Yuki Onodera

Yuki Onodera studied fashion at Kuwasawa Design School and worked as an accessory designer for an apparel company. Uneasy with commercial fashion, which was shaped by markets and trends, she looked for another means of expression and began using her father’s camera, which was readily available to her. She later recalled that she initially thought she could use the camera like a paintbrush. But after walking the streets taking pictures, developing the film herself, and making black-and-white prints, she reached an impasse: it felt as though she was merely “looking for subjects”^*17. She then turned to constructed photography. Here, the term refers to a method in which the photographer prepares objects or a situation before making the photograph, instead of finding a subject and photographing it on the spot. Onodera photographed objects she had made herself, including abstract forms created by melting and coloring plastic, and has said that she was also aware of currents in American constructed photography^*17. The aim was to stop searching endlessly for subjects and create the starting point for a photograph herself. She received an Excellence Award in the first New Cosmos of Photography competition for You Are Running. I’m Waiting with Ears Like Dumbo’s^*12. Her early works layer disparate images such as window frames, boxlike spaces, and circular forms, showing that she was already looking for alternatives to simply selecting a subject from what lay before her^*1. In 1993, her first solo exhibition, which she organized and installed herself, and a collaborative book with a poet attracted attention. The attention did not lead to further opportunities to show the work, and she moved her base to Paris that same year^*1. Onodera has said that she felt a need to work outside Japan and chose Europe over the more commercially oriented United States because of its cultural diversity. Within Europe, she chose Paris, which she regarded as a geographic and cultural crossroads^*16. After moving, she encountered many artists in France who worked across both photography and contemporary art, and saw photography being used actively as a new medium within contemporary art^*17. In another interview, she recalled that her work became more conceptual in this environment and that scale also became important^*19. She made Portrait of Second-hand Clothes in 1994, and the following year presented Down—comprising Liquid and Glass, Portrait of Second-hand Clothes, and Birds—at three venues in Tokyo, which brought her wider recognition in Japan^*8. At a time when the relationship between photography and contemporary art was changing, Onodera developed an approach that treated the structure of the camera, the darkroom, and the scale of the print as parts of a single production process. She later reflected that the sense of suspension in works from this period may have reflected her own way of living without fixing herself to one place or affiliation, and that instability felt more natural to her^*24. In Liquid and Glass, Portrait of Second-hand Clothes, and Birds, made after her move to Paris, subjects repeatedly appear detached from the ground.

Why Photography? Photography’s Original Strangeness

Onodera’s reason for continuing with photography lies in her interest in the mechanism of photography itself. In a 2013 text, she notes that her works are often described as “strange” or “mysterious.” She writes that she does not set out to make strange works; what appears strange arises from a complicated sense of resistance in the way she approaches and handles photography. Images now circulate in enormous quantities, and making and viewing photographs have become ordinary activities. Onodera looks back to a much earlier experience: how strange it must have been, soon after photography’s invention, to use an optical instrument to fix the world onto a flat surface and then see one’s own likeness as a photograph. She identifies the search for this original “strangeness” as one reason she remains committed to photography^*20. Later works continue that inquiry. She places a marble inside a camera or uses two lenses in separate places, testing familiar photographic mechanisms instead of accepting them as given.

From Looking for Subjects to Designing How to Photograph

After her initial impasse, the center of her work shifted from what to photograph to the conditions under which a photograph would be made. Each series uses a different apparatus. In Camera, two cameras face one another^*3. In How to Make a Pearl, she places a marble inside the camera; in Roma – Roma, she uses the two lenses of a stereo camera in separate locations. Onodera has explained that her ideas do not come directly from works of art or films. She thinks for long periods about things that continue to occupy her in everyday life, and a work begins when she discovers a connection with something else^*9. Her account of looking at an old stereo camera and wondering what would happen if its two lenses were exposed in different places, an idea that led to Roma – Roma, clearly shows this process. Because each series uses a different apparatus and procedure, the appearance of the images also changes substantially. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum describes Onodera’s work as a process close to sculpture, with alteration and construction beginning before the shutter is released^*13. A photograph is made through choosing an apparatus, modifying the camera, and deciding how to develop and print the image. The moment of exposure is one part of that process.

