The Opposite Sex Artist Natsumi Yamada | Incarnations

The photographer was born into a Zen-Buddhist family, in Yamagata, Japan. The title of this work, Incarnations, literally means personification or Buddhism transmigration of souls, and is taken from the name of the model for this work, Tamaki. Tamaki is a woman, divorced after many twists and turns, who is currently raising her twelve-year-old boy. Japanese women are not born with a given gender. We fulfill more than one image or personification at the same time: “A good wife”, “an affectionate mother” or “a wise daughter”. And being burdened with all these, we are trying to establish identity and an idea of self.

“We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates… Our ancestors cut off the brightness on the land from above and created a world of shadows, and far in the depths of it they placed woman, marking her the whitest of beings. If whiteness was to be indispensable to supreme beauty, then for us there was no other way, nor do I find this objectionable”. In Praise of Shadows, Junichiro Tanizaki. It was this essay which sparked the Japanese photographer to start taking interest in monochrome photography during her stay in France. Natsumi studied visual art history at Université de Paris, and also took a feminism course at the college of London in Paris. Subsequently, she began working as a contributing editor for design magazines, shifting her main focus to photography. The creation of this work was inspired by the book, In Praise of Shadows, written by Junichiro Tanizaki. Awe of the aesthetics of Japanese tradition, contempt towards women’s social position that has been depreciated in society, and the emotion which arose from both of these two inseparable concepts, are expressed in this set of four photographs. “In Praise of Shadows” is an essay written for Economy and Business Affairs Magazine in December 1933 and January 1934. In this essay, Tanizaki argues that the unique aesthetics that Japanese hold is cultivated through their familiar interaction to darkness and shadows.

Recently her works have been exhibited in Sendai (Japan), Korea, New Zealand etc. By sheer accident, she began shooting the people and their dying folklore culture a year before the nuclear accident. Her solo exhibition is scheduled to take place in Paris as an official artist for Paris Photo. She is also the mother of a 4 month-old girl.