Coming Closer and Getting Further Away

I first came across the photography of Asako Narahashi through the book Heavy Light and then again of her exhibition Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water,  Narahashi's photographs are a heady evocation of disorientation, that  question our sense of proximity and balance in a spatial perspective, in them Narahashi would wade out into the sea and then turn her back and would photograph from the perspective of the sea looking back inland. Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water, Nazraeli Press is a book that I've still not managed to get a copy, but I've kept an eye out for other publications featuring her work, a recent publication is Coming Closer and Getting Further Away a booklet size collection which features a selection of photographs from the exhibition, Asako Narahashi 2009/1989: Coming Closer and Getting Further Away, Tokyo Art Museum, 2009, the text is in Japanese and English and comes with an additionally essay on Asako Narahashi entitled The Form of Water by art critic Shino Kuraishi, (translated by Franz K. Prichard), in which he traces Narahashi's photographs through her previous exhibitions and the books NU-E (1997), Funiculi Funicula, (2003) and also Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water. Kuraishi explores the concept of nue in Narahashi's photography, here the term nue is derived from describing the mythical creature but is also used to represent the sense of an un-identifiable person or an ambiguous indeterminate attitude. The booklet contains some photographs of the exhibition by Takashi Yasumura and also thumbnail images of all the photographs exhibited as well as full page selections of the photographs, which include construction shots of skyscrapers and express ways from Dubai and also photographs similar to those seen in Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water taken in Jindo in South Korea.


For more information and images please check out the publisher's page.


The booklet is published by Osiris an imprint based in Shibuya in Tokyo who publish an interesting selection of books on photography, often in dual text editions, including; Nakahira Takuma's 1970 book For a Language to Come and Kanemura Osamu's My Name is Shockhammer and also a DVD collection of poet Yoshimasu Gozo's films Ki-Se-Ki:gozo cine, (trailer below), and many more, an imprint well worth exploring.

OSIRIS

Asako Narahashi's webpages