Lieko Shiga

Shiga first began making photographs with an autofocus compact camera she had used at a high school sports festival. With the remaining film, she moved a desk and cup little by little and photographed them. When she saw the developed prints, she felt uneasy that a scene she had carefully constructed had returned as something like “proof of reality”^*1. What she received from this experience was less a belief in photography’s correctness than a sense that a made scene, once printed, could stand apart from the photographer’s intention and appear like evidence of reality. SFMOMA explains that Shiga had studied classical ballet from childhood and began photographing with her parents’ compact camera around the time changes in her teenage body made that path difficult to continue^*2. Photography emerged as a way to transfer sensations that had become difficult to express through the body into the camera, light, and photographic paper. In an ART iT interview, Shiga says that in drawing the hand is too close to the image, while in photography the arranged subject can finally be handed over through the shutter^*1. This provides a starting point for understanding her later staging, strong flash, the gap between body and image, and the reality that enters the photograph.

Shiga’s move to London was also shaped by a desire to think about photography within a broader field of art. In an interview with Ashley Rawlings, she says that she felt constrained by the way photography was discussed in Japanese photography schools, and that while visiting museums and galleries in London she learned of a school where photography could be studied within a wider art context^*3. Her official website records that she completed Fine Art New Media at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London Institute, in 2004^*4. SFMOMA explains that during her London years Shiga photographed people close to her—friends, roommates, and neighbors—as unsettling scenes that also evoke nineteenth-century spirit photography^*2. Although she photographed people close to her, Shiga did not move toward explaining their faces or personalities. Through light, pose, rephotography, dark interiors, and the relation with the photographer, these people appear as actual individuals and at the same time as other kinds of beings.

After Lilly and CANARY in the mid-2000s, Shiga received the 33rd Kimura Ihei Photography Award and, in 2009, the ICP Infinity Award for Young Photographer^*5. In 2008, she moved to Kitakama, a coastal village near Sendai, and became a local photographer, asked to photograph residents, sports days, festivals, meetings, and other community events. SFMOMA explains that in Kitakama she photographed residents and local events while attempting to build an unofficial archive through photographs and oral accounts^*2. In the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, her home and studio were swept away, and many Kitakama residents died. In an essay published by Aperture, Mariko Takeuchi notes that after the disaster Shiga took part in washing, drying, and returning photographs found in the debris to their owners^*6. Rasen Kaigan is often seen as a post-disaster work, but its making began in Kitakama before the earthquake and tsunami. The disaster made clear within Shiga’s work that photography can be an artwork, a local record, a memorial portrait, damaged paper, and an object returned to someone’s hands.

Images Returning on Photographic Paper

Shiga’s understanding of photography begins with the sensation of holding an image that has appeared on photographic paper. In her words, as introduced by SFMOMA, it was a shock that an image she had imagined could be reproduced as a material sheet of photographic paper and held in her hand; that experience led her to photography as a form of self-expression in place of dance^*2. The key point is that a sensation held within the body appears, once photographed, as an object outside the body. The image separated from the artist’s body returns bearing the subject’s gestures, the fall of light, and the humidity or atmosphere of a place. The dark interiors, strong light, unnatural poses, and rephotography in Lilly and CANARY become ways of repeatedly working with this “image outside the body.”

Reality Entering the Constructed Image

Shiga’s photographs emerge between an image imagined before shooting and the reactions that occur during the act of photographing. In Rawlings’s interview, Shiga describes the image and setup she brings in advance as conditions that allow unexpected moments to arise^*3. The photographer makes a scene. The subject responds. Light enters, the body moves, and after development the image returns. In that process, a reality that departs from the plan enters the image the artist had imagined. Shiga’s interest turns toward the sensation that a made scene can appear on the print with the face of evidence while also becoming another reality, rather than toward deciding whether photography captures truth.

