Overview

In 2001, Rinko Kawauchi launched her career with the simultaneous publication of three astonishing photobooks--Utatane, Hanabi and Hanako--firmly establishing herself as one of the most innovative newcomers to contemporary photography, not just in Japan, but across the globe. In the years that followed, she published other notable monographs, including Aila (2004), The Eyes, the Ear (2005) and Semear (2007). And now, ten years after her precipitous entry onto the international stage, Aperture has published Illuminance, the latest volume of Kawauchi's work and the first to be published outside of Japan. Kawauchi's photography has frequently been lauded for its nuanced palette and offhand compositional mastery, as well as its ability to incite wonder via careful attention to tiny gestures and the incidental details of her everyday environment. As Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2006, noted, there is always some glimmer of hope and humanity, some sense of wonder at work in the rendering of the intimate and fragile. In Illuminance, Kawauchi continues her exploration of the extraordinary in the mundane, drawn to the fundamental cycles of life and the seemingly inadvertent, fractal-like organization of the natural world into formal patterns. Gorgeously produced as a clothbound volume with Japanese binding, this impressive compilation of previously unpublished images--which garnered Kawauchi a nomination for the Deutsche Boerse Prize--is proof of her unique sensibility and ongoing appeal to lovers of photography.

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9781683951391

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Reviews

Rinko Kawauchi's Illuminance (Aperture) could be the year's most beautiful photo book With Illuminance, Kawauchi clarifies what Chandler calls her spirit of accelerated wonder, summing up her considerable achievement while leaving it marvelously expansive and open-ended.--Vince Aletti Photograph Magazine (09/01/2011) Sensitively designed, Illuminance packs 144 photographs into its 163 French-fold pages. Yet by foregoing individual titles, captions, and page numbers one is left to really look at the images - their uncanny juxtapositions and accumulated connections. The cropped details, emotive over-exposures, and blurred movements actually perform a complex choreography, both in the camera and at the editing stage. For better or worse Japanese photobooks often go without essays to contextualize the work, yet here an appended essay by David Chandler notably cites what Kawauchi has referred to as the constant present to describe the elliptical sense of time permeating her enigmatic oeuvre.--Olivier Krischer ArtAsiaPacific (03/01/2012) Ten years on from her extraordinary first book, Aila, Kawauchi continues her journey into the heightened everyday. That same mix of intimacy and deceptively casual observation holds sway and the end results remain singularly beautiful.--Sean O'Hagan The Guardian (12/13/2011) The work of this Japanese photographer always looks better in book form, where, printed one per page and carefully sequenced, her images-delicate, intimate, reticent but never cryptic-an be absorbed slowly, and her tougher, more jolting photos can better deliver their punch. Illuminance gathers work from the last 15 years: a gangly spider; a hole in a rock, filled with water; a doll-like blossom, washed out by flash; a dead, bloodied deer by the side of the road. The book is cinematic in its steady buildup of images that create a mood, and then break it. This kind of thing is hard to sustain, but just when Kawauchi's approach to the poetic snapshot starts to look familiar, it takes a turn for the weird.--Stephen Maine Art in America (12/28/2011)

Author Information

Rinko Kawauchi studied graphic design and photography at Seian Junior college of Art and Design. Among her awards are the Kimura Ihei Photography Award (2002) and the International Center of Photography Infinity Award in Art (2009). She has had solo exhibitions at Fondation Cartier, Paris; Photographers' Gallery, London; Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art; and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, among other venues. She was one of four artists shortlisted for the 2012 Deutsche Boerse Photography Prize. Kawauchi lives and works in Tokyo.

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