Untitled- from Rinko's collection The Eyes, The Ears
http://thebeautifullight.blogspot.com/2012/03/eyes-ears.html Eyelashes
Untitled- from Rinko's collection Cui Cui
http://www.rinkokawauchi.com/main/CuiCui_eg.html Swallow
Untitled- from Rinko's collection Cui Cui
http://www.rinkokawauchi.com/main/CuiCui_eg.html Sweetheart
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Rinko Kawauchi was born in Shinga, Japan in 1974. She grew up to study graphic design and photography at Seian University of Art and Design, graduating in 1993. In 2001, after many years of working as a freelance photographer, she released three photobooks filled with her own personal work. She called them Utatane, Hanabi, and Hanoko, and she grew in fame almost instantly. Her work has been shown in London, Paris, Kyoto, Sao Paulo, and many more exhibits around the world has appreciated her work. She is an experimental photographer, taking pictures of things no matter how obscure or small. Her photobooks contain soft-palette, beautiful images that tell subtle story lines. She liked to photograph contrasting symbols in her work, as seen in her latest project “Light and Shadows”. It follows two pigeons, one black and one white, which she says its supposed to symbolize life and death. Its unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, and she wants you to question what’s going on. They are often described as “visual haikus”. As said in an interview, she has expressed that “[She] wants imagination in the photographs [she] takes. It’s like a prologue. You wonder, “What’s going on?” You feel something is going to happen.” She wants you to feel like you’re left on a cliffhanger, that the one photograph captures a single moment and leaves you longing to see what happens next. Much of her work is inspired by Shinto, an ethnic religion based in Japan. In Shinto, it is said that all things have a spirit, which is why she takes pictures of anything and everything. The aesthetic of work work often leaves me admiring everything about her pictures. I love how all her photos have soft color palettes and clean edges, everything seems to fit right in its place. It encourages me to take pictures of the details, of the small things in life, and that they can be the most beautiful to capture. It inspires me to use natural light as mush as possible, inspires me to develop a similar style. I want my work to tell a story, but a cliffhanger. I need to capture photos at the best moment possible, right before the climax of the story. That's where you capture the most emotion. Rinko’s photos versus my own no doubt have a very different emotion coming from them. Her piece from “The Eyes, the Ears” capture something almost entirely different from my own. It captures the space, the empty space between someone’s eyes and what they are looking at. My own piece captures the details of eyelashes and eyes. Her pieces from “Cui Cui” capture normal things in our lives, yet how odd everything can be in the grand scheme of things. They feel odd themselves, they just have a strange vibe coming off of them. My works have generally the same idea, particularly my mouth photo, but the strawberries seem to be relatively normal and more aesthetically pleasing. Personally, I like my photo better than Rinko’s eyelash photo because I like capturing the filled spaces other than the empty ones. My first piece, cleverly called “Eyelashes”, simply capture very closely the details of eyes and everything that is apart of them. I love how distinct the middleground is from the fore and backgrounds, as the eyelashes are the only things that are very clear in the photo. My second piece, “Swallow”, I think is cool to look at because you can’t really see whats inside her mouth, but there is space there regardless (I think it’s cool to see that the focal point of the picture is empty space). My last piece feels almost comforting. The pale light from the morning sun coming from the kitchen window, the sweetness of sugar, the beauty that strawberries posses naturally, it all makes me feel at home. |