Nerhol

Nerhol was formed in 2007 by graphic designer Yoshihisa Tanaka and sculptor Ryuta Iida, who had been working with paper and books as material. In an interview with Dentsu-ho, Tanaka said that he sensed a strong visual quality in Iida’s sculpture and began to wonder what might happen if they extracted the shared elements between his perspective as a designer and Iida’s perspective as an artist and gave them one form^*1. The same interview explains that the name Nerhol comes from Tanaka, who “kneads” ideas, and Iida, who “carves” them; that their first exhibition in 2007 was difficult to place from either the design side or the art side; and that they continued to examine the relation between design and art for roughly four years afterward^*1. In an Audio-Technica interview, the duo describe how Tanaka saw Iida’s 2005 solo exhibition, how they shared an interest in paper and a design-oriented sensibility, and how they kept making prototypes after their first collaboration in search of a work that could fix “what they were seeing” into form^*2.

Their early interests lay in shifting the fixed forms of books, letters, and existing images. Yutaka Kikutake Gallery describes Nerhol’s inquiry as beginning with attempts to make books, printed letters, and the standardized images found in the world appear unfamiliar^*4. The shashasha artist page likewise introduces Nerhol as a duo that uses books, text, and images to question the relation between human beings and signs or letters^*21. In an interview with It’s Nice That, the early work Oratorical Type is described as a book-based project in which the artists carefully carved parts of each page to produce another dimension^*3. From this point of departure, photography entered Nerhol’s work less as a pure act of shooting than as one form of information printed on paper, stacked, and handled as pages or objects.

In the process that led to Misunderstanding Focus, the content printed on the material, sequential images, and moving material became central. In a Bijutsu Techo interview, Iida explains that after an early period of trial and error, the duo began to place greater importance on what was printed on the material. This led them toward works made from sequential footage and materials involving movement, and eventually to this series^*5. In 2015, Foam opened Index, Nerhol’s first international solo exhibition. The museum described the duo as exploring the tension between photography and sculpture and presenting an “index” that includes the very process of making a portrait^*7. The 2016 exhibition Promenade at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa introduced Nerhol as an artist duo that critiques the cycle of consumption, production, and obsolescence in contemporary life, and also noted their selection for the Foam Talent Call 2014 and their exhibitions abroad^*15. Chiba City Museum of Art’s 2024 exhibition Rolling the Horizon presented their development from sequential photographic portraits to naturalized plants, petrified wood, and moving-image archives as their first large-scale museum solo exhibition^*8.

Photography Beyond the Flat Print

An entry point into Nerhol is the history of photography being treated beyond the flat print. For a long time, photographs were received as prints hung on walls, as reproduced images in magazines and books, or as documents that record reality. From the late 1960s into the 1970s, however, photography was increasingly treated as a form connected to three-dimensional objects, installation, film, performance, and exhibition space. MoMA’s 1970 exhibition Photography into Sculpture is recorded as a comprehensive exhibition of photographically formed images used in sculptural or fully three-dimensional form^*23. Mary Statzer’s account in Aperture notes that the exhibition grew out of the recognition that the conventional idea of photography as a recognizable two-dimensional image on paper could no longer account for the range of contemporary photographic work^*25. The exhibition included Robert Heinecken, Ellen Brooks, Bea Nettles, Robert Watts, and others, and showed photographs not only as paper images of something, but as objects combined with fabric, light, film, cardboard, wood, plastic, and other materials^*25.

Expanded photography is a term for thinking about this situation, in which photography moves beyond the print and connects with sculpture, installation, film, performance, architecture, and the body of the viewer. The photographic object refers to an approach that treats photography not only through what it depicts, but also through its support, thickness, mode of display, and process of making. Lucy Soutter writes that, in the digital era, photography has joined other forms and activities, moved into three dimensions through sculpture, installation, and architecture, and addressed time and action through video, performance, and audience participation^*24. This expansion does not mean that photography ceases to be photography. It means that reproduction, printing, display, circulation, recording, and objecthood—qualities already embedded in photography—come forward in ways that cannot be explained by the standard modern model of the framed print alone.

