Rinko Kawauchi

Rinko Kawauchi

Kawauchi is most famous for her tranquil 6x6 medium format images; however her method is not always fluent throughout her bodies of work. During an interview with Martin Parr for Aperture magazine Rinko stated: “whatever I’m taking pictures of, I need to discover something”. Personally I feel this is a very uplifting way of taking photos and using the medium. During the interview I also discovered that Kawauchi now uses digital and film together to get the best results.]

Some of her images from "Illuminance":

Her most famous and, I believe, most beautiful work is her series “Illuminance” in which she photographed things she sees every day in her home town after the tragedy of the tsunami. I would like to try and recreate this in my own work as I feel it will challenge me, taking photos of parts of Leeds I see all the time. Her images contain many moments in which we may normally ignore, using water, people etc for rhythmical energy but the images may not necessarily connect.  She over exposes a lot of her images in an effective way (using lens flare), making them appear more important and generating feelings in such simple objects. There is a blue and pink pastel tone prominent in many of her images, which may be an adjustment of white balance that allows them to link together emotionally even though they may not be related. She shows such delicacy through her compositions and attention to fine details but does post produce her work. This is also created through putting two images next to each other in her books/exhibitions.

My image inspired by the method of Rinko:

In my images I chose to take photos of everyday scenes around Leeds, as Rinko did in her home town after the tsunami. These images could reflect the themes that Kawauchi applies such as depicting the world around you, elements of nature and the life-cycle with attention to detail. I shot on DSLR to try and recreate these mostly when taking the actual pictures. I adjusted the white balance to “M5” on my Nikon as it contains pink and blue tones prominent in Kawauchis work. I also chose a day where the sky was bright as it would allow me to create lens flare and in a way “illuminate” areas I wanted to stand out. By using a combination of a higher iso of 320 and an aperture of f8 it allowed me to slightly over expose the canal. By using a fairly fast shutter speed of 1/200 I kept all the detail in the branches entwining over the canal. I am pretty happy with my results, the pink and blue pastel tones worked out as hoped but I slightly saturated these on Photoshop to finish it off. I walk past the canal a lot and by looking at it a different way I discovered different plants and patterns within my shots which linking back to the quote stated earlier, is one of Rinko’s aims whilst taking photographs. My final image links aesthetically and includes the themes that are noticeable in Kawauchi’s work.

I have really enjoyed researching the series of “Illuminance” but if I were to do this again I would like to spend more time photographing something I can connect to even more (such as my home) as this is what stands out most in the series. Shown through colours, details and composition you can really see a strong connection that Kawauchi has to her pictures.