Lecture by Rinko Kawauchi
Tuesday, September 24, 2013 at 7pm
Timken Lecture Hall, California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street, 
San Francisco, CA 94107

Free and open to the public 
No RSVP – Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.

Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi has gained international recognition for her nuanced, lushly colored images that offer closely observed fragments of everyday life. In 2001, Kawauchi launched her career with the simultaneous publication of three astonishing photobooks –Utatane, Hanabi and Hanako – firmly establishing herself as one of the most innovative newcomers to contemporary photography.

Kawauchi sees her work as a vast archive of images with never-ending potential. She photographs her everyday life, however it is through her selection and composition that she creates a magical feeling from her environment. Pictures of a baby being born, portraits of wounded or sick people, instantaneous and magical moments like fireworks, are all components of her visual poetry.

In her most recent body of work, Ametsuchi, Kawauchi unites images of distant constellations, tiny figures lost within landscapes, with photographs of a traditional controlled burn farming method (yakihata), in which the cycles of cultivation and recovery span decades and generations. Punctuating the series are images of Buddhist rituals and other religious ceremonies – a suggestion of other means by which humankind has traditionally attempted to transcend time and memory. Selected works from Ametsuchi are currently on view in the exhibition, A Sense of Place, at Pier 24 Photography.

Kawauchi is recognized for masterful editing and sequencing of her images to generate a rich body of photobooks. Her monographs include Aila (2004), The Eyes, the Ear (2005) and Semear (2007). In 2010, Aperture published Illuminance, the first book of the artist’s work published outside of Japan; she was short-listed for the 2012 Deutsche Börse Prize for this publication.

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