ALLOTMENT｜English info.

After touring Naoko Yogo's exhibition through London/2009 and Tokyo2010, ALLOTMENT will hold a further show in Nagakute Culture House, in Naoko’s hometown of Nagakute, Aichi Prefecture in 2011. The show will present selected works from Granada, Spain. The context of the work will reflect on the self and one's internal vision through a lyrical interpretation of topography. This will be further enhanced by exhibiting at her childhood home connecting her formative experiences of place with her artistic practice. Along with her work, we are pleased to exhibit works by Daisuke Hayata, the first award winner. The exhibition will be open from 24th of April 2011 and an announcement of the next winner will be made at the opening night.

In 2009, ALLOTMENT set up the website and announced the first travel award. The NAOKO YOGO/GRANADA was published by Sokyusha in October of that year. We have organised the touring show at KANDADA art space, Tokyo in February 2010 where we announced the winner of the award, which was given much support by the media – more than 53 applications came through our doors, an impartial judgement was made by art critic Tomohiro Nishimura and artist and the founder of ALLOTMENT Masakatsu Kondo, choosing Daisuke Hayata. We would like to continue to support young artists by, fine-tuning our approach to find the right direction for future possibilities.

Daisuke Hayata is a Japanese artist and a recipient of the ‘Allotment Travel Award 2010.’ Initiated in 2009 to commemorate the life and work of Naoko Yogo, the Allotment Travel Award gives young Japanese artists the opportunity to travel, in order to broaden their awareness and nurture their practice. Hayata received the award for his striking photographic work capturing such ineffable natural enormities as ‘darkness’.

Born in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan in 1981, Hayata studied at Yokohama City University, before spending some time in France. In 2009, he began work on a series of photographs titled Isanatori (2009). Isanatori is a conventional epithet used in traditional Tanka poetry, a genre of classical Japanese verse. The term has many possible meanings, but here the artist interprets it as notions of summer, sun, blue and death. But, its meaning frequently comes back to the sea. Isanatori is comprised of Hayaya’s photographs of the sea. Hayata is interested in the sea as a division of geographic space. It frequently marks both the end of the landscape, but simultaneously, the beginning of an endless expanse of the unknown. When confronted with an uninterrupted vista of water, it is hard to understand that even the sea is geopolitically divided.

Hayata’s photographs of the ocean position the sea as an embodiment of something that is unknowable. Close-up shots of turquoise droplets of water, wispy, ethereal images of the sun shining onto the ocean and photographs of the sea framed by a corner of land are determinedly unrevealing images. Humans, boats and wildlife are all absent from the images. The sea becomes a kind of anonymous entity, one of few features in modern life that occasionally overpowers and outsmarts human design.

It is not surprising that, following Hayata’s exquisite representations of the sea, he next turned his focus to ‘darkness.’ Since 2009, Hayata has been working on a series of photographs titled Ubatama. The title is again an epithet from ancient Japanese verse, meaning night, blackness, dreams, and always, darkness. Given that the photographic process relies on the record of light, the very notion of setting out to capture darkness is a bold assignment. Hayata was driven to the task by the idea that with the invention of artificial light in the modern world, rarely, do we know true darkness. He made the decision that all of his images would be taken at night, using only the light of the moon.

Hayata also works with film, as opposed to using a digital camera. Although the use of digital manipulation techniques are increasingly popular with artists seeking colour enhancements and other adjustments, Hayata prefers to stick to the idea that photography is, as he says ‘a recorder of reality through light.’ His pared down representations of Yakushima – an island in the south of Japan formed by past volcanic activities – gives rise to the notion that the camera can still be a silent observer, a quiet infiltration into a moment of stillness. Like the images of the sea in Isanatori, Hayata’s photographs of craggy forest trees and thick, meandering streams, only just visible in the hazey moonlight, are also an exploration of the sublime, of something great and unknowable. However, there is also a vague sense in Ubatama of an impending doom, an apocalyptic feeling that may have been influenced by the artist’s own experiences as a young boy of the Kobe earthquake and the Sarin gas attack, episodes that displaced everyday life with a sudden awareness of the capacity for tragedy in this world.

