My first exposure to Keijo Kitajima’s work came in the form of Photo Express Tokyo, published in 2012 by Steidl/Le Bal. Billed as “a facsimile of the legendary series of twelve booklets” originally published by the photographer himself while staging a year-long exhibition at CAMP gallery in 1979, the publication consists of a slipcase with those facsimiles, with one more booklet added. The later contains installation photographs from the time and a very short text that did not help me very much understanding what I was looking at.
There were various aspects to the work that fascinated me. First, Kitajima staged twelve different exhibitions in one year (one per month). Second, he produced a little booklet that he sold during the individual shows (you can see them in some of the installation photographs, lying on a table in the gallery). Third, the exhibition was produced in situ, discarding any photography-exhibition convention that until then I had taken for granted: no frames, and the prints had been made right there, using the photographic materials available at the time.
Up until the financial crash of 2008, I had lived under the rather naive assumption that commercial photography galleries exhibited work based on artistic merit and on what their owners responded to. This is incredibly naive, of course, as I would learn the hard way. Regularly, I trekked down to New York City from Western Massachusetts to be exposed to what I thought was at the forefront of contemporary photography.
Then it all came down: first, there was the financial meltdown. And the galleries started showing the most bland, decorative photography. It was as if suddenly, the idea of artistic merit had changed. But of course, that was not the case. It was just that commercial galleries are not overly concerned with artistic merit. Much like luxury-car dealerships, they’re showrooms in which the wealthy shop for additions to their possessions.
Kitajima did not have to worry about any of that. Even though there were some galleries in Japan, they were not geared towards selling photographs. Instead, their idea was to show photographs. And CAMP was not one of those other galleries anyway. It had been co-founded by Daido Moriyama, Seiji Kurata, and Kitajima (Kurata and Kitajima had both been students of Moriyama’s). It was, in other words, an artist run gallery. With commercial considerations being absent, the photographers were able to do what they thought they needed to do to showcase no only their work but also what photography itself was capable of.
Even though in 2012 I was deeply embedded in the Western system of photography — at the time, I taught in an MFA program where students were required to produce serious books (not cheap booklets) and had to stage their final exhibition as if they were art stars (large prints in very expensive frames), the CAMP model struck a chord in me. It appealed to my more rebellious side. I was (and still am) quite naive, but I also had (and still have) a very strong interest in getting around systems that do not work for me. Especially after 2008, I realized that commercial galleries (or museums for that matter) do not actually work for photographers (it’s really the other way around).
Increasingly, I was also beginning to wonder about photography itself and the way it was treated in the world of art. Why do prints have to be editioned if in fact you can make any number of them? Why does everything have to be precious? Why or how does one edit? Why does one show the “best” (or “most successful”) photographs? Or rather is there a way to do something different, and what might that look like? Kitajima’s Photo Express Tokyo showed one possible way.
Photographically, Photo Express Tokyo appears to follow the Provoke model: high-contrast black and white with at times wonky compositions. But photography is more than what its pictures look like. If you look more closely at what Kitajima’s photographs actually show, it’s almost the complete opposite of Provoke. Provoke is infused with a deep sense of nihilism: it’s very straightforward to realize that its photographers did not appreciate the world they were living in. With Kitajima, it’s not so clear. You could see Photo Express Tokyo that way — the excess of a consumerist culture that amuses itself to death (to use the phrase that Neil Postman a few short years later would come up with). But you could also see the photographs as the complete opposite, as a celebration of the joy and energy that is created by the excesses of consumerism.
Over the years, I came across other work by Kitajima. Some interested me, some not. The publications appeared to be released in random order, or rather some arrived way after the fact, years after their photographs were taken. I was interested in this artist, but I found it difficult to understand what was going on, probably in large part because I was unable to read any articles published in Japan.
In late 2019, I met the artist (as part of a visit with a group of students) in what turned out to be yet another one of his own galleries. The photographs on the walls had nothing to do with the work I had been familiar with. They intrigued me deeply, in part because for once with this artist, I felt an affinity in terms of the visual language he had used. I was and will never be able to make work that looks like Photo Express Tokyo (not that I wanted to), but his Untitled Records — land- and cityscapes photographed in what can only be described as bleak settings — strongly resonated with me (I’ve long had a particular fondness of what in one episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 is being jokingly described as “despair vision”).