The staging, lighting, participation of subjects, and color filters described by SFMOMA are operations that make the world appear fantastic while also moving traces of reality into another image^*2.In Shiga’s photographs, skin, shadow, the direction of the eyes, and the stiffness of the body remain strongly present within staged scenes.Strong flash flattens the figure while emphasizing skin, shadow, the direction of the eyes, and the rigidity of the body. Darkness conceals the scene while intensifying the presence of the person who was there. The constructed image and the traces of reality that remain within it give Shiga’s photographs their instability and force.

Photography as Being Photographed

For Shiga, photography turns from an act in which the photographer controls the subject into an experience that unsettles the photographer herself. In her interview with Ashley Rawlings, she describes photographing as the reverse of “shooting”—as an experience of “being shot”—and explains that the time of her own existence is revived within the photograph^*3. The Brooklyn Rail review of Blind Date treats this idea concretely as a problem of photographing people. It describes the elongated pages of couples riding motorcycles in Thailand as a panorama of passing faces and focuses on the women who look back at the lens from the passenger seat^*8. That gaze does not leave the viewer in the safe position of an observer. The viewer is placed as if standing beside a motorcycle passing by and suddenly receiving the gaze of a stranger. The Brooklyn Rail also reads the power relations around objectification through Shiga’s connection of “eyes” with desire and curse^*8. Here, objectification means treating another person as a one-sided object of the photographer’s or viewer’s gaze, erasing that person’s own gaze and response. In Blind Date, the subjects look back into the lens, and the viewer receives that gaze, making the act of looking at the photograph unstable. The figures in Blind Date also lead toward the figures in Rasen Kaigan. Kitakama residents stand before the camera within local records, memorial portraits, event photographs, oral accounts, and memories of the land. In Shiga’s photographs, photographing a person means seeing that person while alsobeing looked back at by that person and seeing the time of the land and of the dead at the same time.

Photography as Medium, the Body as Medium

SFMOMA introduces Shiga’s idea of the camera as something like a “portal,” away from metaphors such as weapon, tool, or witness. It also describes her work as grounded in place-based fieldwork, human experience, staging, lighting, the participation of subjects, and color filters^*2. Within this “portal,” the appearance of the outside world and fear or unease felt in the body pass through the subject, light, and memories of the land to become one image. The artscape International review of CANARY refers to Bataille’s thinking on sacrifice and reads Shiga’s phrase “being photographed” as a moment in which the photographer offers herself to the image^*7. In Bataille, sacrifice can be understood as an experience that removes the body from the everyday order in which things are managed for use, bringing it into contact with death, excess, and fear. In Shiga’s photographs, this idea helps frame the work as an experience in which the photographer herself is exposed to light, bodies, and the presence of death, instead of simply mastering a subject. In a Tokyo Art Beat interview related to Bipolar, Shiga speaks of photography as an act that creates a space-time outside past, present, and future through an image that appears on paper^*31. Photography is a device that records the external world, and it is also a medium that gives fear felt in the body, unease, and imagination toward the dead a form that can be sensed through light, paper, and exhibition space.

People Carry Land and Time

In Shiga’s photographs of people, the orientation of the body, hidden faces, strong light, dark interiors, and exchanges with the photographer determine how a person appears more than face, expression, or personality. Tate Photography calls her works “intimate portraits” and describes them as photographs that bring together mystical landscapes and interiors, personal experience, and larger myths^*9. The intimacy Tate describes includes psychological closeness between artist and subject, as well as the sense that the body, place, light, myth, and memory are joined within the same image. The figures in Lilly and CANARY appear in dark rooms, fire, floating postures, hidden faces, and strong light, as if their bodies have been moved into another reality. In Rasen Kaigan, those bodies become tied to the land of Kitakama, oral accounts, memories of cultivation, and imagination toward the dead. Marco Bohr, writing in TIME, places CANARY alongside the folkloric night landscapes and portraits of Masatoshi Naitō’s Tono Monogatari and describes it as work concerned with the fragility of the body and psychological landscapes^*10.In Shiga’s images of people, what comes forward is less who is photographed than what atmosphere the body takes on through light and staging. The time of land and myth accumulates there.

