2001, Little More Ltd,. Japan, 1st Edition

Rinko Kawauchi is a contemporary photographer from Japan. Kawauchi's work focuses on ordinary things and everyday situations. Her photographs attain their specific quality through her use of cropping and choice of perspective as well as the subtle use of natural light in combination with often virtually transparent colours. Rinko Kawauchi works in series, which, in the form of open narratives, combine poetry and emotion with representations of mortality and occasional melancholy.

Whatever her mood, Rinko Kawauchi says that taking pictures is as natural to her as drinking tea: she seizes upon anything that strikes her; insects, children, animals, scraps of ordinary life, tin scraps of life that embody - more often than not - the ephemeral. Inexhaustibly, her work constructs a new kind of inventory, the unacknowledged purpose of which is to emphasize connections between human beings and the natural or animal world. Her subject-matter is, in appearance, banal: a pan with eggs to be fried, worn rope, a child seen from behind, a dead bug and so on. But there is always another dimension. Rinko Kawauchi's eye feeds off a wealth of everyday images in order to display poetic force - a process which may sound hubristic but actually conducted with characteristically Japanese discretion.

Courtesy of Ibasho Gallery

Utatane is Kawauchi’s debut photobook, won awards for its graceful contemplation of morality. Kawauchi experiments with the emotions that life can bring - organically.