Japanese Blue

Kobayashi Norio

This series, Japanese Blue, photographed over more than thirty years from 1991 to 2024, depicts landscapes featuring blue tarpaulin sheets. Although this is the first time the series has been compiled and published as a photobook, it has long been recognized as Kobayashi's signature work. Blue tarps appear in all conditions, from brand new to torn and weathered. The series can be broadly divided into two categories based on the method of photography: film photographs from 1991 to 1995, and digital photographs from 2003 to 2024. The former were taken using Fujifilm Velvia positive film with medium-format cameras like the New Mamiya 6 and Hasselblad or large-format cameras like the Toyo Field. The latter used medium-format digital cameras such as the Pentax 645D and Fujifilm GFX50S Ⅱ. In the 1990s, Kobayashi largely adhered to the demands of silver halide film, often using a tripod and carefully framing his subjects vertically and horizontally, so the blue tarps occupy only a small portion of the images. Since the 2000s, high-sensitivity digital photography and smaller cameras have enabled more handheld shooting and closer framing of tarps, increasing the proportion of blue in the images.

The series was first presented in 1992 at Gallery Mole in Yotsuya, Shinjuku, and shortly afterward appeared in the September 1992 issue of Asahi Camera. Two years later, Japanese Blue 2 was published in the September 1994 issue of Asahi Camera. In 1996, Kobayashi's second solo exhibition, titled Japanese Blue, was held at the now-closed Zeit-Foto Salon in Kyobashi, Tokyo.

Characterized by its man-made blue colors, Japanese Blue can be situated within the lineage of Kobayashi's landscape works, such as Landscapes and First Light, which explore both visible and concealed aspects of urban and natural environments across Japan. Observing the blue tarps directs the eye to nameless, makeshift places, revealing temporary landscapes that most people would overlook.

The blue-colored tarp was first released in 1974 and has since become a standard color across Japan. Peony blue is artificial and does not easily blend into its surroundings, yet its hue evokes natural elements such as sky, sea, and rivers. If the blue in Kobayashi's photographs is regarded as an object, Japanese Blue serves as a requiem for urban landscapes gradually disappearing or being reshaped by redevelopment. Kiyoshi Kusumi, a media studies scholar and art critic, considers objects wrapped in blue tarps as a form of found art: "When seen as devices giving form to the invisible movements of air currents, they become interesting in the way environmental art is interesting." Kusumi notes that these tarps function similarly to the architectural wrappings of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, defamiliarizing landscapes--although the effect is modest and unintentional, rather than large-scale contemporary art.

Miyabi Taniguchi, a photographer and critic, writes: "A violent shade of blue left forgotten in nature, artificial blue scattered throughout the landscape. But what is initially unsettling gradually becomes familiar without the viewer realizing it. By deliberately making blue his subject, Kobayashi presents Japan's landscapes as they are today. Here we see the conflict between nature and the artificial, or their ironic coexistence. What is artificial decays, and what is natural conveys life force. Yet, under redevelopment, this relationship can reverse almost instantly. It is a story endlessly repeated. Kobayashi does not side with either, but regards each with fondness."

Taniguchi highlights how the polar opposites of past and future, nature and the artificial, inevitably reverse. Destruction and rewilding occur cyclically: even newly constructed futures eventually become pasts, and pasts were once futures. Kobayashi's blue occupies the midpoint in this cyclical spacetime. The blue in his photographs does not belong to the present of the object at the time of capture; rather, it is drawn into the viewer's present, offering the possibility of a dialogue across time. The blue tarp can thus be seen as a "glitch" in the landscape.

Unexpectedly, the blue tarp resembles a blue screen used in chroma key compositing--a technique in television, film, and image editing where a subject is filmed against a blue or green background, which is later replaced by another image. Lighting can cause shadows to fall on the background, sometimes producing a chroma key error called spilling, where the background partially blends into the subject, revealing the original blue--a "bug" in the compositing.

These errors, like a magic trick's failure, reveal the mechanics behind the medium. However, Kobayashi does not manipulate or force such ruptures; his photographs remain ordinary, unembellished, and faithful to the camera. Yet when numerous blue tarp singularities are seen together, the "ground"--the background contrasting the subject--appears and disappears like a bug in a blue screen.

This peony blue, chosen for its camouflage quality in natural settings, merges with the landscape and, like Rubin's vase, reverses our perception of "figure" and "ground." Viewed as an aesthetic object, the blue tarp comes forward while the landscape recedes; when the landscape is "figure," the tarp becomes "ground." Japanese Blue aims for this back-and-forth gaze. Things lost from the past and things yet to come flicker as blue remnants within and beyond the photographs. On the surface of blue, past 'now,' present 'now,' and future 'now' are continuously restored.

── from the afterword
 "Residual Peony Blue" by Kasama Yuki

The blue tarps seen throughout Japan in every sort of place appear as bright, shining surfaces, but closely guard what lies within. They reveal no core, substance, or story.

Japanese Blue - An insubstantial surface that tosses our gaze back to us.
It is also comparable to photography, which lightly brushes over only the surface-level appearance of its subjects....

── from the afterword
 "In the Absence of a Story" by Kobayashi Norio

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Toward the Sea of Contradictions

Mariko Takeuchi

Through her essays and criticism, Mariko Takeuchi has continually turned toward the essence of what it means to see and to make. Toward the Sea of Contradictions, newly compiled, brings together writings published between 2017 and 2024. Following her earlier volume Silence and Image, this book offers words composed quietly in the company of photographs, at times reaching back to encounters with her own images and memories. 

Some of the essays were originally written for students at university graduation exhibitions. Addressed to young people aspiring to art, they illuminate the profound depth of creative practice. Yet their message extends far beyond the realm of art. In accepting the fundamental frailty of human existence while still choosing to live, to create, and to question, her gaze speaks to all of us who find ourselves in a world of disorder. 

Takeuchi has long been engaged in conveying what has no voice, continually asking what it means to see, and to imagine the pain of others. Toward the Sea of Contradictions continues along this path, yet it also draws more closely on personal memory and the body. Within its pages breathe urgent reflections on unknowing, and on the relation between photography and life itself. This solitary yet unflinching endeavor quietly encourages the reader, offering the strength to set out together toward a distant sea.

Text in Japanese only

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