Within this development, photographic materiality becomes an issue because a photograph is both a flat image and a thing that appears through film, paper, ink, exhibition space, books, and screens. Materiality here does not mean only the thickness of paper or the tactile appeal of a gelatin silver print. It includes the support on which a photograph is fixed, the scale at which it is output, the way it travels, and how it is experienced on a wall, floor, pedestal, page, or screen. Photoworks’ “Photography’s New Materiality?” describes photographic images from the beginning as active objects that are held, exchanged, and used, rather than passive images that simply wait to be seen^*28. In this sense, photographic materiality concerns not only what appears in the frame, but also the kind of object through which an image appears before people and the forms of use and viewing it takes on.

Jane Vuorinen’s doctoral dissertation further clarifies this issue within contemporary art. Vuorinen writes that recent photographic materiality appears in one direction as tactile production moving toward collage, sculpture, and mixed media, and in another direction as a situation in which the objecthood of the single photographic image becomes almost irrelevant in digital environments^*26. These two directions may seem opposed, yet they share the same background. As photographs are copied as data, compressed, scrolled, and moved from one screen to another, artists have increasingly taken up the conditions of prints, supports, cuts, placement, and exhibition space within the work itself. The interest in materiality has therefore grown not as nostalgia for analog photography, but as a way to ask under what conditions a photograph becomes legible as an image.

The International Center of Photography’s exhibition What Is a Photograph? organized this situation within photo history. The exhibition presented experiments in photography since the 1970s as a movement that rethought and reinvented light, color, composition, materiality, and subject matter, and described the rise of digital technology as prompting renewed attention to analog photography, digital images, and hybrid forms^*12. The exhibition included Matthew Brandt, Marco Breuer, Liz Deschenes, Adam Fuss, Gerhard Richter, Lucas Samaras, Letha Wilson, Mariah Robertson, Jon Rafman, and others. It brought together chemical processes, camera-less photography, abstraction, digital images, and the reuse of existing images, refusing to confine photography to a single technique^*12. The question shifts from how accurately photography records reality to what materials, processes, outputs, and forms of display make a photograph, and how far it can go while remaining photography.

The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama’s New Photographic Objects organized this issue through contemporary photography and moving image in Japan. The exhibition explained that photographic and moving-image languages are being updated in a situation where digital technology, editing software, copying, scanning, methods of output, installation, and social media are used in combination^*10. Alongside Nerhol, the exhibition presented Teppei Sako, Hiroshi Takizawa, Takashi Makino, and Daisuke Yokota, bringing together moving images that stretch snapshots through time, works based on repeated printing and scanning, layered abstract moving images, and photographs involving data processing or special development methods^*10. The “materiality” addressed by the exhibition is not an attachment to paper or ink as such. It concerns the examination of how photographs and moving images appear after shooting as data, prints, scans, folds, cross sections, screens, and exhibition spaces, and how the history, qualities, and functions of media become part of a work’s structure^*10. The shashasha page for the book of the same title explains that Nerhol’s booklet is composed of close-ups of the works, drawing attention to deep cuts into paper, fibers left after sanding, tiny scratches in the ink, and patterns formed by overlapping layers^*22.

In this context, Nerhol is best understood not as a duo that makes portraits three-dimensional, but as one that incorporates the procedures through which a photograph becomes an image into the work’s visible structure. Whom to photograph, over what span of time, how many sheets to output, in what order to stack them, how deeply to cut, and how to present the cross section on a wall or in a book: decisions that usually become invisible after the photograph is made directly determine the form of faces, plants, and moving-image archives in Nerhol’s work. Viewers do not encounter only a finished image. They also see the process by which that image becomes a sequence of photographs, a stack of paper, a cut surface, and an exhibited object. Here the photograph is not a transparent window onto a subject. It is treated as a thing whose meaning changes through output, processing, and display. In her article on Nerhol, Jane Vuorinen discusses their work not as either photography or sculpture, but as something more than photography and more than sculpture^*27. The reason is that the photographed image and the act of carving paper do not remain separate; each changes the meaning of the other within the same work. Vuorinen notes that in Nerhol’s production, the photographic practice of shooting and the material flow of carving paper overlap, so that the time of sequential photography appears not as a two-dimensional strip but as physical depth^*27. Nerhol’s significance lies not in making photography heavier, but in turning the support, sequence, processing, and display conditions that photographs usually push into the background into elements through which the image is read.

