Real Life Fantasy: A Conversation With KAZUYOSHI USUI
From the Serie “Showa 96”
Kazuyoshi Usui catches the Japanese soul like no one else. His images are impactful and profound.
They show the life and emotions of the real streets, the real people and he fuses them with a lucid, dreamy fantasy of the world that captures the beautiful struggles of a generation.
His Showa series is a prime example of how Japan can be seen entirely differently from how Western pop culture portrays it. Western pop culture has a tendency to romanticize the nostalgia and folklore around Japan. Kazuyoshi Usui blends bright colours, stark emotions and naked lust into a wild mix of dream and reality. As the ‘Japan back then’ meets the ‘Now’, Showa meets the future.
Other works of Kazuyoshi Usui, such as 'Macaroni Christian' or 'A Flying Man' show his exceptional talent of using monochrome colours and hard contrast to tell a dramatic story. Every picture hits the ground forcefully and the more you look, the deeper you are drawn in.
His ‘Bullet Boy’ series is an epitome of character play and storytelling and perfectly shows his cinematographic approach to each frame.
Kazuyoshi Usui is an out of the box icon and talent, whose work and mind will keep inspiring a generation of photographers.
The Gata team had the chance to talk to the artist and find out more about his life, visions, his relationship to Japan, and the contradictions that exist in everyday life.
Let’s go back to the past. Can you please tell us more about when and why you chose photography to express yourself? We could find a lot about your work, but we want to know more about the person behind the camera, please.
I am actually the 3rd generation in my family who works with photography. My grandfather was an avant-garde dancer. When he married my grandmother, he started a small photo studio in the neighbourhood to earn a living. At that time the Second World War started and the young people who were being sent to fight the war had to take photos, so photography became very popular as a culture. I heard that those photo studios at that time had great profits.
My grandfather’s photo studio was burnt down by the air bombings, so he and my father who was still small had to wander in the war-torn street.
After the war, the photo studio was rebuilt, but my father did not inherit the business. He worked as a photographer for the publisher called Shogakukan and later became a freelance photographer. He worked on many different genres, specializing in photographing the royal family in Japan, fashion, and even published a photobook on Kabuki performances. Recently, he also took photos of the 14th Dalai Lama as one of his official photographers.
During the 6 years between 2007 to 2011, my father and I closely followed the 14th Dalai Lama—my father documented him with photography and I documented with film.
The documentary film was released in 2015 with the title “The 14th Dalai Lama”.
Thanks to my father and grandfather, I had a strong foundation in pursuing the path of photography.
Since I was small, however, I was more interested in movies than photography and have watched all sorts of movies. When I was a teenager, I dug into many different genres experimental films, exploitation movies, underground films and was interested in all the music and culture that were related to the movies.
From the Serie “Bullet Boy”
From the Serie “Showa 96”
I could continuously watch 8 hours of Empire State Building on the screen back then. Now that I think about it, I was a strange high school student.
However, I would say that artists of the underground culture like Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, Alexandro Jodorowsky, John Waters, Michael Snow, and others most influenced me when I was a high school student. They grounded my foundation as a creator.
Then I came across Eikoh Hosoe’s photography—his works reminded me how interesting photography can be. He makes his photos like movies. Each of his photobooks is like a movie.
Because he was teaching at Tokyo Polytechnic University, I decided to enter the school. I learned a lot from his seminar and through his introduction, I entered Hakuhodo Inc., an advertisement agency after graduation and worked as their in-house photographer. There were a lot of wonderful art directors in the agency and I had opportunities to collaborate with them. You can take a look at them on my personal website. Chie Morimoto was one of the art directors I worked with, and I still work with her nowadays even though I have become a freelance photographer.
It is my personal style to take underground themes in a relatively mainstream tone. Perhaps it is influenced by my experience in the commercial field.
From the Serie “Showa 88”
From the Serie “Showa 96”
We heard that you find Tokyo a place full of grey shapes and inorganic landscapes. But still, you live in Tokyo. What is your relationship to this city?
Tokyo is a very important place for me. I was born in Harajuku so I have seen the area and Tokyo since I was small. Even now I have my office in Harajuku. Ura-Harajuku district, the origin of street culture, has had a lot of residential houses since the past. When I was a child, many of my friends lived in the area. The main street’s glamour and the back street’s historical culture always existed together. I used to play with my friends in the back streets when I was 6 or 7.
We would draw on the streets with chalk, play Kick the Can and the girls would play rubber band rope jumping too. Entering the 1990s, the shops that sold necessities were forced out, as well as my friends’ families and people who lived there. That’s when Ura-Harajuku became the source of street culture. The area turned into a fashion district and it became difficult for the new to co-exist with the old.
The speed of change was so fast. In Japan, “harmony” is important, but when a big wave comes, everything follows the wave, and the speed in such kind of transition is really quick. The way Harajuku changed as a district, how the new and the old changed and how popular stores would suddenly disappear due to the change in cultural “needs and supply”—when you are in Harajuku, you can feel all this. And by looking at how Harajuku changes, it seems like we can have a glimpse of how Japan overall changes with time.
From the Serie “Showa 92”
From the Serie “Showa 88”
From the Series “Macaroni Christian”
How important is leaving or ‘escaping’ Tokyo so that you can shoot somewhere else for your work? Where exactly do you find your inspiration and what are the places outside of Tokyo that interest you the most?
I am not a documentary photographer, and I try to create images like movies, but it doesn’t mean that I like creating everything from scratch. I want both fantasy and documentary to co-exist in my work. Photography can document and has its spontaneity. I want to treasure these two things.
My first personal work “Macaroni Christian” documented Tokyo in the 1990s. And I placed a “guide” in the work—the Christ who appeared in the modern world.
