Recently our gallery hosted a workshop for young photographers and the sight-impaired. The aim was to give people with visual impairments who were interested in photography an opportunity to experience its appeal, while also encouraging young artists to gain new perspectives on their own work through interaction with those less able to see. The participating artists were asked to present their photographs using three-dimensional raised prints; looking back afterward, many of them commented that once robbed of the premise that the “viewers” could see, it was difficult to know how or where to begin to explain so that they would understand. The experience was a powerful reminder that we who are sighted can share and appreciate photography precisely because we understand the principles behind how cameras and photographs work—because we have a collective sense for certain assumptions, such as that lenses are round but the images generated through them rectangular, that things have shadows, that nearer objects appear larger due to the laws of perspective.

The photographers I introduce below, all younger artists born in or around the 1980s, are challenging themselves to break new horizons and pioneer new forms of expression that do not depend on those established principles and premises. Yuki Shimizu accompanies his photographs with lines of text, the both of which combine to build a strange and wondrous picture narrative. The words do not refer to the images, but neither are they totally unrelated. They each stand on their own but at the same time play off one another at just the right balance, synergistically evoking a world all their own.

Kazuo Yoshida, too, seeks to bring about new worlds through photography. At first glance reminiscent of abstract art, the works shown present composite images of the trees, sky, and filtering sunlight as captured from within the dense forests carpeting the foot of Mount Fuji—an area known as a training grounds for the Japanese Self-Defense Forces and also as an infamous magnet for people looking for a place to commit suicide. While nothing in the images mark their point of origin, their fusion gives rise to a realm with a feel unlike any other that might belong to the province of photography, or painting, or both or neither.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to tell what’s even in Naohiro Utagawa’s works. And being able to tell is indeed not the point. Rather, Utagawa invites us to figure ways of using his fragmentary images to derive enjoyment out of photography—it’s as though he’s making a game of it.

Tamaki Saito turns her lens on her relationship with her four-year-old daughter, who is expanding her fledgling sphere day by day and who, as Saito puts it, sometimes says things that make her question who really is the grown-up. The works hint at Saito’s wonder—and slight bewilderment—at her daughter’s rapid growth. The youngster's eyes give Saito a fresh new window onto the world before her; by distilling their relationship into works of photography, Saito moreover seems to be trying to gauge and confirm the distance between herself and her child.

Yumiko Utsu reigns supreme within her own works as the Creator of their universe. In the Out of Ark series, she breathes life into creatures that might have existed had they not unfortunately missed making it onto Noah’s ark. The creatures are born out of knickknacks she picked up on her travels or her days off, along with wrapping paper, magazine cutouts, vegetables and fish from the grocery store, and so on; the glimpses offered of the beings’ surrounding world lend further depth to the story they have to tell.

Among the participants of our recent workshop was a woman in her 60s who recalled having thrown away all her photographs after losing her sight in her 20s. At the workshop, which was her second, she took a camera in hand for the first time in 40-odd years and experienced the images she took through the aid of three-dimensional prints—in this way reconnecting with the joys of photography. She told us that for her upcoming overseas vacation she planned to take along a camera. Like her, the five young artists here have fallen under photography’s spell and are in the midst of voyaging out to new realms that we all have yet to see. One thing is for certain: supposing their works are selected to be featured in our next workshop, the person who has to try to communicate their magic to our less-sighted participants will be in for a formidable but exciting challenge!

Hiroshi Suganuma (Planning Director, Gallery “Guardian Garden”)

(translated by Chikako Imoto)