Kyotographie 2025 opts for laughter and levity in the face of global strife

Japan Times

17-04-2025

In staid and overstuffed Kyoto, every year documentarians come bearing news from beyond the old Japanese capital. This year, despite a grim global outlook, they've brought mostly cheerful tidings.
Kyotographie, the annual month-long international photography festival now in its 13th edition, opened April 12 under the theme 'Humanity.' Artists from Japan, the U.K., Cote d'Ivoire, Taiwan, Mexico and India, among others, interpreted the brief with a surprising amount of humor and lightness, perhaps as a response to what has seemed like an endless march of darkness over the past few years.
Celebrated 73-year-old British photographer Martin Parr brought his satirical eye to sakura (cherry blossom) season in Kyoto, arriving the weekend before the festival opened to document the peak. 'There's a sort of fever that crosses the city when cherry blossoms are at their best,' he says.
With images such as "Athens, Acropolis, Greece," British photographer Martin Parr brings his satirical eye to the waste and excess of overtourism. |
© Martin Parr / Magnum Photos
The result is hardly the sakura photos that fill our Instagram feeds this time of year. Parr is known for his deeply unflattering photos of tourists and crowds of people caught in moments of absurdity, shots that can range from cheeky to searing. In the Time's building he screens a slideshow of 140 photos of hoards viewing pale pink petals through the screens of their gripped phones. Set to relentless, goofy recorder music, what feels light and funny in the beginning soon becomes uncomfortable and even nauseating, the sight of tourists clutching their dogs in froufrou outfits, plastic charms clacking against long acrylic nails.
Parr brings out the waste and excess of overtourism in the city as part of a larger body of work that began in the late 1980s. For anyone who's been through cherry blossom season in Japan, there is only one appropriate response to Parr's Kyoto shots: 'Too real.'
As a chronicler of humanity, I wonder, does Parr have any hope for our species? 'Not particularly,' says the photographer. 'It's all a bit grim — wars, climate change, floods, fires — it's a bit depressing. But one has to remain upbeat.' Tourism is a great escape, for example, he says, but the scale of our hunger for experience drains Earth's resources. 'It's all our fault because we've all got too much money.'
Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop slips his figure into 1950s archival photos in 'Being There,' a collaboration with Lee Shulman, founder of the archival Anonymous Project. |
© Lee Shulman & Omar Victor Diop
In fact, many of the artists showing at the festival this year laugh their way to or out of discomfort. Lee Shulman, founder of the archival Anonymous Project, and Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop collaborate on 'Being There' at Shimadai Gallery Kyoto East. Diop slyly slips his figure into 1950s archival photos showing very white middle class Americans smiling at dinner parties and on cruise ships, just another member of the family; the seamlessness of his entry amuses and unnerves. It's immediately recognizable: This is fiction.
This complements real photographs of 1970s Okinawa, from Mao Ishikawa's debut 'Red Flower' series, at Kondaya Genbei Chikuin-noma. Ishikawa, born in 1953, still works and resides in Okinawa and is outspoken about her contempt for mainland Japan given the relationship between the former kingdom and the government. The artist doesn't aim to be a documentarian or to make political work, says Taro Amano, who curated a large-scale show of her photos at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in 2023. But the fact is, her nonjudgmental depictions in black and white of life in postwar Okinawa are deeply political. The photos heavily feature women who worked at a bar that exclusively served Black American soldiers stationed on the island, often joyful and wild, at a time when tensions between the United States and Japan were high.
Mao Ishikawa's debut 'Red Flower' series portraying life in postwar Okinawa is subversive through its honest intimacy. |
© Mao Ishikawa
Rather than pointed satire, Ishikawa's photos are subversive through their honest intimacy. After all, photographs are not screenshots of reality but active and considered choices. As critic John Berger once wrote of the role of the photographer, 'I have decided that seeing this is worth recording.'
Drama and irony blend in Graciela Iturbide's expansive retrospective exhibit at Kyoto City Museum of Art Annex, the 82-year-old Mexican photographer's first major show in Japan. 'Death is something very particular in Mexico. The way that it's played with, the sense of humor, at the same time can be very sarcastic, as Graciela shows in her photos,' says the exhibit's curator, Elena Navarro. This playful morbidity is crystallized in a work from 1992: In response to a commission from French newspaper Liberation for an issue on interpretations of happiness, Iturbide sent a photo of a child in western Oaxaca grinning over the corpse of a goat, which had been killed in a ritual sacrifice.
JR poses in front of his newly unveiled mural of 500 locals at Kyoto Station for Kyotographie's 13th edition. |
Thu-Huong Ha
Although one pleasure of Kyotographie is that there's often something for everyone, there are a few misses. At Pushpamala N.'s exhibition at the Museum of Kyoto Annex, the artist's multilayered, highly referential performance work demands too much prior knowledge and feels out of step with the rest of the festival. Which is a shame, as her criticism of India's nation state and orientalist art tropes would clearly illuminate in the right context or for the right audience.
A mural at Kyoto Station and its related exhibit at the Kyoto Shimbun Building by bonafide anonymous celebrity JR, though highly contextualized in place, feels overly slick and superficial. Though the portraits he took of 500 locals in various states, expressions and professions, the painstaking work by his team of 10 to 12 people, is surely a crowd-pleaser, the depth of care and intimacy taken with each participant is lost in the flat and crowded mural.
Keijiro Kai's "Clothed in Sunny Finery" shows men taking part in a "kenka matsuri" (fight festivals) in Okayama. |
© Keijiro Kai
On the more earnest end of the spectrum are human-focused works by Keijiro Kai at Karuchiku Makura and Taiwanese artist Liu Hsing-Yu at Gallery Sugata. Kai, who shoots kenka matsuri (fight festivals), shows men in various rituals of, well, manliness. The still images of bodies in formation, which lack the sound of Kai's videos, make sporting events look like war or disaster zones. Fear, stress and exhilaration are scrawled across the faces of men, bringing out a raw and moving animalism that's nonetheless very human.
Liu, who won the KG+ Select award in 2024 for promising photographers, shows images of his mother and father swapping gender roles, a project the family worked on together as part of his journey as an artist and in his own coming out. His drily expressionless parents make for poignant subjects.
The exhibit that feels most urgent in its portrayal of humanity is by Palestinian American photographer Adam Rouhana. Photographs and acrylic screens replacing shoji in Hachiku-an show the artist's version of Palestine, which is soft, green and full of life and water, not the piles of rubble and mutilated bodies that now flood our feeds. Rouhana began this work in 2022, before the Oct. 7, 2023, start of the latest war between Israel and Hamas, and, more than resilience or resistance, they show simple, quiet life: kids playing in water, a rich field of wheat, a boy going to town on a watermelon.
His work is perhaps best understood not as a hopeful tonic to grim war footage of Gaza but as a 'post-apartheid imaginary,' as he puts it, a response to 20th-century photographers who he believes have played a crucial role in romanticizing and perpetuating Zionist settler colonialism through their images.
'Somehow the liveability of Palestinians, the fact that we are still alive in the face of a genocidal regime of death, is extremely powerful,' says Rouhana. 'And so focusing on life is my approach.'
Kyotographie runs until May 11 at various venues around Kyoto. For more information, visit kyotographie.jp/en . Transportation and accommodation for the Kyotographie press tour were provided by Kyotographie International Photography Festival.