The death of Hiroh Kikai seems to have gone largely unnoted in the photoworld. Yet over several decades he produced what I think is one of the truly great series of photographs: Asakusa Portraits.* From the mid-1980s onwards he would go regularly to Senso-Ji Buddhist temple in Asakusa, Tokyo, and wait for visitors whose appearance caught his eye. He would then ask them to let him photograph them in one of several regular spots in the temple grounds. He took two or three photos of each, against a backdrop of the temple’s red walls, letting them adopt their own stance and making a three-quarter or waist-level shot always with the same camera, a Hasselblad. Put like that it sounds pretty formulaic, but when I first stumbled upon his work quite by chance in a university library I was immediately transfixed, for two reasons. The first was a remark he made in a foreword to the book; and the second was the caption – I might even say the micro-text, included with the images. Like this.
A man who said he'd just had a drunken quarrel
But let’s go back to the remark in the foreword. What he said (I’m quoting from memory here because I don’t have the book) was that his ex-university professor of philosophy lent him the money to buy a Hasselblad one day when he had mentioned that the price had dropped due to an exchange rate fluctuation. He soon realised that the Hasselblad medium-format camera is a very particular kind of machine. It excels in some situations and is very difficult to use in others. Many people might have tried it and then discarded it in order to keep all their photographic options open. But he did something very philosophical which I always try to bear in mind: he decided to take only those photos which the Hasselblad was made for. Other possibilities he just pushed to the back of his mind. That strikes me as being very clear thinking and it seems to introduce the kind of discipline which we are often told is at the heart of creativity. We seem to have completely lost this idea now - that constant repetition may strip away layers to reveal an essence in a way that constant variety does not.
A clerk who was letting her hair grow long,
The captions are wry, witty and compassionate. He says: “….these captions and these photographs are exactly the same thing. At least, they come from the same approach. For me they are intrinsically linked and both create an intense expressiveness. Photography and writing are part of the same battle for me: both involve making something intelligible which is not necessarily so….”* * As I’ve written often enough before, the way that words and photos can play together fascinates me. Get it wrong and they seem to wrestle and exhaust themselves; but get it right and they really dance, as they do here.
"I've always wanted to be different since I was a kid, and I've always been knocked around for it."
The photos are remarkable in their own right – that lovely sculpting of tones, in particular. So what is it that the text adds? The words are mostly drawn from short conversations he had with his subjects, so they are not labels as most photographic captions are; they slip out of the invisible world of the spoken word - so fleeting that they reflect the split-second of the photograph itself. Psychologically they act almost like a flash-bulb. In their lightness and wit they tell us something about the photographer, too. Sometimes they are simply descriptions, perhaps because the subject gave nothing away in conversation (‘a man with a penetrating gaze’ or ‘a man wearing four watches’) but they still suggest the invisible world we all carry around with us. We are left with a pleasing balance that HK pulls off time and time again.
Asakusa Portraits which is now out of print fetches about £100 secondhand but the 2020 Persona can be had for a little more than that including postage from Japan. I am tempted, I must say, to break my ‘no-more-than-twenty-pounds-for-a-photobook’ rule - just this once.
HIROH KIKAI 18/3/1945- 19/10/2020 (portrait from Instagram)
*Asakusa Portraits was published in 2008 by Steidl. Earlier this year further photographs in the series were published by Chikumasobo under the title “PERSONA: The Final Chapter 2005-18”. I have also seen reference to an earlier (2004) PERSONA edition.
**(‘intense expressiveness’? Hmmmm… I bet that packs more of a punch in the original Japanese.) The quote is from a Lensculture interview with Marc Feustel which can be found here
You can find more of HK’s work with the captions here and here.
All photos from Asakusa Portraits © the estate of Hiroh Kikai, courtesy of Steidl.