Isanatori and Ubatama are both captivating and emotive bodies of work that explore not only notions of darkness and the physical and psychological enormity of the sea, but also the rich art historical trajectory of the sublime and the use of the camera to represent the natural and unknowable world.

I remember it clearly now, but at the time it seemed unimportant. We had been talking to Naoko; it was the opening of a group show which included the works of her husband, the painter Masakatsu Kondo. We needed to leave, and she had so many more friends to talk to. We said goodbye, she turned and walked away, a slender, beautiful woman with great natural grace. It didn’t seem to matter, it was just one of those small everyday moments which are seemingly of no consequence. Then only a short time later she was gone – on her way to work on her bicycle, a left-turning truck, and she was lost, stolen from the world and from her work.

Naoko Yogo was a very social artist. Her life was full of people – yet her work tends to be empty of their actual presence. The main body of her work is about landscape, shot in black and white using wet-process photography and a medium-format camera. Looking at her work, it is obvious that she had a very profound understanding of her medium: of the lens, of the camera, and the way the light would work on the film. Her first major body of work, the ‘Night Photographs’, show this clearly. There is a dense inner rigour in their composition. In one picture, a railway track curves from the left to the right of the image, at the centre of which is a pool of light. Small bushes are revealed growing in ground that looks incapable of sustaining life, and the only light – the light which made the photograph possible – comes from two electric lights. In another, we see a snow-bound street, a block-like building full of windows, the outlines of bushes, and a huge tree (trees are a common element in Naoko’s work). Again, all the light is artificial. These are extraordinary images, very carefully constructed. There are no people in the photographs because they were asleep in their houses. But Naoko was not: she was there in the darkness, capturing what little light there was in her camera.

I have a copy of one of her black-and-white photographs from the ‘Night Photographs’ in front of me. All it shows is a barn – a place to shelter animals, or to keep essential tools to make food. It is the kind of building you might pass by without looking at. But the composition of the photograph makes you look: the light falling from the left of the image, the subtle outline of the trees in the background, the clear outline of the roof. In the foreground is another tree, leafless, almost hidden in the dense black of the photograph. There is snow on the ground. It is winter, the time when living is hardest. In the shadow cast by the roof are two small slits like eyes, and the door like a mouth only in so much as it is an entrance. There are no people in the photograph, but it is strangely like a portrait.

A house, a building, is an extension of ourselves. Its boundaries are representative of our boundaries. We live in a building in the same way as we live in our bodies. This one image from the ‘Night Photographs’ shows a humble place. It is a picture of our basic shelter, an image of the home, our security and its strength, our ability to offer hospitality, its walls our protection against the darkness and fear of the night when we sleep and are most vulnerable, our protection from death itself. The photograph, taken in darkness, shows not only Naoko’s lack of fear and belief in life, but also her deep knowledge of what shelter means to us.

Naoko and Masakatsu’s house was, and still is known also as CCC (Clapham Community Centre), a seething hive of activity and hospitality where once Naoko was its hub; it is still driven by her spirit. In English the word window (in Japanese, mado) derives from the Icelandic windauge: ‘wind eye’, an aperture through which light and wind or air can enter the home. In the West we talk of the eyes as windows to the soul. Our word camera comes from the Latin for a chamber or a room, as in camera obscura, the precursor of the modern camera. In this seemingly simple photograph there is, to my mind, an image not of her, but of her life as an artist: a Japanese artist who, with her husband, had made her home in the West, who used that home to give shelter and hospitality, and who used her eyes and her mind. This small building is like a camera: there is the room inside, and the apertures which pierce its façade – its eyes – are like her eyes. This small building captured in the night is like the medium-format camera she carried with such care, which is our window into her inner world. If this small building sheltered humans, animals or even only their tools, then her camera sheltered those final rolls of film.

