Shikijo: Eroticism in Japanese Photography

Included in the “Private Diary” section, Daido Moriyama’s images from his 1980s-era series “A Room” present suggestive close-up views of the naked female body shot in private domestic settings. Photographed from the perspective of the male gaze, the female subject’s face is never revealed; her body is proffered as one that is sexual and pleasurable for the photographer and viewer. A Room (No.1) (1980), which was shot in high contrast black-and-white film, shows a woman lying down on crinkled bed sheets with a towel sprawled across her backside, partially covering her buttocks and thighs. The suggestiveness of the photograph highlights the desirability and suppleness of the female body against the harsh textures of the towel and the room’s carpet flooring.

More unreserved than Moriyama, Nobuyoshi Araki, one of Japan’s most prolific artists who is notorious for his explicit imagery, captures the female body in states of pleasurable pain and sexual play, depicting a genre of eroticism derived from bondage and fetishism. Exhibited under the theme of “Staged,” Marvellous Tales of Black Ink (NA-BK_26) and Marvellous Tales of Black Ink (NA-BK_65) (both 1994) are dramatic visual depictions of masochism. In both images, the central subject is a woman tied up in bondage presenting herself as sexually submissive; black ink spattered on their genitals enhances the explicitness of the photographs. Like many others belonging to the same series, Marvellous Tales of Black Ink (NA-BK_26) also shows Araki himself engaged in play within the photograph, forcing viewers into a voyeuristic role.

Hideka Tonomura, a contemporary of Moriyama and Araki, equally captures intensely sexual and intimate scenes, but from a female perspective. Appearing more intrusive, Tonomura links her fascination of sex to her familial relationship with her mother, creating an unusually painful and uncomfortable context. Mama love (ML No#1) (2008), is one in a series of photographs where her mother is photographed having an affair with another man. Her unflinching stare at the lens suggests that she is fully aware of Tonomura’s camera. The photographs are confrontational and reveal the tension within the mother-daughter relationship.

The theme of family reappears in the exhibition in Noritoshi Hirakawa’s series “A Sense of Accomplishment” (2008) and “A Daughter’s Proposal” (2008), where his main subjects are adolescent women, sometimes shown with their parents. The suggestive poses of the models, juxtaposed against compositionally similar portraits of their parents, depict the conflict of “the daughter,” who negotiates between the polarizing identities of being a father’s child and a grown sexual woman. By flipping the photographs from vertical to horizontal, Hirakawa displaces the subjects and the backdrops to create a space where the traditional Japanese familial hierarchy is confronted by the burgeoning identity of “the daughter.”