“Tone Scape 01” (cropped). 530x193mm, edition 5, Film Based Photography. Photos courtesy YOD Gallery | click to enlarge
The Kyoto-based photographer Hideki Kuwajima doesn’t carry around his camera. This, perhaps, is why, when he puts his mind to photography, the subjects before him suddenly look different. In the past he’s been known more for his work photographing reflective surfaces like glass bottles. But in a new exhibition in Osaka, Kuwajima points his lens at his hometowns to reveal stark landscapes of Kyoto and Osaka.
“Tone Scape 01” by Hideki Kuwajima. 530x193mm, edition 5, Film Based Photography
In “Tone Scape,” a new show that opened earlier this month at YOD Gallery, Kuwajima presents a series of stark photos, each revealing tonal black and white landscapes of Osaka and Kyoto. Kuwajima utilizes a highly analog and time-consuming process of using two different types of film and creating duplicates of the negatives to adjust the gradation of his silhouettes.
“I dismantle negatives of films which capture the fragmented images of those things, and I connect them together like searching for the images in the future,” says Kuwajima, speaking about his process. “The new images are created by distorting the time of the recorded images.” It must be the way these anachronistic photos were processed, but they feel like they were taken in a different time.
“Tone Scape” is on view at YOD Gallery in Osaka through May 30, 2015.
“Tone Scape 05” by Hideki Kuwajima. 533x174mm, edition 5, Film Based Photography.
