Kanemura: Photographs “Tokyo”

December 07, 1995 - January 13, 1996

Osamu Kanemura has most recently emerged as one of Japan’s strongest young photographers. His works, black and white photographs of metropolitan Tokyo, have an inherent confusion to them, requiring the viewer to evaluate their content, inviting them to understand their disorder. Unfortunately this conflicts with the artist’s intent. He plainly disagrees when he states, “The point is not to retell or recompose the story of the ‘unorganized noises,’ but to incoherently connect the incoherent landscape.”

Tokyo, a city historically known for its lack of free space and its inherent organization, is tightly compacted into each one of these 19 x 23 inch images. Kanemura brings the city to life in his compositions. Buildings with their hundreds of window eyes, their tangles of wires, streamers and banners; signs with Japanese characters screaming out at you, asking for explanation. Instantaneously you remove yourself from the chaos and become an outside viewer. Kanemura says of his photographers “[They] expose the surplus of Tokyo like a broken dam pouring into every corner.”

Kanemura, like most young artists, has several jobs which help him to survive in the bustling Tokyo metropolis. One position actually enables and encourages him to take more pictures. Kanemura delivers newspapers to several kiosks throughout the center of Tokyo, focusing around the area of Shinjuku Train Station. He must deliver papers in the morning and then again in the early evening. His work schedule is not felxible, but the free time in between his shifts allows him ample opportunity to travel to various districts of Tokyo on the elaborate train network. Always on the lookout for new locations, Kanemura produces truly unique imagery which captures the intensity of living in Tokyo, Japan.

This will be Kanemura’s first solo exhibition in the United States. There will be 40 to 50 images in the exhibition.