I did not find the artist talk and conversation that ensued in Kitajima’s gallery particularly enlightening. This might have been a translation issue. I don’t want to blame the translator, though. It’s more that Kitajima’s thinking probably best unfolds on the printed page when words are being used. In addition, much like many Japanese artists I have met, there is an obliqueness that probably arises from the very different cultural background and from how things are expressed. In any case, I remember one detail that excited me: Kitajima said that he now eschewed editing the work. There was an answer to my much earlier question whether you can do that: yes, you can. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed the photographs on the walls very much, and I did not think for one second that they were edited poorly.
But how do the bleak landscapes relate to the earlier high-contrast black-and-white photographs, many of whom had been taken with a flash? And how did the street photographs fit in that he made at some stage, not to mention the very colourful documentary-style portraits taken in what was the Soviet Union in its death throes? The catalogue of a recent exhibtion at the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum entitled Borrowed place, borrowed time would finally provide me with an answer (or so I hoped). The book combines all of Kijatima’s work, with a number of in-detail essays added (all available in English translation, which is not a given for such a catalogue from Japan — kudos to its makers!).
As it turned out, the curators in Nagano and the authors of the various essays were facing the same challenge I had been facing: how does this all add up? What are the connections between these very different bodies of work? In part, the answer is provided by the artist’s photographic biography that ties together the early photographs, taken in Okinawa, with Photo Express Tokyo and the later street and documentary photographs. Throughout the book, these are all summarized a snapshots, which is not how they would be described in the West. I don’t mean this as a criticism; to a Western reader this might cause some minor confusion, though.
But there still is that big jump to the later landscapes and the puzzling portraits that show people in white outfits facing the camera with rather blank expressions. These portraits give off Thomas Ruff vibes, except that there appear to be variations of the same people. Without any added context or information given, this is rather confusing (adding an interesting element to Ruff’s approach). As it turned out, Kitajima photographed the same people once a year over a period of a decade (or so). And at least some of the landscapes originated at scenes of natural disasters, which Japan, a country frequently hit by earthquakes and their after-effects (fires and/or tsunamis), is very familiar with.
So what’s the connection? The various authors make valiant efforts to tie it all up. I don’t think that I believe any of these. Instead, I am happy with something else, the photographer’s own words from 1982: “Right now, I want to draw a line under the work I’ve done so far […] and redefine the rules — or grammar, if you will — of my photographic language.” (p. 281) Redefining the rules here meant finding the right camera and approach for what he wanted to do.
Sometimes, the answers can be so simple.
This would make the comparison with Thomas Ruff all the more relevant: after all, the German artist is focused on the conventions of photography. Whatever approach needs to be taken for any given project, however connected or disconnected it visually is from what came before, is the approach to be pursued. It’s not an approach followed by many photographers, possibly given the inherent challenges. But both Ruff and Kitajima demonstrate what can be gained by doing it.
Lewis Bush once told me something to the effect of “photography is too interesting to be art” (or maybe he meant “Art”). My own interpretation of Lewis’ words lead me to think that photography is too interesting to be confined into the art world’s Procustean bed, with its editions, framed photographs sold by used-car salesp… sorry, I meant gallerists, strict and simplistic editing rules, and more. Yes, you can follow that route, and yes, you can get interesting results that way. But there is more.
If you truly want to keep your work alive, you might want to follow someone like Keizo Kitajima instead who embraces his tools like any other “serious” photographer but who will then expose and develop photo paper handing on the walls of his own gallery, who will simply not edit his work any longer, or who will re-conceptualize past work into the present. Unlike paintings or sculpture, photographs allow you do to that.
The making of photographs allows for almost limitless flexibility, and the showing does so, too.
It’s the kind of lesson that especially MFA students would need to hear. But given that many MFA programs are now especially eager to set up a straight pipeline to car dealersh… I’m sorry, for some reason this keeps happening… commercial galleries and museums, I’m afraid that MFA programs might have become the places where photography goes to die, to re-emerge as some form of zombified version of its former self, bereft of the richness of what the medium actually has to offer.
Borrowed place, borrowed time; photographs by Keizo Kitajima; essays by Tadashi Matsui, Shigemi Takahashi, and Shino Kuraishi; 360 pages; PCT; 2025
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