Naoki Ohji “Cult of Personality” | TABlog | Tokyo Art Beat

Titled “XXXX STREET SNAPSHOTS” and presented in monthly volumes, these exhibitions have featured the same subject matter of blurry everyday streetscapes, again and again and again. If you think I’m exaggerating, then see for yourself: Ohji has dedicated a whole website to the project. He’s even taken a shot of the exhibition space from exactly the same viewpoint every time, allowing you to click through each volume and see how the exhibition has changed with each month. I particularly recommend looking at volumes 7-12 back to back; it’s riveting stuff.

This exhibition claims to be different, that it marks a shift in focus (not that there is much in his work) from sceneries to people, as he “believes that if one ignores photographing people, it is impossible to consider oneself a snapshot photographer”. True, people do feature slightly more in these new photographs, but it’s no great turning point in the artist’s career, and it does not warrant the commissioning of yet another solo exhibition.

What bothers me most about the imagery in this work is that it neither succeeds in being timeless, nor does it have any significant relevance to contemporary Japan. It seems stuck in a half-world of the 1970s, like a bad imitation of Daido Moriyama’s street photography. Looking at it that way, I cannot help but think there is supposed to be a comment here about Japanese urban society: the fact that whether Ohji took these photos in Tokyo, Kawasaki, Fukuoka or Okinawa, they all look the same might say something about the homogeneity of the postwar Japanese urban environment.

If Ohji aspires to be a snapshot photographer, then it is hard for him to avoid Moriyama’s legacy. Paradoxically, then, it is interesting that Ohji, born in 1977, should be producing photographs that are unlike those of his contemporaries and appear to evoke the era from before his birth, when Moriyama was at his most active. Is he searching for a nostalgia about an age which he never experienced? Either way, these approaches could be fascinating if he could find a more original or distinctive way of visualizing them.

Left: Okinawa, Oct 6, 2006; Right: Yokohama, Nov 6, 2006.

There are some of his photographs such as the two above that are not bad, maybe even good (the funny thing is, they all look better online than in reality) but either way these are very much the exception in an overall turgid body of work. In any case, while I have tried my best to find what is good about this work, I am apparently barking up the wrong tree. It states in the gallery press release that Ohji “does not think of this poor-quality body of work as art photography or portraiture, and instead sees it as a bet being made on the potential that lies in the ‘meaninglessness of photography’. This exhibition offers the start of some gentle resistance to the state of self-restraint that comes with people looking at people, the limitations of directing a camera lens at someone”.

If Ohji really intends to say that photography is meaningless, then he is wrong. It would be reasonable to question the contrivance of pointing a camera at someone, the artificiality of composing a shot within a rectangle and the arguable self-indulgence of exhibiting it, but given that for most photographers this process is at some stage, if not at all stages, a considered act, then photography inherently contains meaning. If the “gentle resistance” Ohji is supposedly offering us means that by wandering around snapping anything and everything, his arbitrary use of the camera subverts all consideration of composition and therefore renders the act of taking a photograph “meaningless”, then he has achieved nothing more than a self-fulfilled prophecy. It is also more than a little hypocritical to talk of putting up some resistance against photography and yet still submit to its rectangular format and the desire to exhibit in a white gallery space.

Now, to be fair you might argue that it’s not clear from the press release whether it is Ohji who fancies himself as the Che Guevara of the photography world, or the gallery getting carried away with itself, but get this: Ohji runs the gallery! Isn’t that great?! If you’re having trouble finding a place to exhibit your mediocre work, just open up your own gallery and you can display it there as much as you like while writing your own press releases. Why not even employ your own art critic?

The sad thing about this for me is that I really like the Photographers’ Gallery; I am reluctant to criticize this intimate and unusual space that has in the past displayed some outstanding work and organizes regular seminars on all aspects of photography. I am also very impressed that Ohji managed to establish his own gallery when he was 25. However, for a gallery owner to exhibit his deliberately poor-quality work in his own space might be an interesting curatorial experiment to undertake as a one-off exhibition, but to do it twelve times and attempt to justify it with such complacent doublespeak is arrogant. Enough already!