In Kitakama, Photography Becomes Local Work

In Kitakama, Shiga made artworks while also serving as a local photographer, photographing residents, sports days, festivals, meetings, weddings, funerals, and other community occasions, and continuing to collect oral accounts^*2. In this place, photography was used at the same time as the artist’s work, a record of community events, family photography, memorial portraits, and material for oral history. Aveek Sen’s essay for ART iT connects Shiga’s life in Kitakama and her gradual assumption of the role of local photographer to questions of memory and photography after the disaster^*11. What Shiga made here includes works made from the landscape of Kitakama and also a situation in which photographs were requested, used locally, chosen for the dead, connected to oral accounts, and needed in residents’ lives.

This work can appear too calm if it is read only through its relation with the community. In ART iT’s “Critical Fieldwork 34,” Minoru Shimizu criticizes readings of Rasen Kaigan that rely on the language of collaboration and mediation while pushing the artist’s decisions into the background^*12. When cooperation with residents or local record-keeping is emphasized too strongly, Shiga’s decisions—what photographs to choose, at what scale to show them, in what order to install them, and whose voices to include—become less visible. That is the core of the criticism. The point is severe, but it shows that Shiga’s photographs have been received as work that carries the authority of record, collaboration, staging, and exhibition at once. In portrait of cultivation, a person, tree roots, a body, and memories of cultivation overlap within a single image. The fact that SFMOMA, MoMA, Getty, and others hold this work or related works from the series shows that this image of a person has been seen within contemporary photography^*13.

After the Tsunami, Photographs Themselves Become Relics

After the 2011 tsunami, Shiga took part in washing, drying, and returning photographs found in the debris to their owners^*6. This work is inseparable from her understanding of photography. In the Rawlings interview, Shiga speaks of the photograph less as a representation of “murdered time” than as a place where time and life are revived^*3. The photographs washed after the tsunami translated that idea into the physical act of cleaning dirty paper by hand, drying it, and returning it. In those soiled photographs remained families, the dead, lost homes, and time that could not return. Getty News introduces Shiga after the disaster as an artist involved with Kitakama’s community archive and conveys how photographs take on roles within memory and loss^*14. Photographs Shiga made, photographs entrusted to her by residents, photographs soiled by the tsunami, and photographs installed in the exhibition space were different kinds of photographs, but in Kitakama they belonged to the same life. What becomes visible here is the range of roles photography can take: preserving the past, supporting events and families, becoming memorial portraits, being damaged by disaster, being washed, and returning once more to someone’s hands.

Making Time for Looking in the Exhibition Space

Shiga’s work does not sit easily within the photobook or the single print. CANARY was also presented as a slide projection with sound, and artscape International points out that still photographs are connected within the time of edited projection^*7. The Rasen Kaigan exhibition at Sendai Mediatheque was structured as an exhibition that included photographs, texts, oral accounts gathered in the community, and large-scale prints^*15. Tokyo Photographic Art Museum also introduced Human Spring as an exhibition of new work that included photographs made with participants and the experience of the exhibition space^*16. The time of looking at Shiga’s photographs shifts from checking images one by one to walking through a dark space, changing the direction of one’s body, and encountering photographs, texts, and the traces of voices.

Lilly and CANARY

In Lilly and CANARY, Shiga’s understanding of photography appears with particular directness. SFMOMA describes Lilly as an attempt to reconstruct the atmosphere of adolescence, and CANARY as a complex engagement with society and the outside world^*2. Art Platform Japan records CANARY as a 61-part work from 2007^*17. In CANARY, the people are real human beings, yet through blown-out flash, dark backgrounds, fire, floating postures, and hidden faces, they become bodies within dream and fear. Priska Pasquer’s introduction to the FOAM exhibition describes CANARY as a work that combines local myths, stories of ordinary people, personal memories, and emotions, and writes that Shiga imagines an image before meeting people or places and, in the process, seems to enter a state beyond her own body^*18. In this series, Shiga creates a state in which bodies pass through light and darkness and take on another time; the images are more than a sequence of strange scenes.

