IBASHO is delighted to announce the opening of “Yōjo”, an exhibition developed in close collaboration with the Dutch photographer Jeremy Stigter.
“Yōjo”, a Japanese concept that can be translated as “a remaining, lingering, or sustained feeling, an emotional experience triggered by images created through certain kinds of indirect, often implicit, writings”, presents a dialogue, as much a confrontation, between IBASHO’s collection of vintage Japanese photography – from Araki to Yamamoto – and Jeremy Stigter’s own extensive work on Japan.

The result is a total of twenty-five sets of pictures, a sumptuous showcase of vintage black and white photography, each pairing inviting the spectator to view and compare the old to the new, the then to the now, the work of one photographer to the work of another. With a primary focus on Japan and Japanese photography, the exhibition is, inevitably, also about time: how much and how little, the country – its people, its customs as much as its photography – has changed.

While some of the pairings are quite obvious, with the visual similarity clearly spelled out, others present more complicated juxtapositions, where it may be the tonality, the underlying sentiment that has determined the coming together of two quite unrelated photographs.

This guest curatorship has, in Jeremy Stigter’s own words, “been something of a voyage of (re)discovery, for it involved trailing at length through my own archive to find the combinations of pictures that could potentially work, or even ask the most pertinent question. What curiously came to mind in this process was the haiku, the short form of Japanese poetry that traditionally consist of three phrases. What I gradually realised was that in trying to “fit” one picture with another, I would go from two phrases – each picture representing a phrase – to three: the pairing, or the combination, of the two pictures creating the missing third phrase as it were. I hope that I have succeeded.”