The World Photography Organisation is pleased to announce that noted Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi will be the recipient of the Sony World Photography Awards 2023 for Outstanding Contribution to Photography. Kawauchi, one of the most significant Japanese photographers working today, has garnered international acclaim for her personal and bright photos that capture fleeting moments of ordinary life.
The photographer’s work will be featured in over twenty photos at the Sony World Photography Awards 2023 exhibition, which will be held at Somerset House in London from 14 April to 1 May 2023. The artist’s selection covers over twenty years of her career, including major milestones and themes from some of her most memorable series, including Illuminance (2011), AILA (2004), Utatane (2001), and Ametsuchi (2012).
Kawauchi was born in 1972 in Shiga Prefecture, Japan, and began photographing photography at the age of 19. In the early 1990s, she worked as a photographer for an advertising firm before relocating to a Tokyo studio to focus on her own work. She originally received worldwide prominence in 2001, with the publishing of three photobooks, Utatane, Hanabi, and Hanako. Two of the series went on to win Japan’s most prestigious prize for budding photography, the Kimura Ihei Award.
Shinto, which maintains that everything possesses a spirit or force called ‘kami,’ has impacted Kawauchi. As a result, Kawauchi’s lens is patient and sympathetic to its everyday subjects: shimmering lights reflected in a mirror, a pair of hands weaving thread together, sunbeams streaming through a forest canopy. Her images have been compared to haikus, a Japanese type of short-form poetry in which the lines typically reflect on a larger meaning or truth. Similarly, Kawauchi’s minimalist visual language lends these seemingly little moments a feeling of weight and significance.
The body of work she presents in the Sony World Photography Awards 2023 exhibition charts pivotal series from across her career. Her series Utatane (2001), AILA (2004) and Illuminance (2009) exemplify her idiosyncratic style, with glimpses of everyday scenes which reflect upon the cycle of life, and its fragility – the fraying of a net, a mouth opened to reveal a row of fillings, a blade of grass with droplets of morning dew. The exhibition also features work from Ametsuchi (2013), a series which marks a departure both in terms of technique and style. Following a dream, Kawauchi became fascinated by ‘noyaki (burning field)’, the controlled burning of crops before replanting. She has made numerous trips to southern Japan, where, using a large format camera mounted on a tripod she has captured these fires, contemplating the idea of the ritual cleansing of the earth, and her own rebirth.
Commenting on her acceptance of the award, Rinko Kawauchi says: ‘This award is recognition of my work and will encourage me in my future activities. The exhibition brings a body of work that not only characterises my practice, but also presents an ambitious series created with a different method and approach. Through my photography, I seek to create works of art that act as a signpost for me to examine more closely the experiences I am living and what I am looking at.’
The Outstanding Contribution to Photography award recognises an individual or group of individuals who have had a major effect on the photographic medium. Rinko Kawauchi is the 16th laureate of the award, following in the footsteps of William Eggleston (2013), Mary Ellen Mark (2014), Martin Parr (2017), Candida Höfer (2018), Nadav Kander (2019), Gerhard Steidl (2020), Graciela Iturbide (2021), and Edward Burtynsky (2022).
The overall winners in the Student, Youth, Open and Professional competitions of the Sony World Photography Awards 2023 will be announced on 13 April 2023. For more information about upcoming announcements and winners please visit www.worldphoto.org