New York City has finally turned into the international showcase that its perennial status as one of the world centers of photography has long demanded. One can see work from everywhere in New York now--and, notably, a steady stream of Japanese photography currently runs through New York's venues, in sufficient quantity that it appears to constitute a trend. Not only that, but work by Japanese photographers is being presented more and more frequently in other parts of the country as well. Photography in Japan is as diverse and substantial as it is in the United States--and is taken perhaps more seriously as a creative medium by the Japanese public. However, even casual acquaintance with the diversity of its imagery indicates that the catchall term Japanese photography is far too broad and imprecise to be useful. For, in fact, it stretches uncomfortably thin when used to cover not only photography addressing specifically Japanese subject matter and issues (as is true, at least in large part, of the work of such elder statesmen as Eikoh Hosoe, Shomei Tomatsu, and Daidoh Moriyama), but also photography whose imagery is not immediately identifiable as Japanese in style or concern, like that of Hiroshi Osaka, Kenro Izu, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Without suggesting that these photographers' output lacks qualities that are inherently Japanese or that it has been in any deliberate way westernized (even if unconsciously), it is safe to say that, unless one knew their names and nationalities before seeing their pictures, one would not assume their imagery to be Japanese in origin; it seems to come from an international field of ideas.
One case in point is Ken Matsubara, whose formal explorations in color have been showcased in New York several times, most recently at Jayne H. Baum in SoHo in early 1992 in the exhibition titled Vertical and Horizontal. Therein, as in his earlier work, this native of Tokyo (who spent four years in New York in the mideighties) elaborated his highly personal vision, combining painting, sculpture, and photographic seeing into an idiosyncratic system for generating photographic images.
Briefly described, Matsubara' s working method involves placing elegant, simple objects--geometric forms such as spheres, cylinders, or cones and commonplace things like hoops, wine bottles, plumb bobs, twists of wire, and so forth--with painted sections of a floor and wall. The overall surface of those backdrops, which serve as a proscenium, is usually textured and scumbled, and the objects that function as the protagonists in these dramas of the inanimate are generally smooth, metallic, and monochrome (the most recent ones were gilded). These items are precisely positioned, the scene is carefully lit, and additional paint is applied to the set in such a way that, when
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