PHOTO:Naoko Tamura

The Japanese artist, Naoko Tamura works primarily in the media of photography, though she has tentatively experimented, as well, in the media of film, installation and performance. At first glance, it would appear that her photographic work may be divided into two categories: first the atmospheric and cerebrally abstract, atmosphere embodied in the 2004 Seigensha publication Voice and the cerebral in the untitled series of photographs published, serially since 2009, in the psychology journal Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Τaka Ishii Gallery Photography Paris Archive

Tamura is using analog and digital equipment or a combination of them, her commitment to the generally abstract nature of photographic representation results in a literal blur between these apparent categories and to a body of work which, though resistant to unification, is painstakingly consistent. Thus a luridly vibrant blush of blur, in truth an arrangement of flowers photographed at a range beyond close, is no less concrete and, conversely, no less alien than the grounds of an otherwise anonymous space, in fact the psychiatric hospital, Clinique de La Borde, in which the patients are treated with the method of the French psychiatrist Dr Jean Oury (1924-2014). Her first solo exhibition was in 1998 in the Ississ Gallery in Kyoto. In Paris Photo 2014, Naoko Tamura produced enthralling Polaroids, and her work was dealing with the idea of loss and death, her last exhibition was in the Taka Ishii Gallery Photography Paris, her new series of works entitled with the ancient Greek word “Thaümata”, a word used to describe the marvels or the wonders of the natural world.