Working with Photography’s Constraints to Expand Its Possibilities

Onodera accepts photography’s lack of freedom as a condition of making work. She has said that a painter begins with a blank canvas, while a photographer cannot escape the meanings already attached to a subject or its connection to reality; for her, the interest of photography lies in picking something out from within those limits^*17. A camera does not move with the freedom of a paintbrush, and the photographer’s intention cannot fully determine the image. Onodera has explored what photography can do by changing the relationships among subject, apparatus, light, chance, and darkroom work. Discussing contemporary art, she has said that she feels comfortable at the boundary between fields: the art world sees her work as “photography,” while the photography world sees it as “contemporary art.” For her, that position holds many possibilities^*9. She also notes that photography circles can give form greater weight than content, while presenting a work only as contemporary art can make photography seem like one material among many. She keeps some distance from both fields without fixing herself in either one. She calls her work photography because it draws heavily on photographic history, the structure of the camera, printing techniques, and the circumstances surrounding photography^*9. Looking at photography from the side of contemporary art gave her another vantage point from which to consider photographic history and technique.

Rethinking How the Camera Is Used

In 2017, Michael Lucken read the marble in How to Make a Pearl as a foreign object that prevents the camera from operating normally. He saw the same attitude in Camera, Roma – Roma, and Look Out the Window, and noted that Onodera calls such methods “anti-photography”^*21. For Lucken, “anti-photography” names a way of redirecting the medium’s operations. Two lenses are used in separate places. An object is placed inside the light-tight camera body. Photographic paper receives another exposure after the picture has been taken. She departs from standard camera and darkroom procedures to draw out different operations. Lucken also points out that the act of photographing itself becomes part of the work. In 2002, Hideki Maeda based his discussion of Onodera on the difference between the perception of a camera, which has neither a body nor practical aims, and human perception. He argues that many photographers try to bring machine vision closer to human sight, while Onodera expands the possibility that the camera might see in a different way from a human being^*26. In How to Make a Pearl, the glass sphere produces another light inside the dark chamber; in Camera, one camera looks at another. From this perspective, her interventions move away from the habit of treating the camera as a substitute for one’s own eye.

Looking at Bodily Movement—Dance, Film, and Muybridge

Her interest in the body is deeply connected to her encounters with dance and film. Onodera resists a simple account in which her background in fashion led directly to her treatment of the body, and has said that she was influenced by dance and film, especially the work of William Forsythe and Pina Bausch in the 1980s and 1990s^*16. When watching films, she also found herself looking at how characters stood and walked, not simply following the story. This interest extends from the invisible body in Portrait of Second-hand Clothes to the later Muybridge’s Twist. In Muybridge’s Twist, the sequential photographs of Eadweard Muybridge served as a direct point of departure. Onodera collaged multiple fragments of bodies in an attempt to bring successive choreography into a single still image^*16. The dance of Forsythe and Bausch deepened her attention to bodily movement, while Muybridge’s sequences provided the specific starting point for Muybridge’s Twist. These different references converge on a continuing interest in how a photograph can hold the body and movement.

The Body at Work Beyond Exposure

In 2021, Lin Ye argued that because the camera as a black box can make the photographer’s body difficult to see within production, Onodera adds numerous actions outside the moment of exposure. She constructs subjects, researches places and travels, makes collages, colors prints one by one, and cuts paper. Ye places these actions within a process of testing and revising ideas through the body, rather than treating them as decorative finishing touches^*22. In Roma – Roma, memories of movement between two places return through hand-coloring; in Eleventh Finger, photographs made without using the viewfinder, with a camera held at chest level continue into the cutting of paper in the darkroom. Results partly produced by the apparatus are carried forward through later handwork. The work extends beyond the shutter into movement, memory, and darkroom labor.

