Sakiko Nomura

Sakiko Nomura

Photography Sakiko Nomura
Words Sascha Behrendt

Sakiko Nomura is an artist unafraid to be immersed in emotion. Her photographs span people, landscapes, skies, and animals that express intense and fleeting beauty. “I aim to connect the small fluctuations — big sorrows, life and death, everything that surrounds one, and that one loves.” She is known for her portraits of men, where they are nude and lay bare their vulnerabilities. Through set-up situations, sometimes in the privacy of their homes, Nomura records, between herself and her chosen collaborators, feelings of intimacy and eroticism. A spark of eye-to-eye contact, or the languor of a look, that may be knowing, shy, yet deep. Faces are hidden by darkness or curtains of luxuriant hair. Tangles of bodies or auras of light on empty beds express desire, longing and despair. Imagery is presented as moments captured from the narrative of a film — the viewer is aware of what is not shown but suggested beyond the frame. The pictures show no sense of time or a particular place.

Nomura was born in 1967 in the town of Shimonoseki, in the Yamaguchi Prefecture in Japan. She describes it as surrounded by the sea on three sides. “My parents’ house was in front of the ocean, so that going home meant walking toward the setting sun. The whole town would turn orange, but right after, I thought it would be dark and nothing would be left.” This imagery, she believes, influenced her future work. She became interested in photography at the age of 18 and studied at Kyushu Sangyo University. “I started to shoot nudes during my college years. That attracted a lot of people around me each time I wanted to take pictures, and that’s how it has continued since then”. After graduating in 1990, Nomura approached Nobuyoshi Araki — a photographer known for his groundbreaking and transgressive images which re-imagined eroticism, love, marriage and death. “I asked Araki to make me his apprentice, and he took me to a bar that same day. We were having drinks, and beside me he took pictures the whole time. Then he explained, “You carefully change the film like this, thinking at the same time: may it come out well”. Over twenty years she became Araki’s only assistant. For Nomura, like Araki, “pictures became everything”.

Nomura’s subsequent career saw her work published in many books. Nude/Room/Flowers (2013) won her the Sagamihara Newcomer Professionals Award. And her technically innovative book of sombre solarised nudes, Another Black Darkness (2015) brought her the prestigious Higashikawa New Photographer Prize. “Books are the secret relationship I have with my audience. They become my accomplices and share my secret stories,” she has said. It is for all these reasons that we are honoured to share a selection of her work in published form.

Nomura’s images of naked men subverts the art historical male gaze exerted on women’s bodies. She challenges the idea and identity of what is looked at as an object of desire. Her work has foregrounded that of many female photographers in Japan who are also transforming subject matter and representation, from Momo Okabe with their gender and sexuality, to Tokyo Rumando and her self-portraits with myriad personae. Once, Nomura had those who visited one of her exhibitions fill out a questionnaire, so she could learn about their responses to her work. It struck her deeply when one responded, “I thought I was watching Nomuraʼs life — but in fact, it has started to become mine.”

All images courtesy of
Akio Nagasawa Gallery