Asako Narahashi

Asako Narahashi was born in Tokyo and joined the “Photo Session” while studying art in the Second School of Literature at Waseda University.^*6In a dialogue from the first issue of main, now published by SFMOMA, she recalled that she first became conscious of photography as something she was doing around 1986.^*4The Photo Session, with which Daido Moriyama was involved, lasted about two years for Narahashi. In 1989, she held her first solo exhibition, Dawn in Spring, at Gallery Kaido.^*1After graduation, she repeatedly exhibited photographs from her travels at short intervals, printing them herself, making selections, and arranging them on the wall. That cycle became a foundation for her later work.^*1In 1990, she opened 03FOTOS as a place to show her own work. Photographs could move from the darkroom to the gallery the next day, allowing her to repeat the cycle of shooting, printing, selecting, and exhibiting in quick succession.^*1From 1992 to 1997, NU·E developed through seventeen exhibitions at 03FOTOS before being gathered into a photobook.^*1In 1996, she and Ishiuchi Miyako founded the photography magazine main, publishing ten issues through 2000.^*11The first issue set out to create a venue distinct from the exhibition space. Each issue combined work and writing by the two photographers with conversations and discussions of books.^*4In a later Aperture interview, Ishiuchi recalled that they wanted a place to publish the work they were making at the time, apart from what she described as the male-dominated old photographic establishment.^*22The Aperture interview likewise frames main as a women-run project for publishing photographs made outside commissioned work.^*22For Narahashi, making photographs came to include decisions about the space, sequence, and medium through which they would be seen.In 1998, she participated in the exhibition 「距離の不在：写真の現在」 at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, expanding the scale of her work from the small space of an independent gallery to the museum.^*10In 2001, during discussions around a project at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, two images made from the water were selected from several bodies of color work. That decision became one important impetus for concentrating on half awake and half asleep in the water. Around the same time, she gave up her previous rule of printing everything herself and began having larger prints produced by a lab. By this point, her work was changing on two fronts: the position from which she photographed and the way the photographs appeared in exhibition space.^*1

Encountering Daido Moriyama and Learning to Photograph While Walking

Narahashi had been interested in Man Ray’s solarization and photograms since her years preparing for university entrance exams, and she built a darkroom at home. At that stage, however, photography was still closer to a means of recording. In 1985, she read Daido Moriyama’s Memories of a Dog and realized that photography could become a form of expression for her. That encounter directly set her continuing work in motion.^*1The following year, she joined the Photo Session, with which Moriyama was involved, and continued making photographs while showing him what she had taken.^*16AWARE has noted an affinity between her early black-and-white photographs and the are-bure-boke—grainy, blurred, and out-of-focus—language associated with Moriyama and others.^*3Collector Daily describes Dawn in Spring in terms of dark tonalities, strong contrast, dense midtones, blur, and light flare.^*20Narahashi herself made high-contrast prints on resin-coated paper and enjoyed drawing images out of underexposed negatives whose subjects were barely legible on the contact sheet.^*1She then developed a way of working by walking through Kyushu, Okinawa, Taketomi Island, and Tokyo, reacting to people, animals, signs, plants, interiors, and fragments of the street.In Dawn in Spring (1989), high and low viewpoints alternate, and windows, mirrors, wire mesh, plants, and car windows—things that came between the camera and its subject while she was walking—remain in the frame.^*20In NU·E (1992–97), she continued photographing brides, fish heads, animals, plants, and street corners without organizing them around a single subject, following scenes that held her attention even when she could not explain why.^*16In these early snapshots, walking changed the camera position. The height and orientation of her body, along with whatever obstructed her view at a given moment, entered the composition.

“Gipsu” and Color Work—How Movement Changes What the Camera Sees

Gipsu (1991) was made while Narahashi traveled with a broken leg, a cast, and crutches. Photo & Culture, Tokyo describes a work in which her cast-covered leg repeatedly enters the frame, drawing attention to the effect of restricted movement on the image.^*25The article also connects the instability of these frames with the later water series.^*25In Gipsu, the photographer’s body does more than carry the camera. A shortened stride changes where she can stand, and her own leg appears in the frame as she moves on crutches. Her physical state directly alters both the camera position and the portion of the world that can be photographed. The move into color also changed how she looked.One impetus came when a friend gave Narahashi an automatic color processor, prompting her to begin working seriously in color.^*16She found that when she photographed in color as she had in black and white, the factual information of reality became too insistent: a person appeared simply as a person, a building as a building. She began searching for another approach.^*1During the period that led to Funiculi Funicula, she began to include people, buildings, signs, and roads within the same frame. As she has explained, her interest shifted from a single nearby “thing” to an “event” produced by the arrangement of several elements.^*1She also experimented with photographing while walking without fixing her gaze on a single subject, releasing the shutter when something registered at the edge of her vision. She felt that once she looked at a subject too directly, her own emotions attached themselves to it too strongly.^*16In Gipsu, physical restriction determines the camera position; in the color work, she responds to what enters the edge of her vision. Across both, the frame is not fully settled before exposure.