The Questions Tanaka and Iida Brought to the Duo

Nerhol’s method cannot be explained by assigning Tanaka to design and Iida to sculpture as separate roles. In the interview with It’s Nice That, the duo describe a working division in which Tanaka handles layout, shooting, and printing, while Iida takes on the sculptural process, with both giving feedback in the finishing stage^*3. The core of the work, however, lies in the collision between the design question of how an image is shown and the sculptural question of how a material is cut within the same object. For Tanaka, a photograph is flat information that includes composition, printing, scale, page surface, and visual communication. For Iida, a photograph is material that can be stacked, cut into, and made to produce another image through its carved surface. MARPH’s biography states that the two found common ground in methods for posing questions in the present and communicating them to others^*20.

This shared concern became clearer once they began working with photographs. In the Bijutsu Techo interview, Tanaka says that the language used in sculpture and the language used in graphic design are entirely different, and that he has continued to think about how those languages can be shared with others through the work^*5. In the Audio-Technica interview, Tanaka notes that even a word such as “depth” means different things in graphic design and sculpture, and that the value of the collaboration lies in finding a place where those meanings can be adjusted and shared^*2. Tanaka’s concern lies in how visual information is organized and communicated. Iida’s concern lies in how paper, books, and sculpture take shape as things. Nerhol’s portraits grew out of the search for a shared language between these two fields on the surface of the photograph as a printed object, not from a desire to give photography a striking sculptural appearance.

The Face as an Entry Point into Form

Faces appear at the center of Misunderstanding Focus and Index, but Nerhol’s central question is not the face itself. Foam Collection describes w Face, 23 March, Tokyo, Japan as a time-lapse portrait composed of numerous photographs taken over three minutes, a process that captures minute, unintended movements of the subject^*6. The artscape curator’s note explains that Misunderstanding Focus asks a model to sit for three minutes in a setting resembling an ID photograph, stacks 200 A4-size photographs taken during that period to a thickness of about three centimeters, and carves the block like a topographic model^*9. What becomes visible through this method is neither a person’s inner life nor a “true” face. In a conventional face photograph, the seconds before and after the shot, slight changes in posture, the selection of a single image, and the choice of output paper are removed from the reading of the image. Nerhol brings these excluded procedures back onto the surface of the face.

The layers of paper matter not because thickness is visible in itself, but because each print corresponds to a different moment of shooting, and the act of carving places fragments from different moments on the same facial surface. Foam explains that by compressing numerous images into one picture plane, Nerhol reveals the small changes that are always present within photography^*6. In a gallery talk at Musée Hamaguchi Yozo, Yamasa Collection, Shu Oura noted that the face is such a strong motif that it can be recognized the moment it enters the field of vision, and suggested that Nerhol’s layered and carved faces may be intended to slow down this partly automated system of recognition^*19. The face becomes an entry point for showing how a photograph is quickly processed as a single image, rather than a subject meant to reveal the essence of a person.

What the Movement Between Photography and Sculpture Changes

Nerhol’s work does not elevate photography into sculpture or explain sculpture through photography. In sculpture, mass, depth, surface, and the movement of viewpoint matter. In photography, the frame, flatness, optical recording, printing, and reproducibility matter. Nerhol stacks sequentially shot prints and carves them as one might carve sculpture, yet the ink and the photographic image remain on the cut surface. Foam’s Index describes Nerhol as exploring the tension between photography, a medium that easily produces technical and distanced single images, and sculpture, a medium associated with corporeality, expression, and multiple viewpoints^*7. MoMA’s The Original Copy explains that photography has not merely recorded sculpture; through cropping, focus, viewpoint, proximity, lighting, darkroom manipulation, collage, montage, and assemblage, it has reshaped how sculpture is understood^*13.