International criticism has placed CANARY within staged photography, spirit photography, myth, and the temporal expression of slide projection. Marco Bohr, writing in TIME, reads CANARY as an attempt to choreograph emotionally and psychologically charged inner landscapes through photography rather than as a record of recognizable physical reality, and writes that it recalls the folkloric night landscapes and portraits of Masatoshi Naitō’s Tono Monogatari^*10. The artscape International review of CANARY connects the work to Bataille, spirit photography, and mythic realms, and, in relation to the slide-sequence form, refers to Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque^*7. Goldin showed friends, lovers, sexuality, and dependency through slides accompanied by music, allowing private photographs to be experienced as a flow of time. Smithson’s Hotel Palenque presents slides of buildings and ruins encountered during travel together with narration, serving as a precedent in which still photographs become a lecture, a story, and an experience of time. The connection with Shiga lies less in subject matter than in the form of projecting and editing still photographs to create a duration for viewing. CANARY intensifies the presence of the body and of death through the strangeness of its images and through the time in which photographs appear one by one, disappear, and move to the next image.

Blind Date

Blind Date is a series of couples riding motorcycles in Thailand and is an important work for thinking about Shiga’s photographs of people. The Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art introduces the exhibition as an installation dealing with photographs of lovers taken in Bangkok, loss, death, capital, light, and darkness^*19. The Brooklyn Rail review writes that the horizontal pages create a panorama of faces passing by on motorcycles and notes that the viewer is placed near the couples themselves^*8. In many photographs, men drive while women look toward the lens from the passenger seat. The review argues that this gaze shifts the relation between the image and the viewer, turning the act of looking at the photograph into the experience of being placed before the eyes of an unknown person^*8. It further notes that the women are not flattened into familiar roles such as sadness, sexuality, loss, or muse, but appear as figures who examine the viewer in return^*8. In this series, strong colors and fantastic props are restrained. Even so, faces that approach and recede at speed, gazes from the passenger seat, and negotiations between photographer and subject show how Shiga thinks about “photographing people.” Here, a person appears as a momentary encounter with the viewer, not as a fixed portrait.

Rasen Kaigan

Rasen Kaigan is Shiga’s central body of work, bringing together life in Kitakama, oral accounts, her work as a local photographer, and the rescue of photographs after the disaster. The official page of Sendai Mediatheque records that the exhibition was based on her activities in Kitakama and was a large-scale presentation that included photographs and texts^*15. In an SFMOMA video, Shiga explains that when she found a subject that attracted her, she felt she first needed to live around it and share life before photographing, and that this is why she moved to Kitakama^*20. In the same video, she recalls being asked for a photograph for a funeral while photographing festivals and meetings as a local photographer, and describes how this led her to approach the invisible spirit and history of Kitakama^*20. The people who appear in this series are Kitakama residents, partners in oral accounts, and figures close to those who requested memorial portraits. People, land, and the time of the dead overlap within the same image.

Rasen Kaigan has the character of a local archive and, at the same time, that of a strongly staged body of photographs and exhibition. Minoru Shimizu’s ART iT “Critical Fieldwork 33” reads the exhibition as a “stage set” in which remembering and mourning alternate, and places Shiga outside the categories of straight photographer or pictorial photographer, calling her a “director of images” who uses photographs like actors^*32. This evaluation includes criticism, but it shows that Shiga’s work has been read not just as a record of Kitakama, but as the work of an artist who arranges photographs, exhibition space, walking bodies, and the time of memory. The photobook Rasen Kaigan album and the text volume Rasen Kaigan notebook offer an entry point into oral accounts, memories of the land, and residents’ words that photographs alone may not convey^*22.

