Dashwood Books co-publication with Alison Bradley Projects accompanies the exhibition Tamiko Nishimura: Journeys curated by Pauline Vermare on view at Alison Bradley Projects, 526 West 26th Street, New York April 25th now extended through June 26th.
Tamiko Nishimura (Born in Tokyo, 1948) graduated from Tokyo College of Photography (now Tokyo Visual Arts) in 1969. She emerged as part of the vibrant Japanese avant-garde scene in the early 1970s. Over the years, her work—largely based on her own journeys and experiences in Japan and abroad—conveys both a personal and beautifully theatrical perspective on the world.
Nishimura photographs in an instinctive and spontaneous way. Her visual language is poetic, spiritual, and deeply personal. While her stylistic approach to image-making, in contrasted black and white, often blurred, or grainy, is close to some of the artists associated with Provoke, her work is imbued with an introspective and haunting quality that evokes a unique and profound emotional dimension. Throughout her long and ongoing career, Nishimura has photographed women with a distinct attentiveness. The closeup of a woman’s face, her hair brushed by the wind; a woman energetically walking down the street with her grocery basket, her head turned away from the camera; the back of two women walking down a street; a girl reading on a sofa with a magazine resting on her knees; or the intimate portraits of her childhood friend. These photographs depicting women in their everyday lives are filled with a knowing and empathetic quality that stands out in the history of Japanese photography.
In 1973, Nishimura published her debut photobook, Shikishima, a masterpiece including photographs taken from 1969 to 1972 on her journeys across various regions of Japan including Hokkaidō, Tōhoku, Hokuriku, Kantō, Kansai, and Chūgoku. As photobook historian Russet Lederman notes, this book—which was republished by Zen Foto Gallery in 2014—is considered today one of the major Japanese photobooks in history. From the 1980s on, Nishimura expanded her travels beyond Japan, to Southeast Asia and Europe, printing and publishing along the way. She describes her career as “a sequence of journeys,” taking immense pleasure in photographing her free, nomadic existence.
