Tamiko Nishimura: Journeys

Alison Bradley Projects is honored to announce Tamiko Nishimura: Journeys, the artist’s debut solo exhibition in the United States, curated by Pauline Vermare and accompanied by a publication with Dashwood Books. On view from April 25th, the exhibition runs until June 8th, with an artist reception on April 25th from 6:00 - 8:00pm.

Tamiko Nishimura (西村多美子, Nishimura Tamiko, born in Tokyo, 1948) graduated from TokyoCollege of Photography (now Tokyo Visual Arts) in 1969. She emerged as part of the vibrant Japanese avant-garde scene in the early 1970s, after one of her college classmates, who was an actor in an avant-garde theater company called Jōkyō Gekijō (“Situation Theater”), invited her to photograph a performance. Nishimura realized then that she was deeply attracted to “what is expressed through the body." Over the years, her work—largely based on her own journeys and experiences in Japan and abroad—conveys both a personal and beautifully theatrical perspective on the world.

Soon after graduating, Nishimura met Daidō Moriyama, Kōji Taki, and Takuma Nakahira, the influential members of Provoke magazine. Between 1969 and 1970, she briefly worked part time at Taki’s office and regularly assisted Moriyama and Nakahira in the darkroom that they shared, while pursuing her own projects during her travels. When Moriyama saw Nishimura’s landscape photographs, he chose to include some of her images in his book Mayfly (1972). Nishimura started experimenting in the darkroom, developing her images at hotter temperatures and with long exposures to heighten image contrast, bringing a profound emotional dimension to her work.

Between performance photography, portraiture, and street photography, Nishimura’s work transcends styles. Early on, she worked in a very personal vein that had yet to come to the forefront of Japanese photography: a genre called shi-shashin (“I-photography”) which became known through Nobuyoshi Araki and Masahisa Fukase’s personal work in the early 1970s. Her series Neko ga ... (Kittenish ... ), first published in Camera Mainichi magazine in August 1970, later published as a book in 2015, includes a series of intimate portraits recounting a night with a childhood friend who had stayed over during a storm, and whom Nishimura felt the urge to photograph, on a whim. Stylistically as well as spiritually, these photographs have the intensity of Francesca Woodman’s self-portraits. Indeed, these sensuous portraits delicately blur the line between the self and the other.

Nishimura photographs in an instinctive and spontaneous way. Her visual language is poetic, spiritual, and deeply personal. While her stylistic approach to image-making, in contrasted black and white, often blurred, or grainy, is close to some of the artists associated with Provoke, her work is imbued with an introspective and haunting quality that evokes a unique and profound emotional dimension. Throughout her long and ongoing career, Nishimura has photographed women with a distinct attentiveness. The closeup of a woman’s face, her hair brushed by the wind; a woman energetically walking down the street with her grocery basket, her head turned away from the camera; the back of two women walking down a street; a girl reading on a sofa with a magazine resting on her knees; or the intimate portraits of her childhood friend... These photographs depicting women in their everyday lives are filled with a knowing and empathetic quality that stands out in the history of Japanese photography.

In 1973, Nishimura published her debut photobook, Shikishima, a masterpiece including photographs taken from 1969 to 1972 on her journeys across various regions of Japan including Hokkaidō, Tōhoku, Hokuriku, Kantō, Kansai, and Chūgoku. As photobook historian Russet Lederman notes, this book—which was republished by Zen Foto Gallery in 2014—is considered today one of the major Japanese photobooks in history. From the 1980s on, Nishimura expanded her travels beyond Japan, to Southeast Asia and Europe, printing and publishing along the way. She describes her career as “a sequence of journeys,” taking immense pleasure in photographing her free, nomadic existence. It is an honor and a joy to present her exquisite work in the United States for the first time.

The exhibition is accompanied by a limited edition exhibition publication, edition of 500 copies, published and distributed by Dashwood Books and in collaboration with Alison Bradley Projects. This publication features full reproductions of all prints in the exhibition, and is designed by Alex Lin of Studio Lin. The gallery is taking pre-orders on this publication.

Tamiko Nishimura: Journeys

TAMIKO NISHIMURA: Journeys

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