Accepting Chance, Finishing by Hand

Onodera’s works combine carefully specified procedures with results that even the artist cannot fully predict. In How to Make a Pearl, the marble disrupts light inside the camera. In Roma – Roma, the order of exposure determines how the two places are paired. In Eleventh Finger, a photogram made with cut paper is layered over the face of a person photographed without using the viewfinder^*6. The mechanism is established, but the exact image is not decided in advance. This opening allows unexpected images to appear. After exposure, however, Onodera personally makes large gelatin silver prints, coarsens the grain, applies oil paint, and cuts paper. In a recent interview, she also said that she values some kind of circuit connecting the work and her body, and that she wants an image to appear as a material object, not remain something seen only on a screen^*16. Images that emerge through chance are shaped into works through manual decisions about scale, grain, color, and surface. She leaves some choices to the apparatus, then takes the results into the darkroom and into handwork. The two processes remain visible within the same work.

Leaving Meaning Open, Making the Method Specific

Onodera does not determine a work’s meaning in words before making it and then use photography to explain that meaning. She has said that technical ideas, words, images, and concepts mix together in her mind and may connect with another idea years later^*9. In another interview, she explained that making a future work too clear from the outset weakens it; she moves from an ambiguous state toward elements that gradually begin to acquire an outline^*17. As she researches camera structures, routes of movement, and darkroom techniques, ideas become specific procedures. The final image remains open. In the stereo camera of Roma – Roma and the marble in How to Make a Pearl, an idea takes the form of a concrete apparatus or procedure, while the image that results still contains something unpredictable. This method leaves parts of the finished picture that cannot be fully resolved by a single explanation.

Portrait of Second-hand Clothes—From Large Histories to One Garment at a Time

The 1994 series Portrait of Second-hand Clothes began when Onodera, after moving to Paris, wanted to make work concerned with people. She has said that after working with constructed photography, she wanted to move closer to human beings and chose clothing instead of actual people^*16. The garments came from Christian Boltanski’s exhibition Dispersion, where visitors could take second-hand clothes home. Boltanski used a vast accumulation of clothing to convey the scale of tragedy; Onodera spread out and photographed garments one by one, seeking the small histories of individuals submerged within larger history^*16. At the window of her Montmartre home, she held each garment upright with wire, adjusted the shoulders and hems, and waited for the right conditions in the sky and clouds. She later said that she avoided placing the clothing on the floor and presenting it as an object because she wanted to photograph the invisible body associated with it^*16. The fifty-two garments show neither owners’ names nor faces, yet each assumes a different posture. The brightness of the sky defines the contour while the inside of the fabric sinks into darkness, allowing each garment to register as something that once touched a body without adding a narrative about the person. SFMOMA holds several works from the series^*15. In 2017, Michael Lucken drew attention to the difference between Boltanski’s accumulation of clothing and Onodera’s decision to raise garments one by one into the air. He reads this distinction as an invitation to reconsider, garment by garment, a former owner, a generic body, and the culture of clothing^*21.

Transvest—Bringing the Outside World Inside the Body

In Transvest, begun in 2002, Onodera fills the outlines of figures cut from newspapers and magazines with existing images of streetlights, architecture, microscopic photographs, and other subjects, then photographs them in strong backlight. From a distance, each figure appears as a single black body. Up close, images from different places and scales remain visible inside it, producing a body that contains the outside world. Dana Friis-Hansen identifies a tension between presence and absence across Onodera’s work and argues that in Transvest, both the visible silhouette and the harder-to-see interior shape the work^*29. The Chinese photography critic Gu Zheng reads Portrait of Second-hand Clothes as a container in which clothing remembers the absent body; in Transvest, the body itself becomes a container for the world^*30. Seen together, the two series show how Onodera’s treatment of the body has moved away from photographing faces and addressed, by different means, what remains after a body disappears and the external images that enter the body.