Regarding Portrait of Cultivation, Shiga says that she did not stop at listening to accounts of cultivation; she actually dug up pine roots and photographed a person holding them^*20. In that image, the person does not simply stand as an explainer of the land; the figure becomes an image that bears the excavated roots, the weight of the body, and memories of cultivation. MoMA holds portrait of cultivation and rasen kaigan 31, while SFMOMA and Tokyo Photographic Art Museum hold Rasen Kaigan 46^*21. Kitakama was the stage for the work and also a place where the process by which photographs are needed within a community, damaged, preserved, and moved into exhibition became concrete. What Shiga treats is the landscape and residents of Kitakama, and also the movement by which photography is used in daily life, lost, and returned bearing another meaning.

After Human Spring

After Human Spring, Shiga’s attention moves from Kitakama toward Miyagi’s landscapes, bodies, death, living beings, and social change. Amanda Maddox of Aperture discusses Human Spring as work following Rasen Kaigan and Blind Date, linking natural disasters, the body, and questions of seeing^*23. SFMOMA also explains that her recent projects consider the landscape of Miyagi through changes in Japanese society during the Heisei era and cycles of life and death^*2. Artizon Museum’s Hyōchaku placed Chikako Yamashiro and Lieko Shiga together as artists concerned with the land, memory, disaster, movement, and regeneration of Okinawa and Tohoku^*24. In a Tokyo Art Beat interview related to Bipolar, Shiga speaks of photography as an act that creates a distinctive space-time through images that appear on paper^*31. Here, too, Shiga’s interest reaches beyond records that explain events, toward how the body comes into contact with changes in the land and how photography gives that contact another space-time.

The Body, Self-Image, and Women Photographers

Since the 2000s, Shiga has been introduced internationally alongside Rinko Kawauchi, Yuki Onodera, Chino Otsuka, Tomoko Sawada, Miyako Ishiuchi, and others. Getty’s The Younger Generation presents Kawauchi, Onodera, Otsuka, Sawada, and Shiga as diverse practices after the era often referred to as “girl photography”^*25. This grouping points to changes in the body, self-image, and relations of seeing and being seen in photography, more than to a category of young women artists. Alongside Sawada’s self-portraits, Otsuka’s self-image and memory, Onodera’s constructed images, and Kawauchi’s sense of light and the everyday, Shiga draws the subject’s body into light, staging, and memories of place.

I’m So Happy You Are Here, organized by Aperture and Rencontres d’Arles, also includes Shiga within a broad lineage of Japanese women photographers^*26. Seeing Shiga here matters because her work changes relations among portrait, body, self-image, and subject, rather than simply adding her to a list of representative women photographers. The returning gaze in Blind Date, the floating bodies in CANARY, and the figure holding roots in Rasen Kaigan extend portraiture from the communication of face or personality into images where body, land, and the time of the dead overlap.

Between Record and Staging

Shiga’s place in photographic history lies where documentary record and staged photography overlap. Photography has the ability to leave, as traces of light, people and things that were before the camera. In photographic history, this quality has been discussed as record or indexicality. Shiga, however, entered photography by making scenes before shooting, as in her movement of a cup on a desk. In the desk-and-cup episode from the 2009 ART iT interview, a deliberately made scene returned, once printed, as something like “proof of reality”^*1. Here, photography’s ability to leave traces of what was there and the photographer’s staging of a scene exist in the same image. Shiga has worked with the moment when an image gains an unexpected sense of reality at that overlap.

