Ikko Narahara - Photographs from the 1950s to the 1970s

Ikko Narahara - Photographs from the 1950s to the 1970s at Galerie Priska Pasquer in Cologne, Germany. "...Ikko Narahara, born in 1931 in the Fukuoka Prefecture, was a self-taught photographer and as such took part in the groundbreaking photography exhibition 'The Eyes of Ten' in Tokyo in 1957. Two years later he became one of the co-founders of the legendary photo agency VIVO (in collaboration with Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Kikuji Kawada, and others), which was to be the epicenter for a new generation of Japanese photographers.
In his early work Narahara focused on people who were living in isolation from the everyday world, such as monks in a Trappist monastery or the inmates of a women’s prison. His work aimed at creating a 'personal document', he aspired to 'a process of laying bare the inner form by thoroughly depicting the exterior' (Ikko Narahara). Walking a tightrope between description and abstraction, objectivity and a personal narrative, Narahara transcended the journalistic documentary photography then prevalent in Japan. Furthermore, Narahara displayed a particular facility for abstraction and the staging of everyday scenes in strict graphic compositions as in, for example, the series 'Tokyo, the ‘50s', which was only to be published in 1996."