Posted:Jun 19, 2009

The Pure Self

Photographer Keizo Kitajima turns his gaze on three subjects. Or are they turning their gaze on us?

Fourteen photographs, three faces. Walking into Kitajima’s latest exhibition, one is greeted by what first appears to be an uncanny collection of doppelgangers; all super-imposed against the unblemished white background, all from the same angle, wearing the same white shirt, the same expression, the same gaze. In order to steady oneself, the viewer is invited to play a childish game of spot-the-difference, scrutinizing the tell-tale wrinkles, the white shirt, the miniscule variations in expression. One realises there is a time lapse of several years between each portrait, but as the spatial positioning of the models from the lens is maintained precisely, it feels as if one is encountering several versions of the same self.

Kitajima took pains to select models that he did not know, and made no attempt to develop a personal relationship with them, despite meeting with them several times over a few years. While his biological subjects age, the quality of the print or style of presentation do not. They wear exactly the same expression in each shot, varying from person to person: slight discomfort, resignation, even a glower of contempt. Yet apart from this, nothing is revealed about the models themselves. Bereft of introduction or biography, their social position blanked out by the identikit white shirts, they are stripped down to a pure self that continues regardless of – or detached from – their social relations.
KEIZO KITAJIMA, 'PORTRAITS'
60x75cm, digital c-printsKEIZO KITAJIMA, 'PORTRAITS'
60x75cm, digital c-prints

The lack of acquaintance between the subjects and the photographer has been a common theme throughout Kitajima’s career. However, his reputation was built on a vastly different body of work that embodied the ‘snapshot’ aesthetic so beloved of Japan’s photographic giants; Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, and Takuma Nakahira. Employing their spontaneous, shot-from-the-hip style, he covered Japan (both Tokyo and Koza, an American mili-tary hub in Okinawa), New York, the USSR and Eastern Europe, chronicling the bizarre and licentious flavour of their underground scenes, complete with crime, nudity, glamour and booze.

Yet in 1991 he rejected the instantaneous recording of a chaotic and sleazy nightlife, and began to develop a more staged and technical style. Turning his back on a photography that imposed its judgmental gaze on subjects without their consent, Kitajima decided to begin experimenting with a more controlled method, removing the background context and allowing subjects to speak for themselves. Ironically, stripped of any meaningful context, those displayed in “Portraits” hardly seem to speak at all. The fact that their blank, moody, and even defiant expressions cannot be indicative of their personality in general suggests that Kitajima is rather commenting on the nature of portraiture, and confirming the notion that ‘the gaze’ is an imposition that subjectivises and does violence to its object.
KEIZO KITAJIMA, 'PORTRAITS'
60x75cm, digital c-printsKEIZO KITAJIMA, 'PORTRAITS'
60x75cm, digital c-prints

His work here is not only interesting because of the way in which it captures the continuity of self through the biological aging process, but also because it marks a move away from the rapid-fire documentation of the photographer’s surroundings so characteristic of recent Japanese photography. In contrast to that trend, Kitajima’s photographs are surprising not because of their context and illicit flavour, but rather for their lack of it. With the context erased, we are confronted with nothing but the unsettling, pure self.

Sophie Knight

Sophie Knight

Born in what she likes to refer to as the ‘Saitama of London’, Sophie's fetish for foreign languages and hatred of puddles meant she always had itchy feet. After enduring a homestay in Fukuoka and bussing her way through South America, she studied Social Anthropology in London, which convinced her of the essential essence of mankind... and that she had to get away from England. She came back to Japan after a brief stint in Barcelona to find some of the electric nuttiness and zarusoba she had been craving. She now spends her days deciphering Japanese newspapers, translating, writing a zine, speeding around Tokyo on her racing bike to discover tucked-away galleries, making bentos, injuring herself pole-dancing and getting used to the fact that nothing interesting is ever at ground-level in this city.