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  ©Hisashi Kagawa

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  ©Hisashi Kagawa

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Hisashi Kagawa’s exhibition of black and white photographs, Port and Rock, is being held this month.

It was during his first carrier as a young TV cameraman, that he decided to choose still photography as his means of expression. To him, popularity appeared to be the only yardstick for evaluating images in the mass medium. 

After a short period of self-instruction, he left for Italy in 1997 to explore the essence of art for a year in Florence. He then moved to London to answer his question of whether a photographer’s expressiveness really matter when shooting man-made objects such as sculptures and buildings. Kagawa searched for his answer using one of the classic methods, the bromoil technique§and learned an idea of exercising one’s utmost skill in photographic production. To his disappointment, this method, which was popular during the Pictorialism era, drew the audience’s attention to the technique he used more than to his work itself. An encounter in those days with H. Sugimoto’s Theater series exhibited in London, 2001, gave him a good opportunity to learn definite concept is essential in photographic production and that even modern constructions can be the subjects of artistic expression.

The photographs on display in this exhibition are the results of conclusion he finally reached through these experiences. He became more interested to express visually the process of collecting the facts to discover the potential essence contained with them. We gain a great amount of information through our eyes and discriminate it instantaneously between what is interesting and what is not, and things which are not attractive cease to exist, even if they are in plain sight. This is Kagawa’s concept of existence and he tries to express it photographically.

“Port and Rock” were photographed at near-by seaside locations. They do not have any significance as a photographic subject. Their existence is quite obscure, since they seldom attract particular attention in our daily life. Things insignificant individually, however, can create deeper meanings when gathered in numbers. And, as the result, their existence becomes more meaningful. In order to clarify this concept, Kagawa went back to producing gelatin silver prints, which are apt for straight expression. More than 30 prints from the series are exhibited.