A group show is a delicate organism. It is the curator’s responsibility to find linkages - explicit or not - between artists who often have disparate practices. This requires great sensitivity but also a sense of storytelling. A good group show functions in some ways like a book. It has a sense of forward motion, of thematic confidence, of build-up and resolution.

In this exhibition, Four Photographers, we see curator and photographer Yojiro Imasaka choosing artists who might seem, at first glance, to be concerned with entirely different aesthetic issues. But as the show coheres, we sense the commonality in the various work.

Here we encounter issues of identity, mostly, but also subtle nods at freedom, protest, gender, and more. What we are reminded of, mainly, in Four Photographers, is how completely the personal can become not just political but also universal. Each of us walks the world as a human camera. The artists in this show, we realize, simply have the determination to act on the urge to transpose the private into the public - and with powerful results.

The World Surrounding Us
– By Yojiro Imasaka

The four artists in this exhibition are all from the same generation as me and are based in New York. Though on the surface they are quite different from each other, there is a commonality in their work in that they all express important messages based on their own experience through the medium of photography. The world surrounding us is changing rapidly with the passage of time, but issues of culture, society, politics, and the environment remain major concerns in life, regardless of era. These are evergreen topics for art, and the artists in this show grapple with these things in various ways.

Through her photographs, Pixy Liao asks questions about the concept of gender and the social roles it plays as filtered through her own life and cultural background. At first glance, these self-portrait works made with her partner Moro appear to simply be documenting their relationship. However, viewers may realize there is a sense of incongruity in the work. I believe this signals a glimpse into our own latent awareness of gender roles - and the dangers inherent in values that change with the times. Changes in this realm can come with feeling of ambiguity and opacity, and Liao’s work highlights those elements.

In talking about Eric Thornton’s work, it may be easiest to describe my relationship with him. I am an immigrant from Japan, and Eric is one of the Americans I have spent the most time with. I believe his openness to diversity has much to do with the fact that he was born and raised in New York, a city that is a microcosm of the world. And so, for him, it seems quite natural to have a strong resentment over the division of people caused by differences in political thought, religion, or race. Participating in numerous protests such as Black Lives Matter and documenting them, his series of works strongly impresses with the contemporaneity of photography by adding pictorial elements to the power of documentation.

In Nadia Sablin’s work, the sense of interplay between distance from and familiarity with the subject is indispensable. Born in Russia and raised in the United States, Nadia has been visiting her country of birth every year since her late twenties. In her eyes, the village where she spent her childhood summers is representative of the social and political realities across rural Russia. She focuses on the scenery and everyday life there, constructing a narrative that’s richer and more complex than the media-made perspective of Eastern and Western countries. Viewers might be surprised at how far our perceptions of Russia are divorced from the reality that is reflected in these images.

Roughly 200 years have passed since the birth of photography, but with the advent of digital devices such as digital cameras and smartphones, the idea of photography morphed from something you examine thoughtfully to something you swipe past in the pursuit of quick gratification. It is no longer possible to hold people’s attention on a single image for more than a few seconds. The mass media is flooded with photographic images as if pushed by the trend of mass consumption society, and it seems that people are reacting only to the surface. Because most of them are overly processed images, they become unnaturally homogenous, and there is a danger that even our thoughts will change unconsciously. Photography is this powerful.

The artists exhibited here use the medium of photography to ask big questions. Naturally, these works are different from the photographic images that are intended to be consumed in our daily lives (I hope), and fully contain the artist’s own story in a single photograph. Now that the medium of photography has become more familiar in modern society, I ask you to face these images one by one and decipher the stories and contexts behind them. This is because I believe that each and every one of them is not something that can be swiped, but rather a mirror for those of us who live in the same era, and an opportunity to rediscover how we view modern society.