How to Make a Pearl—Introducing a Foreign Object into the Camera

The 2000–01 series How to Make a Pearl grew from Onodera’s curiosity about the interior of a box camera she found at a flea market. An idea about marbles connected with something she had heard about how pearls form, leading to a method of placing a small glass sphere inside the camera^*1. Onodera photographed crowds on city streets in daylight, but the glass sphere collected and diffused light inside the camera’s dark interior. The people sank into darkness, while a white sphere appeared to float above them^*14. She then used chemical processing to make the grain extremely coarse and enlarged the images into gelatin silver prints more than two meters high. Exhibition materials from the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum explain that the enlarged grain itself becomes material in the picture, bringing the crowd out of the darkness^*10. The title refers to the way a pearl forms when a foreign object enters a shell. A small object inside the camera produces an image that the naked eye could not see, through both the optical apparatus and chemical processing. The transformation of light inside the camera determines the structure of the picture. In 2013, Onodera described the series as a work that directs attention to the existence of the camera itself at the same time as the crowd outside it^*20.

Roma – Roma—Setting Aside the Choice of Place

In the 2004 series Roma – Roma, the photographer’s habit of choosing places and selecting individual pictures becomes the subject of the work. Onodera covered one lens of a stereo camera and made 108 exposures in Roma, Sweden. She then rewound the film and used the opposite lens to photograph Roma, Spain, on the same roll. The order of exposure determined the pairings between the two places. She made no selection among the 108 completed pairs and hand-colored every black-and-white photograph with oil paint^*2. Onodera has explained that she deliberately set aside the usual practice of traveling to a place because it interested her as a photographer, and devised a method focused on “movement” itself^*17. By assigning one lens to one place and the other lens to another, the structure of the apparatus and the sequence of travel determine the combinations more than the photographer’s preference. Choices are reduced during exposure; afterward, every image is printed and colored by hand. Judgment is distributed across the entire process instead of being concentrated at the moment of the shutter. In her 2013 text, Onodera explains that Roma – Roma set aside the photographic habit of recording a place. By retaining only the place names, she attempted to remove the photographer from the center of the work^*20.Evence Verdier reads Birds, Watch Your Joints!, and Roma – Roma as works that bring movement and different times into the still image^*28. In Roma – Roma, a pair of images carries more than the instant of exposure: it also holds the movement between two towns, the rewinding of the film, and the hand-coloring based on memory.

Below Orpheus—Turning Fiction into Physical Travel

The 2006 work Below Orpheus began with an unresolved disappearance at a hotel. Two and a half years later, Onodera stayed in the same room and photographed it. Using a seventeenth-century legend as a further clue, she then traveled to the point on the opposite side of the earth from the place of disappearance^*27. Here, a hypothesis connecting fact and fiction determines the photographer’s route, and movement itself becomes part of the production process. In Roma – Roma, identical place names determine the route; in Below Orpheus, the connection between an incident and a legend does so. For Onodera, stories and rules can send her to places she would not normally choose, as well as shape the finished photographs.

Eleventh Finger and the Large Print—Work That Continues After Exposure

In the 2006 series Eleventh Finger, Onodera photographed people on the street without using the viewfinder, then placed paper with cutout holes on the photographic paper and made a photogram over the face area. Coarse photographic grain and the hand-cut contour of the paper remain together in a single image^*6. According to Onodera’s production notes, the decision to cover faces began with questions about the image rights of people photographed without permission. Instead of using a conventional blur, she placed cut black paper over the photographic paper and made a white “shadow” through the photogram process. Her aim was to make flat white areas coexist with the rough texture of gelatin silver photography. Everything, including life-size prints up to about two meters high, was made through analog processes^*25. Regarding the title, LensCulture cites Onodera’s explanation of an “unknown collaboration” between the subject’s ten fingers and the photographer’s one finger pressing the shutter^*23.Gu Zheng notes that covering the face redirects a viewer’s attention, which in portrait photography usually goes first to the face, toward the posture and movement of the body^*30. Onodera changes where the viewer looks first as well as how the photograph is made. Onodera’s works are often made as large gelatin silver prints: Portrait of Second-hand Clothes measures 115 centimeters square, while How to Make a Pearl reaches 210 by 150 centimeters^*10. Her 2010 retrospective at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum also centered on the way her methods change from one series to another, from camera modifications and collage to computer-based transformation^*10. Scale, grain, cutting, and coloring show how the work continues after exposure, on the surface of the print and into the exhibition space.

