Rinko Kawauchi: My Favorite Color Is Blue (Video)
Rinko Kawauchi in conversation with Martin Parr
Courtesty Photoworks on Vimeo.
Rinko Kawauchi‘s photographs are set apart by their remarkable consistency. Nuanced but never repetitive, each frame seems to capture the same frail, effervescent color palette, each, in her typical manner, flooded with light. It’s her attitude toward the photograph and the subject, however, not necessarily the technique that stays the same.
In the clip above, Kawauchi is in conversation with Magnum photojournalist Martin Parr, who has his own longstanding relationship with Aperture: he wrote on the work of Rimaldas Vikšraitis in Aperture #204, and published Life’s a Beach with Aperture in spring 2013. Kawauchi discusses the first transition she made from her usual Rolleiflex film camera to digital when a certain subject called for it. The results were stunning, though not unexpected. She says she hopes in the future to use both formats together, unifying the work by a consistent approach—not necessarily a conscious one, though, as she suggested in an interview for Kopenhagen. “Whenever I’m taking pictures,” she says in the video, “I need to discover something. I want an impression from the object.”
Kawauchi, who was nominated for the 2012 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, first came to prominence in 2001 when she published three photobooks—Utatane, Hanabi, and Hanako—simultaneously during a time when she was still pursuing commercial work. Her acclaim rose rapidly as she went on to put together over a dozen monographs, including Illuminance, published by Aperture in spring 2011, and most recently Ametsuchi, published by Aperture in spring 2013.