This movement between photography and sculpture matters because photographic recording and the irreversible act of carving become inseparable within the same work. Yutaka Kikutake Gallery’s Representation explains that Nerhol has used people, roadside trees, animals, water, image data uploaded online, and recorded footage as material, carving stacks of one hundred to more than two hundred photographs to create images that seem to distort even the temporal axis of the subject^*14. The exhibition also introduced works made from mirrored surfaces, described not as images of particular motifs but as devices whose distorted mirror planes irregularly reflect the viewer and the surroundings^*14. Here carving is not a technique for making a face look visually dramatic. It is an operation that changes the relation among image, support, exhibition space, and viewing position.

From Portraits to Roadside Trees, Naturalized Plants, and Moving-Image Archives

Limiting Nerhol to portraiture narrows the issue at the center of their work. MARPH’s biography explains that the duo has expanded its motifs to people, roadside trees, animals, water, image data uploaded to online spaces, and recorded footage, producing works that even distort the temporal axes contained in those materials^*20. Chiba City Museum of Art likewise notes the development from early portraits made by stacking and carving sequential photographs of people to naturalized plants, petrified wood, and moving-image archives^*8. The artscape curator’s note describes multiple-roadside tree as a work that greatly extends the three-minute timescale used in the portraits^*9. According to the note, in this work the trunk of a tree was sliced horizontally at five-millimeter intervals, each cross section was photographed 120 times, and the resulting 120 prints were made into a relief-like object^*9. The minute time differences of the face are replaced here by the time of growth and by the time of a plant placed along an urban road.

The turn to naturalized plants and moving-image archives expands the problem of the photographic object further. In Rolling the Horizon, Chiba City Museum of Art presents Nerhol’s work with naturalized plants, petrified wood, and moving-image archives as a practice concerned with movement and recording^*8. In the 2026 exhibition Unseen Body, new works output tens of thousands of still images from footage of a professional human model, cut them into strips, and stack them vertically^*16. In this development, the time that photography and video divide into small units is reconfigured through paper, cross section, and exhibition space. Nerhol’s practice has not simply shifted its subject matter from faces to plants and footage. It has repeatedly reassembled the question of how an image is recognized through different supports and procedures.

Misunderstanding Focus, 2012

Misunderstanding Focus is an early major series that shows Nerhol’s method most directly. MARPH explains that from 2011 the duo produced three-dimensional works of distorted human figures by taking more than 200 different portraits over several minutes, stacking them, and carving them^*20. It’s Nice That describes the process as asking the subject to remain as still as possible for three minutes and cutting into the resulting stack of photographs so that the passage of time becomes visible, like the growth rings of a tree^*3. In this work, stillness is not a fully achieved state. It is a condition that gradually breaks down over the duration of the shoot. The more the subject tries to remain still, the more blinking, breathing, and slight changes in posture are distributed across multiple prints. The carving gathers those differences onto the surface of a single face. The title Misunderstanding Focus points to a displacement in the assumption that an in-focus photograph captures its subject correctly. A different selected image or a different cut can produce a different portrait.

w Face, 23 March, Tokyo, Japan, 2015

w Face, 23 March, Tokyo, Japan is a 2015 work in the Foam Collection. The museum records the material as layered inkjet prints and the size as 23 × 20 × 4.5 cm^*6. Foam introduces the work in relation to identity and the constructed image^*6. Within its small scale, numerous differences among frontal photographs of a face are stacked, and the carved surface presents one person’s image and multiple moments at the same time. Foam’s work description states that Nerhol reexamines the genres of photographic portraiture and the snapshot of “reality,” showing that even slight movement can change the representation of a subject^*6. In Foam’s reading, the work is described through the terms “identity,” “constructed image,” “photographic portraiture,” and “snapshot of reality,” and is treated as a work that questions the photographic mechanism by which a person is presented as a single reality.

