Abstracts Geography

'Photography as another reality’: representations of the ‘everyday’ in photographs by Takashi Homma, Naoya Hatakeyama and Rinko Kawauchi

by Dominika Mackiewicz

This thesis explores different representations of everyday life in the works of three contemporary Japanese photographers: Takashi Homma (b. 1962), Naoya Hatakeyama (b. 1958) and Rinko Kawauchi (b. 1972). These representations encompass themes, techniques, theories and historical frameworks that, together, convey a breadth of engagement with the everyday landscapes representative of the photographers’ oeuvres. By presenting an in-depth examination of these relationships, the thesis aims to illuminate the new discursive spaces, networks and nuances in their photographs, which have not been addressed to this day. At its core, the thesis presents a detailed contextual and visual analysis of selected photographs that engage with the themes and concepts of the ‘everyday’, such as ‘rhythmanalysis’, ‘personal geographies’, openness to interpretation, embrace of the ‘accidental’ and proclivity to blend facts with fictions. A secondary objective of this thesis is also to show how these various interpretations of the ‘everyday’ allow us to identify hitherto unstudied connections between Homma, Hatakeyama and Kawauchi’s works and the historical context of konpora photography. Officially recognised in 1968 and extensively discussed at the time, konpora was a Japanese photographic phenomenon that took its name from the word ‘contemporary’ and portrayed everyday life with simplicity and ambiguity. Still, the greater part of scholarship and surveys of Japanese photography in the English language have underplayed the role of konpora in the history of postwar photography from Japan - a shortcoming this thesis helps to address. Involving historical and critical research methods, paired with a visual reading of the photographs, this thesis aspires to discover new interpretative avenues of the photographers’ works, and argues that the re-examination of konpora contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the connections between the photographic past and the present.