Eye Under the Influence — Osamu Kanemura

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“People think that by seeing they can fully clarify things, but I think this is wrong. Photographic images don’t really clarify anything, they rather lead us into a further, uncertain world.” — Osamu Kanemura

Eye Under the Influence is a series of reflections on the transformative impact of various visual artists on my photography over the past three decades. In this chapter, I reflect on my infatuation with a messy and unapologetic visual critique of Japan through Osamu Kanemura’s striking and disorienting street photography, showing me how to embrace ambiguity in my pictures.

If I had to pick a single image to remind me of Japan on a long, lonely voyage, it would be a photograph by Osamu Kanemura. Any black-and-white picture he has taken, developed, and published himself would do. But especially any of the 80 black and white 6x7 images shot with a Makina 67 from his 2001 book ‘Spider Strategy,’ which depict Tokyo cityscape as a gigantic web of chaotic overhead power lines and wires holding together the urban jigsaw puzzle of concrete, glass, and steel. They are the best representatives of Kanemura’s photographic style, which I have subconsciously emulated, shooting the streets of Tokyo around the same time he made the images in…