An exhibition consisting of two distinct, though interrelated, series of colour photographs. The first of these features architectural and topographical details shot on 35mm colour negative film in Tokyo and Kyoto during 2019. The second series of images features details of architectural drawings gleaned from 1960s Japanese lifestyle magazines.

Each image in this series is made as the direct result of a quasi-systematic process of looking, finding and revealing. It is a process that at once adheres to a pronounced formal agenda while openly courting the chanceful possibilities of the drifting subject. These photographs are an intuitive response to the contemporary Japanese cityscape engaging the structural elements and architectural spaces of the city in a process of revealing. It is intended that each photograph operates as a site of subtle visual rupture, a rupture that encourages the viewer to contemplate not only the moment but also the inherent strangeness of the world held in it. These photographs point towards a world that while inescapably contemporary is haunted by the presence of the recent past.

The novel Spring Garden by Tomoko Shibasaki acted as a guiding hand of sorts to this project. Within its narrative spaces the novel engages architecture and photography to gently unfurl the ways these forms simultaneously enmesh and structure memory, desire and identity.

The use of film-based photography in this project was integral to the formal and temporal operations that underpins the project. As a medium, film possesses a sense of pictorial diffuseness that stands outside the blunt explicitness and instantaneity of the digital image. It is this sense of rendering the world at a remove from itself that I have sort to explore in this project.

click here to access a pdf of the short text that accompanied the exhibition.

To access a detailed list of the photographs contained in Looking and Finding click here  (all works are available for purchase).

Looking and Finding was exhibited at the Wedge Gallery, Books Kinokuniya, Sydney. October 17 – 29 2019.