Minoru Shimizu’s ART iT “Critical Fieldwork 34,” written as a critique of responses to Rasen Kaigan, refers to Takuma Nakahira, Walter Benjamin, daguerreotype portraits, landscape photography, Eugène Atget, and spirit photography^*12. Mediation here refers to the way a photographic trace gains meaning through the photographer’s choices, the relation with the subject, printing, exhibition, and the viewer’s interpretation. The discussion around Nakahira includes both a suspicion toward treating photography as a simple copy of the world and a commitment to the trace left by photography’s contact with the world. Benjamin, daguerreotype portraits, landscape photography, and Atget are invoked to think about the uncanniness that clings to early photography: faces and places that remain after time has passed, and empty streets that appear as traces. Spirit photography points to the desire, long attached to the history of photography, that even invisible things might be captured. Shimizu’s essay is critical in tone, but it shows that Shiga’s photographs have drawn discussion around record, mediation, the invisible, and photography’s early uncanniness.

After 3.11, What Can Photography Do?

In photography after 3.11, the question was how to record the earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, as well as how photography might participate in loss, recovery, and the transmission of memory. MFA Boston’s In the Wake presented responses to the disaster by seventeen photographers, including Naoya Hatakeyama, Nobuyoshi Araki, Takashi Arai, Rinko Kawauchi, Takashi Homma, Tomoko Yoneda, and Lieko Shiga^*27. A review in Musée Magazine explains that the exhibition was structured around documentary approaches to the disaster, experimental uses of photographic technology, and the development of new visual narratives around Tohoku^*33. In this field, photography became an image that conveyed damage, a means of thinking about invisible radiation and loss, and an act of recovering lost family photographs.

Shiga’s position within this field is somewhat distinct. She had lived in Kitakama before the disaster, photographing residents and events and being asked to make photographs for funerals. The washing of photographs after the tsunami occurred within a life in which she was already involved as a local photographer, rather than as work documenting the disaster from outside. Musée Magazine notes that Shiga’s project was placed near Naoya Hatakeyama’s work on his hometown of Rikuzentakata, and that Shiga was introduced, alongside Munemasa Takahashi’s Lost & Found, as an artist involved in recovering lost family photographs and returning them to their owners^*33. Sendai Mediatheque organized a dialogue between Shiga and Hatakeyama titled Anya Kōro—What Can Photography Do?^*28. Artizon Museum’s Hyōchaku placed Chikako Yamashiro and Shiga together as artists concerned with Okinawa and Tohoku, land, memory, disaster, movement, and regeneration^*24. Seen in these groupings, Shiga’s work in Kitakama appears as a practice concerned with the process by which photography supports community memory, becomes damaged, is washed, and returns to someone’s hands.

Why Shiga Matters in Contemporary Japanese Photography

Shiga’s reception rests on more than the novelty of strong color or strange staging. TCAA evaluates her work as an inquiry into the equivalence between photography as a medium and the human psyche, and as a perspective that crosses between the nature of photography and the human body^*29. This “equivalence” can be understood as the way movements of the mind take form in the same place as photographic materials, rather than as explanations placed behind the work. Anxiety appears as darkness or strong flash; imagination toward the dead appears as memorial portraits or damaged paper; unease toward a place appears as unnatural posture or as the viewer’s body moving through the exhibition space. In Shiga’s photographs, what is inside the mind does not arrive afterward as verbal explanation; it appears as the intensity of light, the damage to paper, the stiffness of bodies, and the movement of the viewer.

In an exhibition on Japanese photography from the postwar period to the present, SFMOMA traced a trajectory in which Shōmei Tōmatsu and Daidō Moriyama addressed Americanization and urban change, Nobuyoshi Araki and Eikoh Hosoe developed more personal and performative forms of photography, and photography turned toward contemporary culture, including the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. Within that account, SFMOMA identifies Miyako Ishiuchi, Rinko Kawauchi, and Lieko Shiga as significant women artists in contemporary Japanese photography^*2. Tate Photography introduces Shiga’s photographs as works that bring together intimate portraits, mystical landscapes, personal experience, and myth^*9. In a context that includes A Portrait of Cultivation, Anselm Franke of HKW discusses media as something through which bodies, environments, communities, and invisible transmissions pass^*30. Taken together, these sources position Shiga as an artist who gives concrete form, within images and exhibition spaces, to record, staging, body, portrait, disaster, and community.