Yuki Tawada

Tawada began to study photography seriously while an exchange student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, during her time at Tohoku University. Drawn to the medium there, she went on to major in photography at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, before completing master’s and doctoral programs in Intermedia Art at Tokyo University of the Arts^*1. At Camberwell, her attention shifted from composing what the camera recorded to the physical properties of the photograph and the possibility of intervening in its surface^*12.

Her turn toward paper and surface cannot be understood as material experiment alone. In a later official statement, Tawada explains that she works with photography because it is publicly treated as an objective medium even as it acts deeply on private emotion and the unconscious^*2. The photographic surface became a meeting point between depicted content and the body’s response to the image.

Her master’s thesis at Tokyo University of the Arts, “A Method of Treating Memory through Photography,” considered how photography might participate in psychological healing through phototherapy. According to the examination summary for her doctoral dissertation, “The Contemporary Significance of Magic Realism,” Tawada sought to introduce aura and emotional movement into still photographs and to render unseen forces operating within everyday life through tactile methods informed by sympathetic magic and art therapy^*14. Healing here lies less in a finished artwork’s medical efficacy than in reorganizing one’s relation to memory and fear through the act of touching photographs. Tawada’s account of feeling that her own face was being burned when she applied a heated iron to a self-portrait shows how a photograph can be experienced both as a paper object and as a surrogate for its subject^*6. This duality led her interventions on the surface beyond formal experimentation and toward acts that engage memory and emotion.

Making Photographs Speak Again in a Culture of Image Consumption

Her official statement frames the work as a search for ways to make photographs consumed amid the overabundance of information in contemporary life speak again, beyond the reproduction of magical or therapeutic effects^*2. This concern, articulated later in her career, runs through the scraping, folding, and burning she has pursued since WHITE OUT. Manual intervention does more than add an effect. It records the history of someone touching the photograph, hesitating, choosing, and making an irreversible change.

At a 2025 workshop at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, Tawada framed the assignment around “experiencing a photograph as an object,” “beginning a story through touch,” and allowing “traces to open memory and reality”^*11. By retaining the reality recorded by the camera while adding scratches, folds, and burns to its surface, she gives physical form to memories and emotions that had no visible shape at the moment of exposure. This is how her idea of magic realism becomes a concrete working method.

WHITE OUT: Erasing the Crowd’s Information to Draw an Unseen Force

In the early major series WHITE OUT, Tawada abrades large-format prints of crowds in stadiums and cities with erasers, needles, and sandpaper. A 2007 exhibition text explains that she sought to capture the energy that arises once a crowd passes a certain scale, rather than individual facial expressions, and that erasing the image released a torrent of white light^*7.

A crowd photograph can record faces, clothing, seats, and architecture in detail, yet the excitement, anxiety, conformity, and frenzy generated by a group do not appear in the figure of any single person. Instead of adding more information, Tawada removes parts of the recorded bodies and makes the white beneath the ink function as light, smoke, or explosion. The doctoral dissertation’s idea of introducing “movement” into the still photograph to render unseen emotional forces is enacted here through erasure^*14. Scraping becomes a reverse form of drawing. By reducing the details through which the crowd is read as a collection of individuals—faces, clothing, and other markers—Tawada adds the group’s previously formless force as a white trace.

Burnt Photographs: Sacrificial Motifs and the “Empty Shell”

With Burnt Photographs, Tawada adds fire to the more controlled process of scraping the surface. She likens the work to drawing out and releasing something like the soul of a subject trapped in the print, and calls a burned photograph an “empty shell” that retains a presence after the substance has departed^*6.

The choice of subjects is deliberate. They include taxidermied animals, tropical plants in botanical gardens, dances performed for tourists, religious objects removed from temples and shrines, and people who left their home regions for the city—all displaced from their original land or purpose and turned into objects of display, performance, or observation. Tawada links flowers, animals, Buddhist figures, halos, and dancing bodies to motifs once offered in sacrifice, writing that burning returns the fixed photograph to an organic state^*6. Photography can transport a subject into the city and fix it as a specimen; burning opens that fixity back into change.

