What to See in N.Y.C Galleries in May in The New York Times
"The best photography show in town is also the American debut for the Japanese photographer Tamiko Nishimura, who is in her mid-70s. Her exhibition, “Journeys,” organized by Pauline Vermare, a curator at the Brooklyn Museum, serves as an excellent introduction to this artist, who graduated from the Tokyo College of Photography in 1969 and has had a full career in Japan but is less known abroad.
The photographs in “Journeys,” mostly from the 1970s, feature sharply oblique angles, grainy surfaces and subjects — largely women and children — turned away from their viewers. Telephone wires cut through urban landscapes, and roads lead to places outside the picture frame. There are echoes of the French master Eugène Atget, with his uncanny shop windows, and the Surrealists who distorted their pictures. However, the photographs fall very much in line with the radical Japanese Provoke movement and artists like Daido Moriyama, who offered a sharper, more critical view of Japan than what was seen in the mainstream media.
Most of the photographs here are vintage prints, and several photography books display a medium in which Japanese artists historically excelled. (Nishimura’s first photobook, “Shikishima,” was published in 1973 and captured her journeys around Japan.) This show is important for photography experts as well as for anyone who wants a window into the art and craft of Japanese photography in the 20th century, and particularly with a sly, insurgently feminist perspective.
MARTHA SCHWENDENER
