Kikai Hiroh (鬼海 弘雄) : photographer

Hiroh Kikai (鬼海 弘雄), born 1945, is a Japanese photographer best known within Japan for four series of monochrome photographs: scenes of buildings in and close to Tokyo, portraits of people in the Asakusa area of Tokyo, and rural and town life in India and Turkey. He has pursued each of these for over two decades, and each has led to one or more book-length collections.
Kikai had started his Asakusa series of square, monochrome portraits as early as 1973, but after this there was a hiatus until 1985, when he realized that an ideal backdrop would be the plain red walls of Sensō-ji. At that time, the great majority of his Asakusa portraits adopted further constraints: the single subject stands directly in front of the camera (originally a Minolta Autocord TLR, later the Hasselblad), looking directly at it, and is shown from around the knees upwards. Kikai may wait at the temple for four or five hours, hoping to see somebody he wants to photograph, and three or four days may pass without a single photograph; but he may photograph three people in a single day, and he has photographed over six hundred people in this way. He believes that to have a plain backdrop and a direct confrontation with the subject allows the viewer to see the subject as a whole, and as somebody on whom time is marked, without any distracting or limiting specificity.
Though Kikai started to photograph in Asakusa simply because it was near where he then lived, he has continued because of the nature of the place and its visitors. Once a bustling and fashionable area, Asakusa long ago lost this status. If it were as popular and crowded as it was before the war, Kikai says, he would go somewhere else.
Published in 1987, Ōtachi no shōzō / Ecce Homo was the first collection of these portraits. It is a large-format book with portraits made in Asakusa in 1985–6. Kikai won the 1988 Newcomer’s Award of the Photographic Society of Japan (PSJ) for this book and the third Ina Nobuo Award for the accompanying exhibition.
In 1995, a number of portraits from the series were shown together with the works of eleven other photographers in “Tokyo/City of Photos”, one of a pair of opening exhibitions for the purpose-made building of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
Ya-Chimata, published a year later, has a greater number of portraits printed more cheaply on smaller pages.
Persona (2003) is a further collection of portraits made in Asakusa. A few are from Kikai’s earliest work, but most postdate anything in the earlier books. Several of the subjects appear twice or more often, so the reader sees the effect of time. The book format is unusually large for a photograph collection in Japan, and the plates were printed via quadtone. The book won the 23rd Domon Ken Award and 2004 Annual Award of the PSJ. A smaller-format edition with additional photographs followed two years later.
Asakusa Portraits (2008) is a large collection edited by the International Center of Photography (New York), published in conjunction with the ICP’s exhibition of recent Japanese photography and art “Heavy Light”. Kikai’s contribution to this exhibition was well received, and Asakusa Portraits won praise for its photography and also (from Paul Smith) for the vernacular fashion of those photographed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroh_Kikai