In an intimate environment, which invites melancholy, hotel rooms in gloom and with the masculine nude as a sign of identity, he develops his subtle photographic work the Japanese Sakiko Nomura (Shimonoseki, 58 years old). Little known outside his country, Nomura is shown in person in line with his work: he speaks in a low tone, almost in whisper, he dresses completely black and, as he has recognized, is “grim in words.” Now there is the opportunity to discover her works – it is the author of 34 photolibros, which edits with care – in her first retrospective in Spain, at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid, from February 6 to May 11.
“My way of taking photos is to get what I see, the beautiful and the sad at the same time can be; Life and death, ”he said in the presentation to the press this Tuesday. With the title of SAKIKO NOMURA. Tender is the nighttaken from Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, the exhibition brings together 142 photographs and 18 photolibros exhibited in showcases. Nomura, after graduating in an art and design faculty of his country, learned the trade of one of the best known Japanese photographers, Nobuyoshi Araki, a portraitist of female nudes of aesthetics close to sadomasochism, “who asked to be his assistant and For the one who has worked for 20 years, ”explained the exhibition commissioner, Enrique Juncosa. In his images, Nomura avoids putting titles and dates, so the route is organized according to his photolibros and not chronologically.
This author began her career at a time of economic difficulties in her country, the nineties of the last century, but in which museums and galleries were inaugurated, and public and private institutions began to treasure photography collections. As of 1993, at a stage where several Japanese photographers are announced, he exposes his images in Japan and other Asian countries. His work is almost all in black and white, although the principle of the sample is for his photolibro Night Flight (Night flight), 2008, in color, which anticipates it later: male nudes in night -grain night shots, in rooms from which dense clouds of chimneys and airplanes that take off.
Also in color they are his photos of flowers, almost always on black background. Blighted naturalness of orchids, lilies, roses, chrysanthemums … that portrays when they are starting to wither, symbol of the baroque hanites, of the transience of life, present in almost all his work.
This reaches the central theme, the male nude, which was a daring, a break with the stereotype in his country when he published his first book, Naked Room (The naked room), of 1994. We see male bodies curled in bed, men, and also some women, who look at the air with air of sadness and in which it is intuited, in the dark, their sex.
It is a disturbing, mysterious world, of which it names barely gives details (“photography is to take pictures of nudes, face the discovered existence,” he said in an interview in 2022). “It’s not about getting a naked man, but about establishing a relationship with that person; We share a time and place, in silence. It is not a matter of appearance, ”he said this time.
We do know that they are sessions in which, as in Scott Fitzgerald cited, its protagonists are young and attractive, which gives an important erotic load to the images. Hiroki Kurotaki was the first model that posed naked for her, whom she portrayed for twenty years, until her death. In other cases they are known or friends of Nomura, who invites you to undress in hotels rooms or in the bedrooms of their homes. He barely gives them a few instructions and leaves them freedom to move.
Asked why her photographic world transmits that unease, Nomura has responded with a poetic phrase, which could be a Japanese proverb: “There is a current in me that takes me to a sea that is calm and in which when some light ones are built Waves, that’s what I want to capture. ”
In the final stretch there are two other series. In My Last Remaining Dream (The last dream that I have left) There is a selection of the 593 images he has taken for decades of Koshiro Matsumoto X, Kabuki actor, the traditional Japanese theater, emerged in Kioto at the beginning of the 17th century. Nomura not only portrayed him acting, but also while changing clothes or made up. Matsumoto, who began his career with six years, descends from a family in which all its male members, since their great -grandfather, have been and are Kabuki actors.
While in Majestic (Majestic), published in 2022, photographed tattooed men, belonging to the Edo-Choyukai association, which pilgrimage to Mount Oyama every year, a sacred space in which they fulfill the rite of bathing in a waterfall.
Nomura has ended up telling that, for this exhibition, he was in Granada last summer taking photos (a handful is exposed). A job that will serve you “for next projects.” “I threw about 200 reels,” he said. A barbarity of images that indicates that she photographs both analog and digital and that, in any case, does not stop clicking, as explained. “I don’t think about throwing a picture, I do it because I hardly need a viewfinder, my eyes are my viewfinder.”