A Different Direction in the Era of “Onnanoko Shashin”

In Japan during the 1990s, self-portraits and photographs of everyday life by young women drew attention and were often grouped under the label onnanoko shashin, or “girl photography.” The J. Paul Getty Museum describes the term as reductive and controversial. Its 2015 exhibition The Younger Generation presented Onodera, Rinko Kawauchi, Chino Otsuka, Tomoko Sawada, and Lieko Shiga as five diverse practices that could not be encompassed by that label^*4. Onodera also emerged in the early 1990s, as the first winner of the New Cosmos of Photography, yet from the beginning she did not center direct records of private life or self-portraiture. Her attention went to constructed images, the structure of the camera, the darkroom, and large prints. These artists shared the historical moment in which young women photographers were gaining new prominence, but their work cannot be reduced to a single style. After moving to Paris, Onodera encountered a setting in which contemporary photography was actively presented as a medium of contemporary art. She later recalled that her own work became more conceptual there and that scale became more important^*19. Photographic history, camera structure, and printing techniques remained integral to the work^*9. Her career intersects with both the rise of women photographers in the 1990s and the growing proximity of photography and contemporary art. Within that setting, she developed work centered on the camera’s structure, the darkroom, and materiality. In the 2005 exhibition Life Actually at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Michiko Kasahara discussed How to Make a Pearl as a portrait of contemporary people and Transvest as a portrait of a complex contemporary individual^*31. Even within an exhibition devoted to women artists, Onodera’s work was read in terms of crowds, anonymous bodies, and figures containing multiple images, rather than private confession or first-person everyday life.

International Criticism: Apparatus, Body, and Time

International criticism has approached Onodera’s work through different questions of apparatus, body, and time. In 2005, Evence Verdier compared her placement of a marble inside the camera in How to Make a Pearl to John Cage’s prepared piano^*28. The comparison does not claim a line of influence. It explains a method of inserting a foreign object into an existing device to draw out an operation it was not designed to produce. In 2021, Lin Ye discussed the travel, fabrication, coloring, and darkroom work added beyond the exposure as actions that return the body to photographic production^*22. In 2024, Yuzu Murakami connected the recurring sense of suspension in the early works with Onodera’s own stated affinity for instability^*24. Although these readings differ, each shows that an initial idea is carried through the camera’s structure, the photographer’s movement, manual processes, and even the order in which viewers look.

What Connects the Different Series

The Centre Pompidou collection includes multiple works from Portrait of Second-hand Clothes and Look Out the Window^*7. SFMOMA holds works from Portrait of Second-hand Clothes, How to Make a Pearl, and Look Out the Window^*15. Works from different periods and made by different methods have continued to be represented in major international museum collections. The series vary greatly in appearance, but Onodera does not try to determine every element of the picture through the photographer’s judgment alone. A marble changes the light inside the camera. A stereo camera combines two places. A photogram creates another contour in the darkroom. She then works directly on the scale, grain, color, and surface of the print. The actual subject before the camera, optical changes inside the apparatus, chemical processing, and the surface of photographic paper remain in the work as physical traces. From one series to another, Onodera changes the relationships among the photographer’s intention, the subject, the apparatus, chance, and handwork. Her methods continue to change, but she consistently asks how a photograph becomes an image and where the photographer can enter that process, pursuing those questions through specific production procedures. In recent work, Onodera has not limited herself to gelatin silver photography. In the 2022 work Here, No Balloon, she overlays a digital 2.5D print on a gelatin silver print nearly two meters high that she printed herself, then collages them on canvas^*32. She uses gelatin silver and digital processes according to the needs of each work and combines the necessary procedures. Her commitment to treating the image again as a physical object continues in recent work.