Group 7, Tama, Goes to Totem Pole Gallery

Shinya Arimoto's Portraits at Totem Pole Gallery

It was a mystic place. Totally new but simultaneously, it’s old. I have visited Totem Pole Gallery June 21, Tuesday. The gallery is located in the residential area. With a white faint light, it appeared. Its outside is glassed in and one is able to see inside of it. The first thing I felt about this gallery when I stepped in was that this gallery is something homey.  Twenty photos, shown in one room. The room is not so large but with its white painted wall, it makes the whole gallery look bright and clean. Also, it exaggerates the works well.

Shinya Arimoto is the photographer of all twenty.  All images displayed are selected from his past exhibitions. The gallery is run by him and other four photographers. They rotate their work exhibitions periodically. 

As I look through his art, I gradually am drawn into his photos. In every images, Arimoto uses single person and they all have some kind of personality that is little or much different than us. From these twenty works, particularly, two photographs have impressed me; a guy with dress that is made from Koinobori (carp-shaped steamer), and a woman who wears a mask which has a hole on it. What are they doing? Why they wear stuff like that? First time, I watched them with wondering and confusion. At the same time, I thought these people are crazy. A guy wears a dress like a woman? A mask with a hole? That’s abnormal. It was my first opinion.

But wait a second. They might have some idea. That something we don’t know.  A dress made from koinobori. Isn’t this saves nature? When koinobori gets old, we throw away. The guy in the photograph wears a koinobori dress walking through Tokyo. And the woman with a mask, she has a drink at her side. The mask has a hole at the place where her mouth is. With that mask, she can drink it without put off and put on the mask. It is true that they look abnormal but they are not crazy. They have an idea and actually it’s smart. As with these two images, most of the images that are displayed there were taken in Tokyo. Every day, I walk through Tokyo but I was oblivious of my surroundings. His photograph made me to realize that even if you don’t notice, there are so many people who are talented and cool. His art makes us know and notice new stuff in daily life.

All of his photographs are black and white. Why black and white? Arimoto says color photo sometime make back ground push into the main object too much. By making it white and black, viewers look the main object which artists want to show most. And it worked well. I first looked at a person in the photograph and after that, I looked behind of it. Totem Pole Gallery is small but inside of it there are the photos that are really interesting. Arimoto’s works made me think both when I was at the gallery and also, after I left there.

Shinya Arimoto was born in Osaka, Japan, 1971. After he graduated high school, he got into TV commercial film studio. At that time, he had been thinking that photograph is occupational stuff and no more than that. His recognition toward the photography has changed since he entered Visual Arts Osaka. As he studied photography, its mysteriousness and attractiveness gets deep and deeper, and it captivated him into the world of photography. Also, Masatoshi Naito’s photo album, “Tokyo” prompted him to take a step into field of photography. In 1994 he graduated Visual Arts Osaka. In 1998 he won 35^th Taiyo award. From 1994 through now on, his photography have been exhibited as a solo. Moreover, he also exhibits his art as a group.

In Shinya’s works, we often see the homeless in it, but he doesn’t intend to choose them. Also, he doesn’t inquire particular race, age or job. His theme is “brightness of primitive life that indeed exists in urban living.”  What he looking is a person who is prominent even if he/she is in the crowd. That means, he is looking for people who can’t categorize by his own experiments and knowledge that he have had.

Shinya mostly takes black and white photography because he loves it. Black-and-white photographs were the first photograph he had composed. He liked to work in the darkroom and it is fascinating to run all process by himself.  And primarily, when he think of his theme, color is not necessary in his art. Sometimes, when the photograph has a color, its background gets overabundant. Of course, background is necessary, but most important thing is an object. That is one of the reason he takes black and white. Besides going to neighbor convenience store, he always carries a camera everywhere he goes. Right now, he administrates the Totem Pole Gallery, exhibit his own arts there, lecturing at photograph school, and take a photograph that have requested. For the time other than that, he works on making photographs. He says that reading a book, listen to music, or going out for a walk, everything relates to the photograph so it’s not able to state from where to where is the time for working for the photography.

    He feels pleasure that he could give viewers the stuff he found is easy to miss and is really tiny and delicate. As the artist, he wants to create the photograph that could take over for the next gender. Also, he wants to more people to know about the fascination of photograph. Edward Weston found a perfect curve in the urinal form, and Alfred Stieglitz discovered the state which is the sky and oneself is equivalent. As it is said “The number of the art is the number of the artists”, he feels proud of finding out the new value in making a photograph.