Erasers and needles allow comparatively fine control over gesture and form. Fire irreversibly alters the paper’s contour, strength, and thickness as well as the image. Tawada’s experience of feeling that her face was actually being burned when she burned a self-portrait reveals the difficulty of fully separating photograph and subject in the psyche^*6. The sense that an act performed on an image can reach the thing it depicts parallels the logic of sympathetic magic, in which effects pass between things that resemble or have touched one another^*20. Burning carries contradictory sensations of harm, sacrifice, and release. Tawada has described both the pleasure of breaking a taboo and, ultimately, a feeling of being forgiven by the subject^*6. Fire’s irreversible transformation gives material form to the psychological identification between photograph and subject by taking it on as damage to the paper.

I am in You and Family Ritual: Approaching Fear and Family Memory

I am in You, Tawada and her mother burned photographs of waves breaking on shore against the background of her intensified fear of the sea after the Great East Japan Earthquake. On a gallery tour, she explained that she repeatedly burned away the water while preserving the sea foam in an attempt to soothe her fear of the sea and the injury it had left^*19.

Tawada applies fire to the photograph that recorded the sea itself, keeping the fear tied to its source. By repeatedly touching an image that points to past reality and deciding with her mother what to retain and what to let disappear, fear moves from an emotion enclosed in the mind to a concrete task carried out together. Shadow Dance and Family Ritual also use photographs and archival images from the maternal line. The roles of photographer, owner, subject, and person altering the image overlap, extending private memory into a process handled within the family^*4. Healing appears as the creation of an order and duration through which fear and the past can be approached via photographs, rather than as their erasure.

Making Loss Spatial: Why the Prints Are Layered, Lifted, and Suspended

Tawada does not press her burned prints flat against a single wall. She layers them, lifts them on pins, and sometimes suspends them from the ceiling. Seeing as Though Touching at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum treated photography as matter with a support, surface, and mode of installation, as well as depicted content, and presented I am in You as a central example^*5.

A flat photograph hung on a wall encourages the viewer to read the image frontally. Hiroshi Uemura argues that experiencing a photograph as an object requires an installation that prompts changes in viewpoint—walking around the work, peering into it, or looking upward^*10. When lifted and layered, the burned holes disclose another water surface or the wall behind; charred edges cast shadows; and the overlap of images changes with the viewer’s position. Loss no longer remains blank space. It transmits light, reveals another image, and becomes a spatial structure that sets the viewer in motion.

WHITE OUT and Missing Folklore: Crowds and the Urban Unconscious

WHITE OUT strips information from images of crowds and renders the force arising across the group as white form. In the subsequent Missing Folklore, erasure extends to architecture, roads, and night views; contours and signs that identify the city are replaced by white traces^*3. The Japan Times described the exhibition as a group of large works in which the surfaces of urban photographs had been scraped, blurred, and scratched^*8.

As her subject shifts from people to the city, the underlying problem remains: the visible appearance captured by the camera cannot fully convey the feelings and memories that animate a place. Removing place names, functions, and identifying details shifts the city from a legible location into a psychological field where heat, tension, and forgetting overlap. The white scars keep the city grounded in reality while adding forces that operate within it but do not register directly in a photograph.

From Shadow Dance to Ash and Ceramics: What Remains after the Image

In Shadow Dance, Family Tree, and I am in You, burned family and seascape photographs are reconstructed in layers, so that loss within the image, support, and shadow form a single work. The 2024 book Her smoke rose up forever brings together series on matrilineal memory and collaborations in which the ash of burned photographs becomes glaze on ceramic works by Fuku Fukumoto^*15.

In these collaborations, the photograph persists as ash fixed to a ceramic surface after it can no longer be read as an image^*16. The progression from print to charred paper, ash, and glaze holds preservation and disappearance together. Image information is lost, while the matter that composed the photograph and the history of its making pass into another support. Tawada’s “empty shell” is a form for sensing presence in matter after the image has departed, rather than destruction that leaves nothing.

Presented at Fotogalerie Wien in 2025, Lachrymatory was described as a work in which participants burned personal photographs they had brought and used the ash in the glaze of tear vessels, transferring private memory into a tangible form while questioning the materiality of images and the fragility of memory^*21. In a French article on the Rencontres d’Arles, curator Mariko Takeuchi explained that Tawada also uses the remains of found snapshots made by ordinary consumers, addressing invisible connections between her own family and anonymous families^*22. Even after private photographs lose their original owners and contexts, their burned remnants and ash can become material for new relations.

