Picture © Rinko Kawauchi

Rinko Kawauchi, the celebrated young Japanese photographer whose books have taken the art world by storm, will be in London next month to deliver a one-off workshop.

Celebrated for her almost childlike view of the world – expressed in loose, free-flowing edits of her simply composed pictures and published in photobooks such as Utatane (2002), Aila (2004) and Cui Cui (2005) – she will run a five-day workshop, organised by award-winning photographer Leonie Purchas.

‘My husband and I participated on an Antione d’Agata workshop organised by the Arles photo festival in France,’ says Purchas. ‘It provoked me to question my practice in an intense and accelerated way, and my work developed more rapidly than it had done through years of studying.

‘It’s a form of learning that I find exciting and feel is missing here in the UK. I now live in a large studio that was originally a fabric workshop. It seems the perfect, and most affordable place, to host our first treat, Rinko Kawauchi, who will be followed up in November by JH Engstrom.

‘The workshop is open to people for whom photography is their life, but not necessarily their profession. It is being organised by myself, Lina Brocchieri and Camilla Gore - two friends mad enough to believe in a not- for-profit dream…’
The event runs five days, from 01-05 June, in Stoke Newington, and costs £480. There are spaces for 10 people, with three currently still available.

Purchas is also organising a talk in which Kawauchi will be in conversation with Martin Parr at nearby Campbell Works. The event on the evening of 01 June costs £5, and spaces are limited. Email photo.workshops@yahoo.co.uk to book a place or to apply for the workshop.
For news on further events, visit here (which wasn’t live yet as we posted, but is due to be so soon).

Parr introduced Kawauchi to the British public when he guest edited BJP in 2004. He also wrote a piece on her, which is republished below:

Photography is a curious beast. Just when you think every permutation has been tried and that all new work looks like something we have seen before, along comes a photographer who can make us look and say: 'That's so simple, why hasn't any one thought of this before?'

Often critics dismiss this work as banal or just plain bad because, as with listening to new music, it takes a while to appreciate it. Memorable examples of this are Robert Frank's The Americans, 1959 and more recently William Eggleston's Guide, published and exhibited originally in 1976 to damming reviews from the critics. Nearly 25 years later Eggleston's work is correctly hailed as being a milestone in colour photography and he is praised the world over.

The young Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi is another candidate for this role as her work is so distinctive. No other photographer takes images like hers and it is even difficult to work out her lineage and influences, as one can often do when viewing contemporary work.

I was so convinced about the importance of Kawauchi's work that I curated not just one but two shows of her work for the Arles festival this summer, where I was guest artistic director.

Although they were her first major shows outside Japan, she has gathered a strong following at home over the last few years.

Her first book Utatane was originally published in 2001 but is already in its seventh edition. Over 20,000 copies have been sold - though bear in mind that the Japanese are the biggest photography book-buying public in the world. Utatane and the follow up book Hanabi won the coveted Ihei Kimura prize for new photography.

So what is her subject matter and why are so many people excited by her work? Well the simple answer is that it concerns the pleasures and terrors of everyday life. She has a knack for photographing the simplest object, animal or person, revealing both a feeling of beauty and a sinister undertone.

I talked to Kawauchi in Arles and we discussed her work and career. Her start in photography was pretty conventional, picking up a camera for the first time on a school trip and finding herself drawn to the medium.

But it took her a time to realise she was a photographer not a cameraman - Kawauchi's rather charming definition of boring or commercial photographers (to put it bluntly).

When I asked how many photographers she thought there were in Japan, she hesitated and said 'a few'. But, surprisingly, Kawauchi also does quite a lot of commercial work, including a whole book to accompany a film. As she says: 'It's the final use of the image that counts, not the reason it was taken.'

Her work is distinctively Japanese, so I asked her if she liked to shoot outside Japan. 'Absolutely,' she replied. 'My subject matter is spiritual, not factual so I can photograph anywhere.'

For me the most compelling aspect of her work is the everyday terror she finds, and I ask if she is frightened by the world. She says she is, but adds: 'I have a switch in my head that I can turn on when I am working and this is how I can locate these feelings. When I am not working I turn it off.'

She believes that we all experience these feelings when we are children, and are first questioning the meaning of existence. She also believes that these feelings are latent in everybody, and that she almost has a responsibility to show these qualities to other people through her work.

At Arles I exhibited her most recent show and book Alia, as well as her first body of work. Alia roughly translates into English as 'birth', a subject that has interested Kawauchi for many years. For the project she photographed both animal and human births, using the internet to make contact with a small group of midwives who put her in touch with some expectant mothers. She won their confidence, and arranged to photograph the upcoming births.

Kawauchi says that birth contains a fascination for her, adding: 'It is something you don't see when you walk down the street, and I wanted to see it and photograph it.'

Asked if she wants a baby herself, she replies: 'Of course, doesn't everybody?'

In Arles the installation for Aila was very distinctive, a scatter of small full bled, frameless images on the wall, while the Utatane exhibition showed larger images placed mainly in a row. Kawauchi insisted on installing this exhibition herself, aided by her agent and book publisher.

But she is humble about her success, only stating that she must be a real 'photographer' now because so many people are interested in her work.

Kawauchi has a refreshing and disturbing innocence and I believe that we will hear her name much more frequently in the years to come.