A first US solo exhibition surveys the Japanese photographer, often overshadowed by male counterparts she assisted such as Daidō Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira
Few legible faces appear in the grainy black-and-white photographs of Tamiko Nishimura. The subjects in Journeys, her first US solo exhibition – mostly women, captured in quotidian moments – tend to escape the camera’s gaze. Most of them turn away from us. Some are simply silhouettes. The faces we do see are often partitioned, obscured: in Eternal Chase – Hakodate, Hokkaido (1970–72), a cloche hat covers the eyes of a young citywalker; in a garden in Shikishima — Okunakayama, Iwate Pref. (#016) (1972), a mother burrows her nose into her baby’s hair. And then, in other photographs, there are the visages rendered so faintly as to appear spectral: an infant peeking over her mother’s shoulder at the beach; a woman trudging up a snowy hill. Even Nishimura’s most sensual portraits, like those in her 1970 series Kittenish…, contain only closeups of bent knees, splayed thighs, languid hands.
Nishimura, who was born in Tokyo in 1948, is often overshadowed by male counterparts such as Daidō Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira, both of whom she assisted in the darkroom as she began developing her own images at higher temperatures and with longer exposures. The photographs on display in Journeys – largely taken between 1969 and 1978, spanning six series and displayed as gelatin silver prints – typify the subversive style she found through these darkroom experiments: granular and high-contrast; understated, spontaneous and subtly haunting. Her images evoke hazy memories – just barely out of focus, and out of reach. Taken together, her unidentifiable women become half-recalled figures, the particulars of their faces the casualties of time. Yet in simulating the tenuousness of memory, Nishimura firmly immortalises her subjects.
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