In Scent of the Sky (2025), she also tested a structure in which viewers or owners intervene in the work’s transformation, leaving its final state and moment of completion to the owner^*23. Photographic transformation thus extends beyond the passage from paper to ash or ceramic to questions of time and ownership: who touches the work, and when it is considered complete.

Post-Photography: Giving Reproducible Images a Singular History

With Shigeo Goto and others, Tawada organized Photography Mutates: MUTANT(S) on POST/PHOTOGRAPHY, presenting photography as a medium that changes state among print, three-dimensional form, moving image, and digital processing^*13. In an essay on the project, Keiju Kita takes Tawada’s statement—“for now, we can still let materials speak”—as a point of departure and analyzes how images originally made for a photobook are reused in THEGIRLWHOWASPLUGGEDIN and repeated as material within the exhibition space^*18.

Post-photography here does not mean what comes after photography’s end. It names the way one image acquires a different temporality and mode of touch each time it moves among book, print, cut paper, installation, ash, and ceramic. In 2025 Tawada described photographs, in an era when AI can generate images resembling reality, as “touchable dreams” marked by the hand^*12. Scraping, folding, and burning do not signal a return to analog photography. They inscribe infinitely reproducible images with a history of a particular person touching, judging, and making an irreversible alteration.

Healing and Ritual: Changing One’s Relation to Memory

In Tawada’s master’s and doctoral research, healing lies in changing one’s relation to memory and fear by touching photographs, repeating actions, and working with others; it is not a medical effect delivered by the finished work. In I am in You, she and her mother repeatedly burned away the water while preserving the foam, turning fear of the sea into a duration they could work through together. The work leaves fear unresolved and shows the sequence and duration of actions constructed to approach it.

Charred edges, lace-like holes, and overlapping shadows have a strong visual impact. Their beauty and the skill of burning can come forward so quickly that the family history, fear, and urban displacement behind them recede. In a 2018 exhibition review, Kotaro Iizawa observed that although the works’ material presence attracts attention, it is underwritten by conviction and urgency in grasping reality through this method^*9. Reading the works therefore requires attention to the form of the damage, the photographed subject, the person making the alteration, the collaborators, and the extent of transformation.

Photographic Materiality and Magic Realism

Photography historian and anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards argues that an exclusive focus on depicted content obscures the photograph’s status as an object that is made, handled, stored, and damaged^*17. Art historian Toshiharu Ito likewise notes that photographic supports have repeatedly changed over the medium’s short history and writes that the photographic image has continually searched for a body in which to dwell. He interprets Tawada’s handwork as an attempt to reawaken photography’s magical materiality and aura^*2. Seeing as Though Touching at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum approached photography and moving images as material media that act on the viewer’s senses^*5. Tawada’s work can therefore be situated within debates about photographic materiality and post-photography that intensified after the 2000s.

Tawada belongs to a broader field of material approaches to photography. The 2024 international exhibition I’m So Happy You Are Here organized the work of Japanese women photographers around three lines: observation of everyday life, critiques of social roles, and experiments with and expansions of photographic form. Alongside prints, it presented installations, moving images, and photobooks as part of photographic history^*24. Tawada’s work appeared within this broader movement beyond the flat print.

The Photographers’ Gallery Bookshop in London likewise describes her scraping and burning as an inquiry that crosses photography, painting, and sculpture and pursues photography as a material medium^*25. This is an example of international reception rather than an academic classification, but it shows that Tawada is being introduced as an artist who expands photographic form beyond material experiment alone.

Tawada extends the exposure of the support into questions of photography’s surrogate function and emotional force. Because a photograph is received as objective evidence while also acting as a proxy for its subject, physical interventions in the image become ways of engaging unseen forces, fear, and memory. In her doctoral dissertation, magic realism is defined less as a technique for producing fantasy detached from reality than as a process of psychological healing that gives tactile trace to feelings and auras at work within visible everyday life^*14.

The “aura” and magical force invoked in her official statement do not call for a literal revival of older beliefs. They describe a way of returning nonexchangeable histories—scratches, burns, the uncertainty of the hand, and labor shared with family—to images that are endlessly reproduced and consumed, allowing photography’s effect on feeling to be experienced anew. Tawada’s place in photographic history lies in her expansion of the photograph from flat image to three-dimensional object, and in her use of prints that retain traces of reality to give form to what photographic objectivity cannot easily hold. Material transformation, psychological healing, and rituals drawn from folk belief converge in a single working method.