What kind of chemistry will be ignited when I input fiction in the place I document? Since then I started to create works with combined themes.
That style of mine is probably inspired by Italian film director Jacopetti. Although he is renowned as a documentary film director, especially for his work Mondo Cane, his work combined both reality and imagination.
When the movie was released in the 1960s, most people at that time believed that it was purely a documentary. Apparently some people got angry later when they found out it wasn’t. Now, it is recognized for its entertaining quality and even has its own genre called “Mondo Movie”.
The thrilling theme combined with the real and the unreal also works really well with photography. What you think is real is actually fake, and what you think is fake is actually real. Even if it's something fake, the atmosphere and philosophy of a certain era is already implemented in it. What’s thrilling is that many years later, it will secretly become a part of reality in that era.
Currently, the idols and pro-wrestlers in Japan are also entertaining in the way that they have both realistic and unrealistic qualities in them. We tend to want to believe that the outer layer of a certain thing represents its reality.
At the same time, we are actually also aware that it is actually being made up. However, when we see the idols dancing wholeheartedly and pro-wrestlers bleeding, what we see becomes what is real, and deep inside we want to see how the real and the unreal are appearing and disappearing. I’m personally attracted by their suspicious and entertaining qualities.
From the Series “Mondo Trasho”
You mentioned ‘Humanity Smell’ and ‘grey zones’ in a previous interview. Can you please tell us more about these words and the ideas and curiosity behind them?
Religions, in my opinion, are also a grey zone. You wouldn’t know if God really exists or not until you die. I don't think it’s necessary to discuss the truth. If having the presence of God in your heart gives you the courage to survive, live in the way you think is right and become driven to live on your own.
Of course, there is also the relationship between the front and back that controls the world.
I think that there are things in the world that can impact how the world runs smoothly and that people can live strongly because of their existence.
From the Serie “Showa 92”
Are you planning to focus more on the Heisei era, and if so, what would you say are the interesting characteristics for you of this period?
Not particularly.
Which are your favorite cameras to work with and why?
PENTAX67, because it is very easy for me to think of image compositions with its camera frame. The impression I get with the frame will directly become the image itself. It may sound like something normal, but that actually doesn’t work with most of the other cameras. The impression I get in their frames can be quite different from their resulting image.
From the Serie “Showa 88”
From the Series “Macaroni Christian”
Can you please give us a short introduction to your love and passion for the Showa era? What makes this era so unique in Japan's history?
I am not trying to express nostalgia by naming my series “Showa”. To me, “Showa” represents the ‘gritty determination to survive’.
Rather, I am trying to create a world of fantasy. I imagined if “Heisei” and “Reiwa” did not come, and “Showa” had continued to exist in another time and space and what kind of world it would be.
I am trying to photograph Japan from a multiversal point of view.
It seems like Kotodama (lit. word: spirit) really exists. “Heisei” meant “peace everywhere”, and the era was really peaceful and full of abundance. Thanks to our ancestors, Japan developed further as a country and went through an average, stable, and mature period of time. However, it is also true that since most young people have not experienced the rite of passage before becoming adults, we are not mentally fulfilled and so we tend to feel insecure about whether the current condition is good for us. I am one of these people.
On the topic of “survival”, there are all kinds of contradictions and grey zones that exist. Many things cannot be divided into black and white, or into “1” and “0” like computers. Human beings are very complicated in that way.
Such complication also exists in the world of entertainment, in travel entertainers and show-houses, as well as the world of Itako (blind women who train to become spiritual mediums) and shamisen playing. There is a background of that era to every culture. Even the bride-doll-marriage culture that exists in the sacred grounds of Aomori may be built upon the grey zone as a kind of salvation for the mind. It seems like in the Showa era, a “sanctuary that cannot be invaded” exists. In the sanctuary, truths and lies are not defined and there are no ultimate answers for anything. Contradicting elements like “sacredness and vulgarity”, “fear and humour”, “real and fake”, and “life and death” coexist as one. To me, the smell drifting in such a sanctuary is exactly the smell of human beings.
Now, before the Tokyo Olympics, everywhere is being cleaned up and Japan is about to enter a new stage. When the country changes, there will be a lot of cultures that will disappear.
By using photography as a media that is contradictory - in the way that the real and the fiction co-exists - I want to capture the friction held between the outer and inner aspects of human beings. Maybe it is a way for me to use photography to fulfil my emptiness from growing up in the Heisei era.
From the Serie “Showa 88”
Sex looks like a private topic in Japan, but only at first sight. Sex, and the businesses behind it, seem to rule the back alleys of Japan. Why do you think there is such a contrast between how people deal with their temptations and the way they communicate them?
If humans are considered as some form of hardware, sex is an animal behaviour for leaving offspring, and such a way of thinking is adapted naturally. If no descendants remain, the history of humanity will end. I think that the history of mankind has been continuing because the hardware has the pleasure function of “desires”, like “appetite” and “libido”. On the other hand, humans also have a software called “heart”. The software is built to fulfill our desires and give our life some “satisfaction”. Apart from the purpose of leaving offspring, humans have created a different genre for sex—directed to purely enjoying the pleasure as a form of “satisfaction”. It is something original for human beings. Food and fashion are very similar to that concept too.
From the Serie “Showa 88”
Japan recently started to open its doors to more immigration. How do you think this new influx of cultures and people will change Japan's island mentality and culture?
I think Japanese people are good at maintaining their own identity while they can implement and output a mix of various cultures. So I think the new influx of cultures and people will create something really powerful that we cannot imagine.
As always we ask our interview partners about their interest in cinema. Could you please tell us your three favorite movies?
HOLY MOUNTAIN, DEER HUNTER and 3:10 to YUMA（2007）