I use printing techniques on selected papers to create visually minimalist yet imaginatively expansive objects that serve as a suggestive launchpad for open interpretation.
My work explores the awakening of our unconscious from silence, in order to inspire us to feel connected to the invisible.
My focus is to achieve objects which somehow touch our physical senses.
Using my own hands is the most important aspect of my work.
I describe my methods as “letter writing”.
Choosing the inks and letterheads, wishing the right words are revealed to express a thought, while imagining the recipient.
Laying emulsion following the rhythm of my own breathing, my existence becomes part of this physical communication.
The slowness of letters reaching others creates the space of time and my thoughts travel patiently with the letter until it reaches its destination.
We seek to reclaim certain moments, sounds and sensations.
Through photography I am doing exactly that.
Tomoko Nagakawa’s approach cannot be dissociated from the use of so-called ‘traditional’ techniques, insofar as she asserts the use of analogue photography – as opposed to digital – and printing on specific papers. The attention paid to the materiality of the process does not stop there, since it encompasses what she calls a physical relationship with photography (she herself coats the sensitive emulsion on the paper), and a production process that resembles a craft: each photograph is the result of a slow and unique process. The time devoted to each image is the time she deems necessary for the technical development of the work, but also for its maturation in terms of meaning and its ability to reach a viewer likened to the recipient of written correspondence. This is a far cry from the practice that is sometimes referred to as the ‘decisive moment’, which makes the fleetingness of the moment of the shot a privileged pathway to what emerges as essential at the point of encounter between the photographer and the world. In the latter case, the photographer’s body is also present in the act of creation, but focused on the act of taking the photograph. Tomoko Nagakawa’s images take a long time to develop, and are akin to writing, but this does not mean that the result is narrative. The images produced, and the way they are arranged in series, do not produce a narrative, but open up a wide range of sensations and interpretations. It is a question of remembering the disappeared, but in a register that moves away from portraiture towards barely legible, almost subliminal images. In this way, the absence to which the photograph bears witness is no longer that of a particular person, but that of everything we miss, infinitely and without being able to name it.
Written by Christian Maccotta