Rinko Kawauchi: Illuminance

Photograph Magazine

Vince Aletti

Rinko Kawauchi's Illuminance (Aperture) could be the year's most beautiful photo book… With Illuminance, Kawauchi clarifies what Chandler calls her "spirit of accelerated wonder," summing up her considerable achievement while leaving it marvelously expansive and open-ended.

The Guardian

Sean O'Hagan

Ten years on from her extraordinary first book, Aila, Kawauchi continues her journey into the heightened everyday. That same mix of intimacy and deceptively casual observation holds sway and the end results remain singularly beautiful.

Art in America

Stephen Maine

The work of this Japanese photographer always looks better in book form, where, printed one per page and carefully sequenced, her images—delicate, intimate, reticent but never cryptic—an be absorbed slowly, and her tougher, more jolting photos can better deliver their punch. Illuminance gathers work from the last 15 years: a gangly spider; a hole in a rock, filled with water; a doll-like blossom, washed out by flash; a dead, bloodied deer by the side of the road. The book is cinematic in its steady buildup of images that create a mood, and then break it. This kind of thing is hard to sustain, but just when Kawauchi's approach to the poetic snapshot starts to look familiar, it takes a turn for the weird.

ArtAsiaPacific

Olivier Krischer

Sensitively designed, Illuminance packs 144 photographs into its 163 French-fold pages. Yet by foregoing individual titles, captions, and page numbers one is left to really look at the images - their uncanny juxtapositions and accumulated connections. The cropped details, emotive over-exposures, and blurred movements actually perform a complex choreography, both in the camera and at the editing stage. For better or worse Japanese photobooks often go without essays to "contextualize" the work, yet here an appended essay by David Chandler notably cites what Kawauchi has referred to as the "constant present" to describe the elliptical sense of time permeating her enigmatic oeuvre.

Little Brown Mushroom

Alec Soth

An exquisitely produced monograph with wide international distribution. This book should make Rinko a household name.

New York Magazine

Kawauchi is a master at grasping dreamlike moments, both profound and banal, with incredible detail: swirling surf, a translucent small frog perched on the edge of a hand, a child intensely focusing on a tiny speck on the sidewalk. As David Chandler writes in an essay that accompanies Kawauchi’s pictures, which were taken over the last 15 years, “Recorded are the rhythms of this life, rather than its set pieces: a breath, a touch, and a glance, the things that happen inside the moment and that can never be clearly seen.”