According to Shinto, the indigenous religion of Japan, the world is animated by divine spirits. These kami, as they are called, are infinite and everywhere: from volcanoes and waterfalls to a newly hatched chick. The photography of Rinko Kawauchi is a visual expression of this belief. Over the past 25 or so years, Kawauchi, who was born in the Japanese prefecture of Shiga, has trained her lens on all manner of subjects – big and small, majestic and mundane – in her ongoing quest to capture the sublimity of our reality. A beam of ethereal sunlight pours through a canopy of trees; a baby, milk-drunk, lays its head in an adult’s hands.
Her big break came with the simultaneous publication in 2001 of three photo books – Utatane (“Siesta”), Hanabi (“Fireworks”), and Hanako (named after its subject, a disabled girl living in Kyoto). These books, which made clear Kawauchi’s remarkable ability to find poetry in moments from everyday life, were met with instant acclaim: a string of prizes, commissions and shows followed. “It was like a storm,” she recalls, speaking on a video call from Japan, where she still lives and works.
Her efforts are being recognised this year with the Outstanding Contribution to Photography prize from the Sony World Photography Awards. To mark the accolade, an exhibition of her photographs will go on view at Somerset House, in London, next week.
Kawauchi is wary of overthinking her approach to photography. “I try to empty my mind and just concentrate on the subject,” she tells me. “If I try to control it too much, the magic doesn’t appear.” Take, for example, her image of a bleached-out rose in a haze of pink, which appears on the cover of her 2011 photo book Illuminance. She had come across a rosebush in a small playground in Copenhagen. “It was nighttime, so I used flash, which is usually kind of cheap. When I went back to Japan and developed the film, I was surprised by how beautiful it looked.”
In 2013, Kawauchi switched from her trusty square-format Rolleiflex to a large 4×5 camera for a new series entitled Ametsuchi (“Heaven and Earth”). The images depict controlled burnings in the grasslands of the volcanic Aso region in Japan – an ancient tradition stretching back more than 1,000 years – alongside other sweeping landscapes and starry skies. “When I went to Aso, it felt so huge,” Kawauchi says. “That’s why I chose a big camera, even though the 4×5 is very time-consuming in terms of how long it takes to process the film.” The labour paid off: the series effectively conveys the awe-inspiring scale of the land and cosmos.
That Kawauchi allows herself to be guided by her subjects, as opposed to any grand conceptual strategy, is central to the power of her photographs. Tuned in to the singularity of each encounter, she composes images that reveal the usually hidden essence – the kami, one could say – of beings, places and things. “I just hope people feel something,” she says of their intended effect. When looking at the universe in this miraculous light, how could you not?
The Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition is at Somerset House, London WC2 (worldphoto.org), from Friday-May 1