From Street Snapshots to Snapshots in the Water

Around 2000, Narahashi entered the sea at Jogashima intending to photograph underwater. The water was too murky, so she abandoned that plan and turned the camera toward land from a low position near the surface. Two frames stayed with her, and in 2001 she began pursuing the work in earnest.^*16Narahashi has said that before concentrating on the water series, she made many snapshots.^*17In her 1996 dialogue with Ishiuchi Miyako, published by SFMOMA, she recalled buying a camera around 1986 and beginning to walk in order to take photographs.^*4The 2026 exhibition Between the Lines describes the 1980s, when Narahashi began working, as a period in which photography shifted from explaining events toward the relations among people and things occupying the same place. The exhibition text also notes that her early work accepted chance encounters during the act of photographing instead of following a predetermined subject.^*31Photo & Culture, Tokyo identifies a shared method across her early work and the water series: shooting handheld and responding to the situation as it unfolds.^*25In the street, she changed position on her own feet and released the shutter in response to what entered her field of view. In the sea, the ground no longer held still, and waves changed the height of both her body and the camera.She kept working handheld and reacting to what happened around her. On the street, chance came through encounters; in the sea, water, unstable footing, and bodily movement also entered the process. In the water series, snapshots were made where the photographer’s footing and camera height could no longer remain stable.

In the Waves, the Eye and the Camera Move Separately

For half awake and half asleep in the water, Narahashi entered the water to about chest depth, held a waterproof camera close to the surface, and photographed toward shore. She has explained that the Nikonos viewfinder and lens do not align; trying to look through the finder and compose would submerge the camera, so shooting without using the viewfinder became the basic method.^*17Since childhood, Narahashi had remembered the sensation of waves pulling sand from beneath her feet and pushing her body forward, backward, and sideways even in knee-deep water. When she later entered the sea to photograph, she worked with her footing being swept away, the constant sound of waves, and a wavering sense of direction.^*17The ground shifts, and her standing height changes with each wave. Her eyes track safety and the movement of the water while the hand holding the camera rises and falls. Those changes enter the image.Because Narahashi’s eyes follow the waves while the camera points toward land, what she is looking at and what the film records never fully coincide. A high wave hides the shore; a lower one reveals buildings or mountains, while the height and tilt of the camera change with it. In 2002, early in the series, Kyoji Maeda wrote that Narahashi was following the bodily sensation of drifting among waves.^*26Writing in 2026, Frieze described Kawaguchiko as an image in which both the camera and Mount Fuji appear to be tossed by the current.^*30The water moves the photographer’s body, changes the direction of the camera, and alters how the land appears.Narahashi has also said that she keeps making practical judgments so that she does not become too completely absorbed in the sea.^*17She cannot determine the frame from stable ground. Her body takes the force of the waves, her eyes monitor movement and danger, and the camera records images she has not seen. In the early snapshots, a walking body changed the composition; in Gipsu, restricted movement changed the camera position; in the water series, the waves move both body and camera. Across these works, the ways she can move and see become part of what the photograph records.

Separating Exposure from Selection

Narahashi does not begin the water series with a fixed final image in mind. After considering the location and the direction of the sun, she turns the camera around her and makes a large number of exposures. She has said that in the film era she used dozens of 36-exposure rolls on a single trip, and that her shooting volume increased further with digital cameras.^*17Afterward, she does not decide from a first impression. She looks at the photographs repeatedly, avoids relying too heavily on what she felt at the instant of exposure, and keeps the images that continue to hold her attention.^*17Even when she is thinking about society or nature, she avoids translating those ideas into a prior explanation for the photographs. She has said that even when she is conscious of the marine environment, making pictures to explain it would make the work less interesting.^*17Nor does she consider photographing the sea itself to be the purpose of the work.^*18Since the 03FOTOS years, shooting, looking, and selecting have never ended at the same moment.She releases the shutter while walking through the city, moving with a cast, or being shifted by waves, then looks at the photographs later and under different circumstances. Because selection does not depend only on what she felt during the exposure, frames she did not consciously notice at the site can become works. Later decisions about what to keep and what to place beside it turn snapshots that began with bodily responses into a photobook or exhibition.^*25

The Water Series Begins at Jogashima

The water series began with two chance images made at Jogashima around 2000 and expanded to seas and lakes across Japan. According to Yossi Milo Gallery, Narahashi photographed at more than fifty locations after 2001.^*7At Jogashima she first used an amphibious compact camera, then moved to a 35mm waterproof film camera, the Nikonos.^*16The waterproof camera allowed her to continue working handheld in the water.^*17In 2007, Nazraeli Press published half awake and half asleep in the water, bringing together work made from 2000 to 2006, with Martin Parr involved in the editing and selection.^*9The book does not map the coastline geographically. As the water surface recurs from page to page, the height of the shore, the buildings, the mountains, and the amount of sky all change. A consistent method reveals differences among places.

