which is completed with the presentation of three shorts directed by herself (Hiroki, Flower and Be) starts with photolibro jobs Night Flight (2008), one of the few of his color: the aforementioned male nudes alternate in intimate attitudes and located in hotel rooms or in their homes with take -off or landscape and snapshots of different forms of living lighting in the dark, from the landing and the take -off of aircraft AA the smoking fires or the industrial chimneys.
To his models – with some of them, such as Hiroki Kurotaki or Kabuki Koshiro Matsumoto actor, he worked for decades – allows them to freely travel through those in -comfortable interiors after shallow previous instructions; Somehow, these photos are the reflection of their comfort both before the camera and in relation to its surroundings. The mystery that surrounds them has to do with their closeness and distance with life and death, as in its floral compositions, in which it introduces, as we said, the color, but in a monotonous way and wrapping it in the dark, suggesting around them another space of intimacy. Like baroque vaits, they symbolize the transitory again.
Other images exposed correspond to photolibros Black Darkness (Conjunction of male nudes, empty bedrooms, skyscrapers in the fog, flowers and waves of the sea, in black and white, always very dark and close to the dreamlike); Nude/ A Room/ Flowerswhere he incorporates some color and normally nocturnal scenes of his trips; either Fate in Springa volume in which he introduced formal changes: he overlapted images not necessarily related to each other to arouse unsuspected connections.
These technical experiments would last through solarization, after their participation in the 2016 Arlés meetings: the content of the fruits of that process becomes even more hermetic and suggestive, being able to derive from the dreams and memories of whom he contemplates (natures, Silhouette cities, individual or couple intimacies); I was clear that, If one does not look for things that cannot be seen, they do not become visible.
Sakiko Nomura. “Tender is the night”
Mapfre Foundation. Recoletos room
Recoletos Paseo, 23
Madrid
From February 6 to May 11, 2025
