Koji Onaka
JAPAN
Koji Onaka (1960, Fukuoka, Japan) has established himself as a major figure in the Japanese photographic scene. This inveterate adventurer has been collecting souvenirs of his travels for over 40 years. His images have been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions and publications in Japan and Europe.
Koji Onaka's passion for photography was born from his discovery of the images in the series Tales of Tono, by photographer Daido Moriyama. He then decided to leave his hometown of Nogata to join the Tokyo College of Photography, where the master taught. It was this desire to come into contact with Moriyama that pushed him to make his mark in the world of photography.
Koji Onaka began his career in 1982 with the CAMP gallery and very soon asserted his photographic style. Imbued with melancholy and mystery, his images invariably escape the laws of time. The artist seeks as much to document places as to reveal their emotional charge, leaving the viewer the possibility of interpreting each image according to his own sensitivity.
© Courtesy of In)(Between Gallery
• SERIES •
Have a break
Have a break
At 62 years old, 46 years since his first darkroom, 31 years after the release of his first book (Seitaka-awadachiso, 1991), and 37 books later, Koji Onaka's photographic career has not been a short journey. And throughout this journey, not once has he traveled without the same trusty camera.
With this camera, Onaka embarked on a journey in search of memories, crossing paths with unknown photographers and many great Japanese photographers, such as Takuma Nakahira Sensei, Masahisa Fukase, Daido Moriyama, and Nobuyoshi Araki. A photographic exploration, between inspiration and emancipation from these models.
Photographer Daido Moriyama described the Koji Onaka of the 1980s as follows: "In the streets of Shinjuku at that time there were two personalities, the dashing, funky-groovy Koji kun, and the depressed, existentially anguished Onaka kun."
These two facets of Koji Onaka can be found throughout his books, but not as distinctly as through the wake drawn by his Faraway Boat, drifting through time, or the colorful cities and landscapes of Japan in the Have a break series. These two series are the subject of the exhibition presented as part of the 2022 edition of the photography festival InCadaqués, through 40 color silver gelatin prints from his travels in Japan between 2013 and 2015, and 15 black and white silver gelatin prints from the period of the 1980s to around 2010. This selection shows how Onaka's images reveal the artist's personal feelings as much as they tell a story.
As the artist himself says, "In a way, I know that it doesn't matter when or where I took my images, or why I took them. Nevertheless, I hope that these photographs, once forgotten in time, will live on as much as possible. For I feel that these are images that show moments of a time adrift, as a boat drifting away in the flow of time”.