“What sort of provocation do the photographs of Rinko Kawauchi pose to my thinking?,” Masatake Shinohara asks a little bit over halfway through Inhabiting Light, his joint book with the photographer. Shinohara is a philosopher teaching at Kyoto University, and the book is a true collaboration between two very different people who, as becomes clear, are interested in the same thing.
“What is important about a photo,” Shinohara quotes Kawauchi in the Epilogue, “is the way one takes it, rather than what one takes.” Thinking about how this idea might connect to what we experience as reality, the philosopher notes that “we often feel that there is a kind of light present”, a light that brings us into contact with “the dimension of depth that remains at the edge of everyday life in a way that goes beyond our conscious grasp.”
The book arose from a back and forth: Kawauchi would send a photograph, Shinohara would write a text in response and send it back, after which the photographer would respond to the text… In the book, the photographs and responses are not presented side by side. Instead, they are presented on their own. The text never explains the photographs; the photographs never illustrate the text.
To call Inhabiting Light a philosophy of photography would be correct in some ways; and yet it would also be besides the point both authors are trying to make. All-too-often writing around photography ends up limiting both the medium and the world it visually describes; here the openness of the words and the pictures avoids that problem.
When engaging with the book, the reader/viewer learns something about what photography is or does. But their focus is mostly guided towards something that is just beyond our own understanding.
I suspect that this might pose a challenge for many who are used to the unfortunate, bland literalness that pervades photographic discourse these days.
But challenges are good, because it is only through challenges that new insight is to be gained. The challenge here is less an intellectual one (neither the photographs nor the text are overly complex) but a mental one: allowing for the possibility that one of the most technical media in fact might get at an aspect of the world that cannot be understood, but whose implications can be felt.
“When one pays attention to works of photography enabled by the machine as the product of modern technology,” Shinohara expresses this idea, “it becomes possible to glimpse a kind of elemental materiality that has not been saturated by human thought. […] We may come to think that we have been touched by a certain mystery.”
It is this aspect of Kawauchi’s work that has been noticed and expressed by other writers as well. It is most dominant in the photographer’s early work (with which she became well known) and most of her current work (as I’ve argued on this site before).
In light of Shinohara’s writing around this particular photographer’s work, it would be worthwhile paying more attention to how photography can hint at the unexpressable.
I suspect that I do not have to explain how such an approach would enrich a medium that is often hobbled by, as I noted, literalness, a medium whose full potential is often not used when it merely serves to illustrate ideas.
It would be straightforward to argue that the common reference to photography being “poetic” might get at similar ideas as those expressed in Inhabiting Light. But why would understanding photography have to operate on terms set by a completely different medium?
As a relative latecomer to the scene, of course it was inevitable that photography would be seen in relation to painting or poetry or whatever else. Photography thus became the youngest child among a group of much older siblings: spoiled and pampered, but not being taken too seriously — and always seen in relation to the older siblings.
Inhabiting Light severs that mechanism and dives into how photography can do its own things in its own unique fashion.
Soon enough — in a decade and a half — photography will enter the third century of its existence. It’s high time that the discourse around the medium reaches the maturity that one would imagine almost two full centuries of photographs would have resulted in.
Recommended.
Inhabiting Light – Dialogue on the Edge of the Everyday World; photographs by Rinko Kawauchi, words by Masatake Shinohara (Japanese/English); 136 pages; Torch Press; 2025
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