CONCRETE OCTOPUS by Osamu Kanemura


 

It would be strange and misleading, though obviously not wholly inaccurate, to call these photographs “images of the Japan of the present time.” Though they might perhaps have much to say to the social historian, their documentary function is circumscribed by the interest in exploring a visual universe too disunited and incomplete to be recognizable as a cultural or historical form. In these images, the world presents itself with great purity and without provocation or seduction, as though poised in the interval before the repetition of an already forgotten catastrophe. 

Chris Fujiwara

Osamu Kanemura (b.1964) is a photographer born and based in Tokyo. He has been photographing the city-scapes in his solid monochromes. Since 1992, he has had more than twenty solo exhibitions in Tokyo, New York and other cities. His works have been featured in many exhibitions, including the 1996 'New Photography 12,' The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the 1997 'Absolute Landscape,' Yokohama Museum of Art, the 2004 Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles, and the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale. His 2002 photobook, "Spider's Strategy" is widely known as his major publication.

His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, as well as in other public and private collections. He received the New Photographer Prize from the Photographic Society of Japan in 1997, the Ken Domon Prize in 2000, and the Ina Nobuo prize in 2014.