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Hiroh Kikai

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Artists

   Hiroh Kikai (鬼海弘雄, Kikai Hiroo^ ?, born March 18, 1945) is a Japanese
   photographer best known for his monochrome portraits of people in the
   Asakusa area of Tokyo, a project he has pursued for over thirty years.

Early years

   Kikai was born in the village of Daigo (now part of Sagae, Yamagata
   Prefecture) on March 18, 1945 as the seventh and last child (and fifth
   son) of the family. He had a happy childhood, from the age of 11 or so
   preferring to play by himself in the nature that surrounded the
   village. He graduated from high school in 1963 and worked in Yamagata
   for a year, and then went to Hosei University in Tokyo to study
   philosophy. As a student he was keen on the cinema — he particularly
   enjoyed the films of Andrzej Wajda, who would later write essays for
   some of his books, and Satyajit Ray — and has said that he would have
   worked in film production if it did not require him to write, a task he
   has never enjoyed, and money, which he lacked.

   Immediately after his graduation in 1968, Kikai worked as a truck
   driver. A year later he worked in a shipyard. Meanwhile he stayed in
   touch with his philosophy professor from his university days, Sadayoshi
   Fukuda. Fukuda's wide interests extended to writing a regular column
   for the magazine Camera Mainichi; he introduced Kikai to its editor,
   Shōji Yamagishi, who showed him photographs by Diane Arbus that made a
   great impact. Kikai started to take photographs in 1969. At that time
   (when a university graduate could expect to earn ¥40,000 per month), a
   Hasselblad SLR camera normally cost ¥600,000; Kikai heard of an
   opportunity to buy one for ¥320,000 and mentioned this to Fukuda, who
   immediately lent him the money, with no interest, no date for return,
   and no pressure. (The loan was eventually repaid.) This Hasselblad
   500CM, with its 80mm lens, is what Kikai has used for his portraits
   ever since.

Photographic career

   Kikai thought that work on a boat might be photogenic, but, having no
   experience, could not get a job. He eventually got a job on a boat
   fishing for tuna by having an unneeded appendectomy and displaying the
   scar as a guarantee that he would not force the boat into port. He
   worked on the boat in the Pacific from 6 April until 9 November 1972,
   with a stop in Manzanillo (Mexico) for provisions. It was during this
   time that he took his first photographs to be published, in the May
   1973 issue of Camera Mainichi. But Kikai decided that in order to be a
   photographer he needed darkroom skills, and he returned to Tokyo to
   work at Doi Technical Photo (1973–6). In 1973 he won a prize for his
   submission to the 14th exhibition of the Japan Advertising
   Photographers' Association. He became a freelance photographer in 1984,
   a year after his first solo exhibition and the same year as his second.

   Living close to Asakusa (Tokyo), Kikai often went there on his days
   off, taking photographs of visitors. He stepped up his visits in 1985;
   three collections of his portraits have been published so far.

   Kikai's other long-term photographic projects are of working and
   residential neighborhoods in Tokyo, and of people and scenes in India
   and Turkey. All these are black and white. However, his occasional
   diversions have included colour photographs of the Gotō islands and
   even of nudes.

   Unusually in Japan, where photographers tend to join or form groups,
   Kikai has never been in any group, preferring to work by himself. When
   not setting out to take photographs, Kikai does not carry a camera with
   him. He leaves photographing his own family to his wife Noriko, and it
   is she who has the camera if they go on a trip together.

   In the early part of his career, Kikai often had to earn money in other
   ways: in 1980 he briefly worked at an Isuzu plant, in 1982 in a Subaru
   plant.

   Kikai taught for some time at Musashino Art University, but he was
   disappointed by the students' lack of sustained effort and therefore
   quit.

   Kikai has had solo exhibitions in Tokyo and elsewhere in Japan, Kraków,
   and San Francisco; his prints are held by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum
   of Photography and the Centre for Creative Photography ( University of
   Arizona, Tucson).

Asakusa portraits

   Kikai had started his Asakusa series of square, monochrome portraits as
   early as 1973, but after this there was a hiatus until 1985, when he
   realized that an ideal backdrop would be the plain red walls of
   Sensō-ji. At that time, the great majority of his Asakusa portraits
   adopted further constraints: the single subject stands directly in
   front of the camera (originally a Minolta Autocord TLR, later the
   Hasselblad), looking directly at it, and is shown from around the knees
   upwards. He may wait at the temple for four or five hours, hoping to
   see somebody he wants to photograph, and three or four days may pass
   without a single photograph; but he may photograph three people in a
   single day, and he has photographed over six hundred people in this
   way. He believes that to have a plain backdrop and a direct
   confrontation with the subject allows the viewer to see the subject as
   a whole, and as somebody on whom time is marked, without any
   distracting or limiting specificity.