From another Tama member:

Shinya Arimoto is a rising Japanese photographer. After he graduated from the Visual Arts College in Osaka, he moved to Tokyo. At first, he had certain difficulties with the distant mentality of the people in Tokyo, but after a while he got used to it. “Now”, he told us in an interview, “I really like them a lot”. He specializes in black and white portraits of random individuals. For him, there is nothing more interesting than the exceptional charisma of extraordinary ordinary people. His photographs are mostly snapshots with contradictory, moody, and dark consistency, reminiscent of the most haunting and forlorn moments in life. Sorrow-speaking eyes are common features of most of the photographs. By looking at those eyes, the verdant, average viewer gets pushed into the deepest abyss of his or her soul, where exasperation and irredeemability grow to an unusual degree.

The first reason why he decided to specialize in black and white photography was because he wanted to eliminate all unnecessary stimuli caused by color. The second reason was the unique atmosphere of black and white photographs. As the result, the viewer can focus on deeper expressions instead of the multicolored surface, and sinks into the scenery to experience it completely.

Although exceptionally gifted with photographic talent coupled with a unique feeling of depth, Shinya Arimoto did not want to become a photographer by all means. He always showed reluctance against salary men, but a cook job and a job as a manga artist had been something he had been interested in for a long time.

 In 2006, Arimoto launched the ‘Lotus Root Gallery’ in Yotsuya, Tokyo with Keizo Motoda. After Motoda left the ‘Lotus Root Gallery’ in 2008, Arimoto renamed it to ‘Totem Pole Photo Gallery’. From the 四ッ谷三丁目 (Yotsuya san-chome) station, it is a 10 minute walk to the gallery. The route is well signposted, so you will most likely find it easily. The gallery looks a bit run down from outside, but very nice and clean when you go inside. At present, he is running the gallery with four other artists, viz. Tatsuya Shimohira, Naoki Sekiguchi, Tatsuro Hiruma, and Emi Fukuyama. 

One interesting photograph, taken in Shinjuku, Tokyo is part of the ‘Ariphoto Selection’ series. According to Shinya Arimoto, the person in it came from New York City and had no money and no passport on him. Arimoto bought him something to eat, chitchatted with him, and after that, he took a nice snapshot. Like most professional portrait photographs, the centered subject is in focus and the background is out of focus. The blurred background emphasizes the motion of the subject and prevents the viewer to distract from the subject. The lights and the illuminated signboards are producing an intense contrast. The man is wearing an oversized beanie, and he is carrying a sports bag. The weather seems to be cold, because he is also wearing a scarf (which is dotted by the way), and a kind of a Western leather jacket. The difference between a good photographer and an awesome photographer is, that the latter one is actually able to capture the whole atmosphere rather than just the particular objects. Fortunately, this is exactly what Arimoto does.

But there is still one problem. Nowadays, in the so-called digital age, where everyone can shoot and manipulate photographs easily, photographs aren’t enough to retain enough visitors anymore. As an artist, you have to establish some sort of interpersonal relationship with your visitors. This can be done either personally during an exhibition or indirectly through i.e. social networking. Luckily, we were able to talk to Shinya Arimoto and ask him some questions, and – apart from the fact that his pictures are really stunning – he turned out to be very frank and interesting. He welcomed us with a cup of ‘麦茶’ (barley tea), listened carefully to our questions, and gave us detailed and intelligent answers to each of them. He combines wisdom and knowledge from many aspects of life, and along with his extraordinary talent, his future definitely looks very bright.

And to close, this from Tama Group as well:
The more you know about Arimoto's  photographs, the more interested you feel. This is because his photographs talk with each object. He said he took pictures in a large city, so that almost all of his photographs in gallery are taken in Shinjuku, which is one of the largest neighborhoods in Tokyo. When we walk in the hustle and bustle of a big city, we usually do not pay attention to the individual.  He said that a big city is a very wide diversity of people. We often consider a crowd as a group, or we are not willing to keep our eyes on the individual. However, each people has a different experience, life and interest in their inner life. Arimoto keeps his eyes on a man, whom especially we tend to ignore in a crowd, for example people who do not have a house and people wearing peculiar clothes. Furthermore Arimito talks with him or her. One example is the photograph of a man hanging his head. His expression seems to contain sorrow and resignation. According to the photographer, he is from Vietnam. He came to Japan with his second Japanese mother, but he was introverted, he cannot speak Japanese, so that he cannot work and he wanders about Shinjuku.

As we come to know about the background of his subjects, we notice that people’s faces and emotions tell us his or her personality and life. His photographs are not seen, but felt. One of the evidences of this, his photographs are black-and-white. His photographs make us feel a personality and life through the lens, so that visual distraction of color would prevent us from being aware of something. His photographs make a featureless city colorful, and by this, you may be come to have fun when you walk in a big city.