Comparing Iwasehama and MEKARI

In Iwasehama in SFMOMA’s collection, dark green water fills much of the lower half of the frame. A figure and rocks at the left edge, along with a ship on the horizon, remain within a narrow band. The shore barely appears as continuous ground; the height of the water fragments the information on land.^*12In half awake and half asleep in the water MEKARI in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, a dark, out-of-focus wave rises from the bottom of the frame, leaving a bridge at the upper right and distant land in a narrow strip above it.^*2Even when the camera faces land from a similar height above the water, a wave can occupy more or less of the frame, radically changing how much of the figures, ships, bridges, and other elements on shore remain visible. The body and camera rise and fall with each wave, and the amount of land seen changes with them.SHIKARIBETSUKO in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, was made on a lake, showing that the series extends beyond coastlines.^*15

Photobooks and Digital Work—How Photographs Are Shown

For many years, Narahashi made it a rule to print her own photographs. While preparing work for an exhibition at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, she began having 60 × 90 cm prints produced by a lab and stopped limiting the work to sizes she could print herself.^*1The 2007 photobook half awake and half asleep in the water brings together photographs made from 2000 to 2006 as a sequence of pages.^*9Tsuka has noted that the editing begins with calm water and alternates between rougher and quieter seas, while the physical act of turning the thick pages recalls the repetition of waves.^*23After the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, Narahashi stepped away for a time from photographing water in Japan. She photographed on land in the Netherlands before returning to the water series through work at Lake Nojiri.^*19Drifting but never sinking, composed of work made from 2019 onward, follows the film-based half awake and half asleep in the water but is presented as a separate series because it uses a digital camera. Each work is captioned with a combination of the year and the initial of the place name.^*8As the IG Photo Gallery exhibition text notes, the same basic situation continues with digital cameras: she looks toward land while the movement of water rocks her body.^*8Across film, self-made prints, large lab prints, photobooks, and digital work, Narahashi has continued to review large numbers of photographs she could not predict at the moment of exposure, deciding afterward which to keep, at what scale to show them, and in what sequence. The separation between exposure and later presentation has remained central from her early work to the present.

Dawn in Spring, NU·E, the color work Funiculi Funicula, and the water series look markedly different, yet Narahashi has consistently moved with a handheld camera, made many exposures, and selected photographs later.^*25In 1998, she participated in 「距離の不在：写真の現在」 at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.^*10In 2008, she received the Higashikawa Domestic Photographer Award.^*5The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, holds several of her works.^*13SFMOMA also holds work from NU·E and the water series.^*14From 03FOTOS, her work moved into museum collections and exhibitions in Japan and abroad.

What Did She Change About the Snapshot?

In the 1968 Camera Mainichi symposium “A Symposium: Contemporary Photography—On Everyday Sceneries,” participants discussed how photography could respond to scenes that appear unexpectedly in everyday life, outside staged situations and narrative accounts of events.^*28They also questioned a single-point perspective that seemed to arrange the world neatly around the photographer.^*28In a 1977 conversation, Shoji Yamagishi asked about the relation between photographic vitality and the snapshot, while Garry Winogrand pointed to the term’s ambiguity: the finished photograph alone does not reveal how the photographer made it.^*29The snapshot has repeatedly raised questions about responses to chance, the photographer’s intention, and the relation between the act of photographing and the finished photograph. Narahashi began walking with a camera in the mid-1980s, starting from snapshots that responded to fragments of everyday life. In Gipsu, restricted movement entered the act of photographing; in the water series, the body was moved by waves. In 2007, Kyoji Maeda considered the shoreward water photographs as snapshots made from a place where one would not normally expect the photographer to be.^*24Photo & Culture, Tokyo likewise sees continuity between the early land-based work and the water series in her handheld way of responding to what unfolds around the camera.^*25Narahashi carried the snapshot’s responsiveness to chance encounters from the street into the water. There, chance also comes from waves, footing, the body, and the movement of the camera.

Japan Seen from the Sea—International Criticism and Current Research

Frieze has discussed Narahashi’s water series as photographs of Japanese land seen from the sea, with the water occupying the foreground as a large mass and the land appearing as a thin, distant strip.^*21Narahashi herself has said that when she began the water series, she wanted to “see and photograph Japan as an island.”^*19When the water occupies most of the frame, buildings and mountains appear as narrow forms beyond the sea, and the land itself seems less stable. Frieze’s criticism focuses on how land changes within the image when seen from the sea, more than on the unusual fact of photographing while in the water.In 2025, Franz Prichard of Florida State University presented “Submergent Opacities: Asako Narahashi’s Photographic Surfacing of Gazes” at the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.No paper or abstract has been made public, so the argument remains unavailable beyond the title.^*27