“For me, photography has always arrived suddenly from the future.”
—Ikkō NaraharaSince his widely acclaimed debut exhibition Human Land in 1956, Ikkō Narahara (1931-2020) continued to explore his distinctive approach to photography aimed at creating a ‘personal document’, resulting in images that embraced the tension between reality and abstraction, objectivity and subjectivity. A member of the short-lived yet highly influential Tokyo-based art agency Vivo (1959-61) alongside Shōmei Tōmatsu, Kikuji Kawada and Eikoh Hosoe, Narahara went on to photograph various places around the world while living in Paris (1962-65) and in New York (1970-74).
It was during this time that Narahara travelled across the United States, which led to his seminal 1970-74 series and 1975 book Where Time Has Vanished. With his otherworldly sensibility, the Japanese photographer captured the vast American landscape, including the present work Shadow of car driving through desert, Arizona (1971). In the accompanying essay to the book, he recalled the transcendent experience:
While we were driving across the flat Arizona desert, we felt as though we had been thrown out from earth and thrust into another planet. The horizon was so clear that we could see far into the limitless distance, and in this way, it resembled the vacuum on the surface of the moon. It was a surrealistic sight to behold. The landscape surrounding us there in the desert was ancient, but to be so informed of the age of something in geological terms is somewhat meaningless. For when one personally experiences the image, it is something altogether different and new as though it were just born. And so, it was for us.
This sense of timeless wonder is most evident in the photograph offered here – an exaltation of light and shadow into pure dynamism. His language of expression is poetic, spiritual and introspective as exemplified in this early, exhibition-sized print, made by the photographer in 1973 in New York. In 1974, his final year in NY, Narahara took part in The Museum of Modern Art’s New Japanese Photography, the first extensive survey of contemporary Japanese photography outside Japan. Since then, his work has been featured in countless exhibitions, including Japan: A Self-Portrait at the International Center of Photography, New York (1979), The History of Japanese Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2004) as well as retrospectives at Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris (2002-03) and at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (2004).
