Untitled, 1996

Hara Mikiko (born in Toyama, Japan, 1967) graduated from the Faculty of Literature at Keio University, Tokyo, in 1990. She initially worked as an actress in underground­-theater groups before becoming a photographer through a series of coincidences: finding her father’s camera, receiving an enlarger from a friend, and learning to print from a photographer. In 1992, she began studying photography at Tokyo College of Photography, first working in black and white then turning to color before graduating in 1996. Her first solo exhibi­tion, Is as It, was held that year in Tokyo. Hara was inspired by her professor Suzuki Kiyoshi and the Austrian color photo­grapher Manfred Willmann. Since the mid-1990s, she has been using a medium­-format German camera—an Ikonta from the 1930s—that a friend gave her when she was in college. This old camera, combined with a 1950s lens and Kodak color film, allowed her to develop her own style characterized by an unusually delicate, pale palette. Hara always carries her quiet and lightweight camera, photographing fleeting passersby, landscapes, and natural elements that surround her. Aiming in the general direction of the gestures or details that attract her, she often releases the shutter spontaneously, without pausing to look through the viewfinder. The resulting images—dreamy, slightly out of focus, and off­-center—compose what she describes as “an accumulation of fragments of my daily life.”