PERSISTENT IMPERMANENCE - HIROH KIKAI’S ASAKUSA PORTRAITS
The portraits of buildings and people by Hiroh KIKAI (鬼海 弘雄; B. 1945, D. 2020) were well-known and -applauded in the photographer’s native Japan, but he only achieved his international accolades in 2004 when his book Persona won two prestigious photography awards in Japan, and when Steidl published Asakusa Portraits in 2009.
Kikai’s oeuvre is characterized not by breadth but by the narrowness of his subjects, and the techniques deployed to capture them. He took pictures of buildings, people, or people in the fronts of buildings; he focused on working class and lower middle-class suburban neighborhoods in Japan, India, and Turkey; his work was almost exclusively monochromatic. Kikai described his subjects as the “crevices” of society, and their images rarely feel like they are bigger than their contents. Kikai’s exploration of documentary aesthetics reflect how the photographic medium explores the contradictions between our collective imagination of eternity and the reality of material time.
Because of its western publication by Steidl, Kikai’s best-known work to western audiences might be Asakusa Portraits, the result of nearly 30 years of photographing passers-by in an entertainment district that surrounds Senso-ji Temple in Asakusa, Tokyo. Little else distinguishes one image from another, besides the various characters who agreed to be photographed. Except for the early images that began the series, Kikai used the same unadorned red walls of the temple as his background. His subjects were asked to pose as they pleased, and Kikai never spent more than ten minutes with each subject. Here is where we can first see the various ironies that comprise Kikai’s self-reflexive project about photography.
The current location of the Senso-ji Temple is not its first. First built in 941 AD, it was moved and then reconstructed to its current location in Asakusa in the 17th century. A succession of fires and destructive events occurred in the intervening centuries, including its total leveling in World War II. Rebuilt in the 1960s, the temple is now the main attraction for domestic and international tourists alike, with the local population employed by the retail and entertainment industries. The temple itself performs what it also facilitates, principles of the persistence of impermanence.
Kikai’s methods, and the resulting images, suspend these two themes, accomplished by self-imposed constraints that the photographer never strayed from. Choose strangers, and those dressed outside of contemporary fashions. Photograph them against the same backdrop under even, natural light. Abiding by such limitations allowed the images, and the subjects therein, to disconnect from their particular moments in time, identified only by the short captions Kikai wrote upon publication. Such rules exercise control against natural and historical time, against the inevitability of demise and shifting socio-economic and political balances.
Despite Kikai’s efforts, these last two can always be counted on. A woman photographed in 1973 returns to the series a decade later, noticeably older, her style changed. A man photographed twice, the distance between the two instances about twenty years, shows his degraded eyes. Kikai’s works suggest that perhaps all photography is as much about itself as what it documents. Like the optical illusion of a flip book animation, the persistence of vision is fiction, and time’s resemblance to its opposite is both uncanny and unfathomable. There is no antonym for “time” in the dictionary, only clumsy phrases to approximate it – “life after death,” “eternal time,” “the future.” That might suggest that such a concept doesn’t exist, yet Kikai’s work insists otherwise. It might be glimpsed only in the moments of passersby against a vermilion wall, year after year, and kept in the imperfect technologies of the photograph.
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