Naoko Yogo trained as a sculptor at the Chelsea School of Art, and you can see this in the photographs. Sculpture and its form are revealed by light. I was taught as a sculptor to see the light cast upon a form as sculptural colour. You have to look at the form, you have to think about how the light would dance off the form. This is very clear in Naoko’s photographs: she looks at the landscape around her sculpturally. She has transformed this knowledge of making form into looking at form. Once having found her means of expression – the photograph and its machine, the camera – she travelled with it, looked through its lens and set its apertures. She worked in Bilbao, in Venezuela, in the Czech Republic and finally in Granada. This exhibition is an example of those final 40 rolls of film she shot there, negatives she never saw. Photographs showing huge expanses of seemingly uninhabited land. And again, as in the ‘Night Photographs’, these are places which seem as if they had never been looked at properly before. But as always there are trees, and through them, life; and through her brilliant use of light and darkness we can see the form as she saw it. In the ‘Night Photographs’ there was no light as such, but she found it. In the posthumous ‘Granada Photographs’ we see a landscape presumably almost obliterated by light; and within it she found the shadows.

The medium-format camera is a very interesting instrument, and so is the film within it. Wet-process photography demands conceptual rigour, and in the digital age it is easy to forget just how unforgiving this medium is; to forget the blindness – for only the darkroom can reveal success or failure. The fact that she brought these images back unseen, and their evident success, is a testament to her command of the medium, her understanding of her chosen craft and her vision.

The final series shot in Granada, some but not all shown posthumously in this exhibition, reveal an artist who had found her voice. Despite her loss, we can still see the world as she saw it through her camera. Or more accurately, as she wanted us to see it. In these works she brings us back to the notion of the sublime, where we can feel the fear of how small we are in the darkness, how small we are in the vastness of the landscape; but always she leaves some small clue as to how we do actually have a place and are part of it.

How easy it is to take something away, how very difficult to make something new in the world. In her life, Naoko Yogo was able to bring people together. In her work, she was able to see and transform the extraordinary beauty of the world we live in. She was just emerging as an artist after two successful shows in Japan, and sadly she leaves only a small body of work. But there is no doubt that she saw and made something new, and nothing can steal that. Naoko’s eyes have gone from the world, but because of her courage, her humanity and her command of that simple but subtle machine we call the camera, the world as she saw it still exists; and what a world it is.

I do love it when photographers, or any artists for that matter, genuinely want to help promote a fellow photographer or visual artist. It doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, it’s worth the effort. Two recent emails have done just this. In one case, a photographer sent information about an award for photographers and artists, The Allotment Award, and an exhibition of work in memory of Japanese artist, Naoko Yogo, who died in a bicycle accident in 2005. The other email was from someone who wrote to me after looking at the blog to recommend a Czech photographer’s work. It was perfect timing as I had already booked a flight to Prague for two days and am writing this post on the outbound trip.

Call it serendipity, call it coincidence, it doesn’t really matter. The fact of timing is crucial and the message is: Dare to Do. What have you got to lose? This is especially the case if you’re a freelance photographer and have to do your own marketing and promotion, negotiating and pitching, as well as keep accounts. This is something I am all too aware of as I am also freelance which means that my door, or this cyber portal, is always open – to everyone and anyone. For me, this is one of the wonderful aspects of blogging; direct and unmediated contact with an audience.

Photographer Robert Hackman wrote to me about the Award and the process leading up to last night’s launch of the show, Naoko Yogo: GRANADA, and the accompanying book:

“Naoko had just come back from a trip around Granada, Spain where she had been on a month-long road trip with her Pentax 67 shooting landscapes in black and white. She was quite excited about what she had shot and was looking forward to developing the film and looking at the contact sheets. Tragically, she died before she could process the film. She died on 15 December 2005 on a South London road in an accident involving her bike, a truck and a bad corner.

“All of her friends knew that there were rolls of unprocessed film in her studio and that this should be dealt with as a last gesture for Naoko. However, the film canisters remained in the studio for a further two and a half years. Her husband, artist Masakatsu Kondo and I decided to get to work on the unprocessed film with a view to preparing for an exhibition, and planned to work on the project over a period of a year or two which would allow us to devote our full attention to it during quieter times in our own working schedules.

