Rinko Kawauchi born 1972 is a Japanese photographer best known for her, images of the of the mundane and everyday life. Her photographs often have a bright radiant effect using a shallow depth of field with flash creating an over exposed image giving a dream like quality. The soft pastel colours of her work also give a serene feeling helping to present the ordinary as something sublime. Her work is rooted in the ideals of Shinto philosophy – Shinto is the ethnic religion of the people of Japan. According to Shinto all things have a spirit or a ‘kami’ so therefore nothing is ‘too mundane’ to be photographed and appreciated; There are four affirmations in Shinto: tradition and family, love of nature, physical cleanliness, and matsuri (festivals in which worship and honour is given to the kami). Kawauchi tries to capture “small events glimpsed in passing,” – she never goes out with an idea of what to photograph only taking pictures of that which interests her – her work is spontaneous and a reaction to the world around her.

Her work stretches over a large number of subjects – from flowers and the ocean, to streets and walls. She gained success in her field very quickly after the release of her first 3 photobooks in 2001: UTATANE, HANABI, and HANOKO. Her 2011 photobook ‘Illuminance’ explores the ideas of dreams, temporality and the divine.

Kawauchi puts a lot of thought into how she sequences her photobooks with images paralleling each other in composition over multiple page spreads – these juxtapositions creating a natural flow between her images. Much of Kawauchi’s is taken on a medium format Rolleiflex film camera meaning that instead of taking multiple images and choosing from the best she instead must use single takes – she describes this as a form of daily visual journaling she often writes poetry alongside her images often being nonsensical outside of the context of her work ‘the drinks of color beautiful delicious in his hand’. Her work as a particular focus on light with her images having a shallow depth of field and frequently being over exposed with lens flares, this helps to create the almost ethereal feeling of Kawauchi’s images.

I chose to use Rinko Kawauchi as inspiration for this project as I think her work fits my theme of finding beauty in the mundane and small things I also like both her aesthetic and practical approach to photography trying to take unstaged images in the moment.