Sunday, Dec. 16, 2001

By MONTY DiPIETRO

Special to The Japan Times

Maybe the world of painting seemed too old-school, too much turpentine-and-sweat -- or maybe the impatient daughters of the bubble era simply wanted a quick, easy expressive medium. Whatever triggered the phenomenon, there was an unprecedented surge in the number of young women entering the photography departments of Japanese art colleges during the early 1990s.

The wave of what critic Kotaro Iizawa termed onnanoko no shashinka (the curiously translated English-language label was "girlie photographers") broke big toward the middle of the last decade, with personalities such as Hiromix and Yuri Nagashima exhibited widely and profiled endlessly in pop-culture media.

Their work -- snapshot aesthetic documentation of the little things in the photographers' everyday lives -- was immensely popular both with other young women, who could relate to it; and with males of all ages, who could take a peek at the private moments of teens who, no doubt mindful of who was buying their books, frequently photographed themselves wearing contrived faux-naif pouts and white underwear.

Today, the residual effects of the girlie-photographer phenomenon (which fizzled out several years ago about the time Hiromix posed nude for lubricious lensman Nobuyoshi Araki) include wider acceptance of photography as a contemporary art medium and the emergence of a new class of collectors who buy photography as art.

Collectability is the defining characteristic of "art photography." Photojournalists and commercial photographers make images for the mass media, but they rarely release editions (limited runs of numbered and signed prints). Art photographers, in contrast, work primarily in editions, the magic number these days being somewhere from three to 10 prints from a given negative.

Although photo books can also be lucrative vehicles, especially in Japan, the stature of art photographers is generally determined by how well their editions perform both in the primary market (when first released at galleries) and when tested later at auction (the secondary market).

It took photography the better part of the 20th century to earn its place beside sculpture and painting as a "legitimate" art form. Internationally, the big names these days are Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cindy Sherman and Thomas Struth, who last year at Christie's set a record for a contemporary photograph with "Pantheon, Rome," a large 1992 C-print that sold for $ 270,000. (As the print was from an edition of 10, the value of the edition could be estimated at a whopping $ 2.7 million, far higher than the record for any work by, for example, respected painter Frank Stella.)

With work that spans genres, about the only thing these artists have in common is that they are all of them making a great deal of money.

The Paris Photo Salon, one of the world's leading photography fairs, has seen demand shifting from archive prints toward contemporary photographers over the last few years, and galleries that used to handle only paintings have also picked up contemporary photography in a big way. The new Internet-based art players, meanwhile, have determined that while it is difficult to sell paintings online, lithographs and photographs, especially those priced under several thousand dollars, will move comparatively well from their sites.

Tokyo has always had a number of good photography galleries, though, paradoxically, these have lost their niche now that almost every contemporary art space is exhibiting photography. The so-called maker's galleries, run by the likes of Nikon, Pentax and so on, hold little appeal for art photographers, most of whom would prefer to show in spaces that also feature paintings and installations.

Junko Shimada runs just such a space, Gallery Side 2, in Akasaka. "Of course painting will always have a certain market, but the collecting of photography is definitely increasing in Japan," explains Shimada. "I'd say the collectors I work with tend to follow artists from their generation, young collectors are interested in young photographers like Thomas Ruff, while older collectors are following people like Daido Moriyama and Doug Aiken."

It can be argued that one of the reasons for the current popularity of contemporary art photography is that the medium is simply better-suited than painting for capturing the landscapes and moods of postmodernity. Artists involved in what has been termed "in the moment" photography treat their subjects in a manner nearly opposite that of the portrait painters of yesteryear.

It is hard to imagine that the onnanoko no shashinka would have been able to bring us into their fast-food world with watercolors; or that Larry Clark could communicate the brutal reality of his greasy-haired, pimply, junkie street-hustlers if he had them sit for him in a studio. At least that's what the contemporary art market is suggesting.

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