“All of Naoko’s notes of her Granada trip were in Japanese, as were the film exposures and suggested development times. We had to trawl through her previous work notes to try and decipher her abbreviations and symbols. Once we had a clear idea of how to tackle the film, I developed them with a mixture of caution, fear and fond flashbacks of a dear friend. I processed the film in her studio where I had a strong sense that she was watching over my shoulder. At times, I swear I could hear her voice and laughter.

“Masakatsu, myself, and a few of Naoko’s close friends edited down Naoko’s photographs from a digital contact print to 16 images. We also emailed the contacts to friends, including Japanese-based photographer Taiji Matsue for feedback. This process and the involvement of her friends helped her husband on his own, long and difficult, path.

“Naoko loved Oriental Seagull photographic paper and had some half-used boxes in the studio but not enough to create 16 prints. We had difficulty trying to find a printer in the south of England who was still printing on fibre-based paper which is quite rare nowadays. However, all our efforts were rewarded when we came across Sharon Easterling of Downtown Darkroom, upstairs from Silverprint. Sharon was meticulous and lovingly absorbed herself in the project, creating wonderful prints on an Ilford Warmtone Variable Contrast fibre-based paper, which was used as a close alternative. I shot the prints on digital in my studio in preparation for offset printing for a book.”

The book includes a foreword by Tokyo-based art critic and historian, Tomohiro Nishimura, with a further article by London author, Chris Roberts. It is published by Sokyusha Publishing Japan. All proceeds from the sales of Naoko’s book and photographs will be donated to the Allotment Award.

The £1000 Allotment Award (click on the link for details in English as the website is still in Japanese) has been set up by Masakatsu to commemorate the life and work of Naoko Yogo. . The award supports emerging Japanese artists and photographers who are based anywhere in the world and provides opportunities for young Japanese artists to travel, with the aim of enhancing their experience, broadening their knowledge and vision, and developing and nurturing their work. However, at present the annual award is only open to post-graduate Japanese artists/photographers. Entrants must submit examples of their work accompanied by a two-page text on the work with details as to how they will use the £1000.

“Before Naoko passed away in 2005, she devoted a lot of time and energy to her allotment in South London. In his text for Naoko’s book, Chris Roberts recalls one of her stories about her allotment: “There were no taps on the allotment so she had to carry water there herself […] She had worked out the bare minimum each plant required, no more than a glassful each […] it was just a small habitual act of kindness that would result in something coming to fruition.”

Naoko Yogo (1971 – 2005) was a Japanese artist who lived in London. She studied Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design completing her studies in 1998. While a student her work was concerned with the three-dimensional, yet her preferred medium of expression always remained photographic. Yogo travelled alone with her camera and what she offers the viewer through her images is as much about contemplative reflection on the self and one’s own internal spaces as about the topographical and the lyricism of place.

Naoko Yogo: GRANADA opens today and runs until 31 January 2010 at Hepworth Court, London, UK

“Allotment” is a travel award established in 2009 to commemorate the life and work of artist Naoko Yogo.

The Allotment award provides opportunities for young Japanese artists to travel, with the aim of enhancing their experience, broadening their knowledge and vision, and developing and nurturing their work.

Before Naoko passed away in 2005, she devoted a lot of time and energy to her allotment in South London. It was an important part of her life, a source of great joy as well as hard work. In his text for Naoko’s book, Chris Roberts recalls one of her stories about her allotment: “There were no taps on the allotment so she had to carry water there herself […] She had worked out the bare minimum each plant required, no more than a glassful each […] it was just a small habitual act of kindness that would result in something coming to fruition.”

For Naoko, there was no difference between working on her art and on her allotment: they coexisted as vital parts of her life. In both, she worked with enthusiasm and care, paying attention to small details. Though each required a great deal of patience, she never compromised. She went through a constant process of trial and error in order to accomplish what she set out to do.

The Allotment travel award will reflect Naoko’s life and legacy by supporting artists who, like her, are guided by a passion to produce their work and yet endeavour to pursue their dreams.

All proceeds from the sales of Naoko’s book and photographs will be donated to the Allotment fund.