multiple-roadside tree, Remove, and Unseen Body

multiple-roadside tree marks the move from the human face to the roadside tree. Yutaka Kikutake Gallery’s works page includes multiple-roadside tree from 2016, confirming the expansion of Nerhol’s production beyond portraiture and into organic matter^*18. The exhibition information for Promenade at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa describes Nerhol as critiquing the cycles of consumption, production, and obsolescence generated by contemporary economic activity^*15. In this context, the roadside tree is not simply a natural object. It contains the time of urban management, transplantation, pruning, growth, and recording. Remove, shown in 2020 at VOCA 2020 at The Ueno Royal Museum, received the VOCA Prize. The museum records the work as an inkjet print measuring 150 × 204 × 5.7 cm^*17. The juror’s comment for the exhibition noted the dual quality of the work: a sculptural materiality acquired by roughly cutting through many layers of photographs, and a return toward photographic quality through the monochrome image^*17. In the Bijutsu Techo interview, Remove is described as a work made from past moving-image archives related to NASA’s gravity test program^*5. In the 2026 work Unseen Body, Nerhol moved toward a method of outputting tens of thousands of still images from video and stacking them vertically, expanding the early portrait’s “several hundred faces” into a vast bundle of still images that divides bodily movement into fine units^*16.

From Portraiture to the Photographic Object

Portraiture remains an important entry point when placing Nerhol within photo history. The photographic portrait has long functioned as a form that links the face to personal identity and allows the subject to be recognized as “that person.” Foam states that Nerhol reexamines the genres of photographic portraiture and the snapshot of reality^*6. Yet if Nerhol is explained only through portraiture, the conditions of production that include output, layering, cutting, display, and book form become difficult to see. Their portraits do not aim primarily to express a sitter’s inner life. Through three minutes of sequential shooting followed by cutting, they compress into one object the differences before and after a face photograph is organized into a single image.

In this respect, Nerhol occupies a position apart from Yasumasa Morimura, who constructs self-portraiture through performance and quotations from art history, and from Thomas Ruff, who addresses the institutional neutrality of the portrait. Useful points of comparison include Tokihiro Sato, who makes time visible within the photographic image, and Kenta Cobayashi, who transforms digital images in data rather than through physical cutting. Where Sato leaves traces of light in the image through long exposure, Nerhol carves a stack of sequential prints and leaves short differences in time on the cross section of paper. Where Cobayashi digitally distorts images, Nerhol cuts printed photographs and gives the work a physical irreversibility that cannot be erased through retouching or copying.

The Reach and Limits of This Position

Nerhol’s position becomes weaker when it is absorbed into only one category: photography, sculpture, or graphic design. In New Photographic Objects, the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama placed Nerhol among artists who foreground the materiality of photography and moving image, explaining that the participating artists were proposing new approaches to the field through the materiality of media^*10. The Case Publishing page for the book of the same title notes that the catalogue changed format, paper, and binding method for each participating artist, deepening the exhibition’s theme through the book itself^*11. This point connects with Yoshihisa Tanaka’s role as a graphic designer. Design in Nerhol’s work is not an auxiliary task that makes the work easier to view. It determines the conditions through which the work is recognized: the size of the output, the order of the stack, the state of display, and the form in which the work is reconstituted as a book.

Nerhol’s method does not solve the essence of photography or present the correct form of portraiture. Their work enlarges the procedures between the camera’s recording of an instant and the photograph’s use of that instant as a stable image: shooting, output, layering, cutting, and display. If the method of stacking and carving paper is viewed in isolation, the work can easily be reduced to a visual effect. The point lies less in the appearance of the distorted face than in how output, cutting, and display alter the conditions under which one photograph can be understood to stand for its subject. With this limitation in view, Nerhol can be positioned as an artist duo that turns the contemporary condition in which photography operates simultaneously as image, object, information, and exhibition material into a concrete set of procedures.