LONDON .- One of the most important Japanese photographers working today, Kawauchi has achieved international renown for her intimate and luminous images, capturing ephemeral moments of everyday life.

More than thirty images by the photographer are being shown at the Sony World Photography Awards 2023 exhibition, which returns to Somerset House, London since 14 April to 1 May 2023. The selection, made by the artist, spans over twenty years of her career and highlights significant milestones and themes across some of her most iconic series: Illuminance (2011), AILA (2004), Utatane (2001), and Ametsuchi (2013).

Kawauchi was born in 1972 in Shiga Prefecture, Japan and first began taking photographs at the age of 19. In the early 1990s she worked as a photographer for an advertising agency, before moving to a Tokyo studio to focus on making her own work. She first gained international attention in 2001 after the publication of three photobooks, Utatane, Hanabi, and Hanako. Two of the series went on to win Japan’s most prestigious award for emerging photography, the Kimura Ihei Award.

Kawauchi is influenced by Shinto, which holds that everything has a spirit or energy, called ‘kami’. Accordingly, Kawauchi’s lens is patient and empathetic towards its quotidian subjects: shimmering lights reflected in a mirror, a pair of hands braiding thread together, sunbeams flooding through the canopy of a forest. Her photographs have been compared to haikus, a style of short-form poetry originating from Japan which through its lines often reflects upon a wider meaning or truth. So too, Kawauchi’s spare visual language gives these seemingly small moments a sense of great weight and significance.

Commenting on her acceptance of the award, Rinko Kawauchi says: ‘This award is recognition of my work, and will encourage me in my future activities. The exhibition brings a body of work that not only characterises my practice, but also presents an ambitious series created with a different method and approach. Through my photography, I seek to create works of art that act as a signpost for me to examine more closely the experiences I am living and what I am looking at.’

SONY WORLD PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS

Produced by the World Photography Organisation, the internationally acclaimed Sony World Photography Awards is one of the most important fixtures in the global photographic calendar. Now in its 16th year, the free-to-enter Awards are a global voice for photography and provide a vital insight into contemporary photography today. The Awards additionally recognize the world’s most influential artists working in the medium through the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Awards; previous recipients include Martin Parr, William Eggleston, Candida Hofer, Nadav Kander, Gerhard Steidl, Edward Burtynsky and Graciela Iturbide. Rinko Kawauchi is the 16th recipient of the award which will showcase the works at a prestigious annual exhibition at Somerset House, London. The display will be a substantial mix from her career, including highlight works from her series Utatane (2001), AILA (2004) and Illuminance (2009) – which all exemplify her idiosyncratic style. The exhibition also features work from Ametsuchi (2013), a series originating from a dream in which Kawauchi became fascinated by ‘noyaki (burning field)’, a 1000-year old tradition where farmland is burned before replanting. She has made numerous trips to southern Japan, where, using a large format camera mounted on a tripod she has captured these fires, contemplating the idea of the ritual cleansing of the earth, and her own rebirth.

RINKO KAWAUCHI

Born in 1972 in Shiga Prefecture, Japan, Kawauchi lives and works in Chiba. Kawauchi simultaneously released a series of three photographic books in 2001 – UTATANE, HANABI, and HANAKO, and was awarded the prestigious 27th Kimura Ihei Award the following year. She received the eminent Infinity Award in 2009 in the Arts Category by the International Center of Photography, and in 2012 the 63rd Ministry of Cultural Affairs Newcomer of the Year Award, and the 29th Shashin no Machi Higashigawa Native Japanese Artist Award. Kawauchi’s work has been the focus of several solo exhibitions both in Japan and internationally, including AILA + Cui Cui + the eyes, the ears at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in 2005 and at The Photographers’ Gallery in 2006, Illuminance at Gallery at Hermès, New York, in 2011, Illuminance, Ametsuchi, Seeing Shadow at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in 2012, and Kawauchi: The river embraced me at Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto in 2016. She has also hosted and participated in a multitude of group exhibitions, including the Rencontres d’Arles in 2004, New Documents at the Brighton Photo Biennial in 2010, and the Prix Pictet at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2017. Her solo exhibition M/E recently on view at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery was showcasing the essence of Kawauchi’s oeuvre through work from the past decade combined with never-before-seen images from her archives. M/E, the main subject of the exhibition and inspiration for its title, is a new series Kawauchi began shooting in 2019. The letters stand for “Mother” and “Earth,” combining to form both “Mother Earth” and “Me.” At a glance, the series’ images of Iceland’s volcanoes and ice floes and Hokkaido’s snowy landscapes may seem distant and unrelated to the everyday scenes from the COVID-19 pandemic that accompany them in the series. However, both types of image depict events now taking place on the planet we live on, and Kawauchi’s artistry alerts us to the connection between them. The exhibition invited the viewer to reconsider a range of questions about the workings of human life and our relationship with nature.