Challenging Conventions of Seeing: Photography in the Art of Suga Kishio, Enokura Kōji and Nomura Hitoshi

In 1970s Japan, artists such as Suga Kishio, Enokura Kōji and Nomura Hitoshi discovered the recording potential of the camera to subvert conventions of seeing and urge a renewed perception of the world. Disguised as snapshots that record simple everyday events, their photographs were rather active investigations of the world we live in: a branch pressing a piece of bubble wrap just beneath the water surface, a trail of water left on the ground cutting through a narrow street, the artist’s body curving along the line of the waves on the sand, a hand extended forward projecting its shadow on the floor, a sequence recording the evaporation of dry ice and so on. These photographs do not attempt to spontaneously capture everyday life. They are rather staged situations and nonsensical interventions within everyday spaces that seek to explore the passing of time itself, in-between spaces, fragile situations on-the-verge-of-disappearance and inter-relations between things, spaces, humans and natural phenomena. As such, they provide an “experience of experience,” to borrow the words of Jeff Wall, in which the viewer is urged to experience the world in a fresh new way. This paper will examine the ways in which these artists utilized the “documenting” and “mediating” functions of the photograph in order to capture reality as it is – beyond the recorded object and freed from the mediation of language and logic.