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  ©Michiko Kon

Michiko Kon is a well-known photographer of Japan. She makes unique objects with food such as fresh fishes and vegetables, as well as with flowers and insects, then photographs these objects and produces beautiful gelatin silver prints. Various objects produced by her fertile imagination appear on photographic printing paper. She creates incomparable beautiful world weaved by opposites such as light & shadow, life & death, and imagination & reality.

Kon produced black & white photographs since late 1970s also color works on and off since 1994. Her “black & white” world of photography expands to “red & black” or “blue & black”, and it is mainly color works that she produces since 2001.

The prints shown at the exhibition is a selection from masterpieces by Michiko Kon including “Yellowtail and Hat, 1987”, “Octopus and Melon, 1989” as well as “Sunflower and Sardines, 1990”, which are recently printed by platinum printing process. Breathed new life by platinum process, photographs by Kon becomes more elegant with beautiful texture like lithograph. This is new “still-life photographs” by Michiko Kon who is conscious of surface and materials.

Platinum printing is a classic photographic printing process in 1880s through 1920s. Because of distinctive elegant rich tonal range with depth, platinum prints came to photographers’ attention again at present time.

Around 20 platinum prints, a selection from masterpieces by Michiko Kon from 1979 to present, are shown at the exhibition. This is an exhibition of another world of photography of Michiko Kon created by platinum prints.

Michiko Kon
Born in 1955 in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture. Received The Ihei Kimura Photography Award in 1991. Kon has had many one-person exhibitions since 1985. Recent group exhibition includes “Beyond the surface _ Japanese Style of Making Things” (Singapore Art Museum, 2003), “The History of Japanese Photography” (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2003).

Public Collection: The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (Tokyo), Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (Tokyo), The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago), International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House (Rochester), Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona (Tucson), Art Museum, Princeton University (Princeton), Polaroid Collection (Cambridge), and others.

Exhibitions at PGI