   Though Kikai started to photograph in Asakusa simply because it was
   near where he then lived, he has continued because of the nature of the
   place and its visitors. Once a bustling and fashionable area, Asakusa
   long ago lost this status. If it were as popular and crowded as it was
   before the war, Kikai says, he would go somewhere else.

   Published in 1987, Ecce Homo was the first collection of these
   portraits. It is a large-format book with forty-one portraits made in
   Asakusa in 1985–6. Kikai won the 1988 Newcomer's Award of the
   Photographic Society of Japan and the third Ina Nobuo Award for this
   book.

   In 1995, a number of portraits from the series were shown together with
   the works of eleven other photographers in "Tokyo/City of Photos", a
   major exhibition held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

   Ya-Chimata, published a year later, is a second collection, with 182
   portraits printed on smaller pages.

   Persona (2003) is a collection of 166 portraits made in Asakusa. A few
   are from Kikai's earliest work, but most postdate anything in the
   earlier books. Several of the subjects appear twice or more often, so
   the reader sees the effect of time. The 33×31cm book format is
   unusually large for a photograph collection in Japan, and the plates
   were printed via quadtone. The book won the 23rd Domon Ken Award
   (presented by the Mainichi Newspapers) and 2004 Annual Award of the
   Photographic Society of Japan. A popular edition followed two years
   later.

Portraits of spaces

   Kikai has said that people and scenery are two sides of the same coin.
   When tired of waiting (or of photographing) in Asakusa, he walks as far
   as 20 km looking for urban scenes of interest where he can make
   "portraits of spaces". He generally photographs between 10 a.m. and 3
   p.m., and avoids photographing when people are present as their
   presence would transform the photographs into mere snapshots, easily
   understood; even without people, they are the image or reflection of
   life. Samples from this series have appeared in various magazines from
   at least as early as 1976.

   Tokyo Labyrinth (1999) presents portraits of unpeopled spaces in Tokyo
   (and occasionally the adjacent town of Kawasaki). There are individual
   shopfronts, rows of shops, residential streets, and so forth. Most of
   the buildings are unpretentious. Like the Asakusa series, these
   portraits are monochrome and square, taken via a standard lens on 120
   film. Each photograph is simply captioned with the approximate address
   (in Japanese script) and year. The townscape series continues with work
   for "Tokyo Polka", published in the periodical Sōshi.

India

   Kikai has said that going to India feels like a return to the Yamagata
   of his youth, and a release from life in Tokyo. His photography there
   is much less planned or formal than his portraits of people or places
   in Tokyo: after an early start with colour 120 film, he uses black and
   white 35mm film in India — and has laughingly said that he would use
   35mm in Tokyo if the city were more interesting and didn't make him
   feel unhappy.

   India, a large-format book published in 1992, presents 106 photographs
   taken in India (and to a much lesser extent Bangladesh) over a period
   totalling rather more than a year and ranging from 1982 to 1990. It won
   Kikai the Shashin-no-Kai award.

   Indo ya Gassan ("India and Gassan", 1999) is a collection of essays
   about and photographs of India. Gassan is a mountain in central
   Yamagata Prefecture close to where Kikai was brought up; in his essays,
   Kikai muses on India and compares it with the Yamagata of his youth.

   Shanti (2001) is a collection of photographs that concentrates on
   children, most of which were taken in Allahabad, Benares, Calcutta,
   Puri and Delhi in 2000. It won the Grand Prix of the second Photo City
   Sagamihara Festival.

Malta, Portugal and Turkey

   Kikai was one of thirteen Japanese photographers invited by EU-Japan
   Fest to photograph the twenty-six nations of the European Union; he
   spent twenty-one days in Malta in September 2005 and a short period in
   Portugal in October 2004, travelling widely in both countries. In
   colour, these photographs are a departure from his earlier work. Most
   are more or less candid photographs of people. A collection was
   published as the eighth in a series of fourteen volumes, In-between.

   Kikai has visited Turkey several times; photographs of Turkey have
   appeared in the magazine Asahi Camera.
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