Installation view of the exhibition Kan Azuma: A Matter of Place, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2024. © Kan Azuma Photo: NGC
A Place That Matters to Kan Azuma
Kan Azuma: A Matter of Place, a solo exhibition of works by Japanese photographer Kan Azuma (b.1946), presents his photographic rendition of the landscapes and cityscapes of Canada, as well as the people he encountered during his many serendipitous trips across North America and Japan. Drawn from the Gallery’s collection and from the artist’s recent donation of archival materials to the Gallery’s Library and Archives, this exhibition includes his most celebrated series – Erosion (1973) and Other Land (c.1975) – alongside the artist’s contact sheets, workprints and negatives.
A freelance photographer who had trained at the Tokyo Design Institute, Kanetsugu (Kan) Azuma landed in Vancouver in 1970 on a tourist visa. It was three years after Canada’s Centennial celebration, when the newly implemented immigration points system abandoned national origin as an admission criterion. Wanting to stay longer in the country, Azuma obtained a permanent immigration status soon afterwards.
Azuma had initially wanted to move to New York City to continue his apprenticeship with Ikkō Narahara (1931–2020), one of the leading figures in Japanese contemporary photography in the 1960s. Azuma had planned to shoot a photographic essay on young generations in the U.S., but having been refused by U.S. Immigration as a suspected anti-Vietnam War sympathizer, he chose to do the project in Canada instead. During a 2022 interview with this author, the artist recalled that he had found the country actually better suited to the project. He pointed out, however, that once he settled in Canada, his interest gradually shifted from people to landscape.
Kan Azuma, all works Untitled, c. 1985, from the series 88 Shrines Pilgrimage, gelatin silver print, 22.8 x 15.6 cm. Gift of the artist. Kan Azuma fonds, National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives, Ottawa. © Kan Azuma Photos: NGC Library and Archives
Azuma’s mentor Narahara was a member of VIVO, a collective of photographers who explored a new visual language that could adequately reflect the radical transformation of the postwar sociocultural landscape in Japan. Daidō Moriyama (b.1938), a key member of the Japanese avant-garde photography magazine Provoke (1968–70), also had a great influence on Azuma’s photographic style.
During the magazine’s brief existence, its photographers sought to move away from the photojournalistic style, while examining the camera’s potential to capture fragments of reality that cannot be expressed with language. In particular, their emphasis on a subjective voice of the person behind the camera – which foregrounds the sense of immediacy captured in the affective experience of reality, reflecting the sociopolitical upheavals across the nation – engendered a style known as are-bure-boke, meaning "grainy, blurry, out-of-focus". Most of Azuma’s works created in the 1970s in North America unmistakably demonstrate the stylistic connections to his predecessors and contemporaries in Japan.
Kan Azuma, all works Untitled, c. 1973, from the series Erosion. Gelatin silver print, 25.3 × 25.2 cm. CMCP Collection. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © Kan Azuma Photos: NGC
The Erosion series, for instance, featuring Point Pelee National Park and Lake Erie, Ontario, is a photo essay composed of 50 postcard-sized photographs. For Azuma, the landscape was inspirational: “at Point Pelee, I felt that my imagination was almost overpowering reality. It would have been possible to capture it in paintings, but photography as a tool requires calmness and [it] easily shatters the hope of seeing.”
According to the artist, this series is intended to be viewed in its entirety like a visual haiku, Japanese short-form poetry. It is carefully sequenced to evoke rhyme-like rhythms, projecting Azuma’s own anxiety, repellent sensation, feelings of rejection and the incomprehensible dissonance that he sensed in the scenes as a newcomer to the country. His emotional response to the scenery in the series is more prominently revealed through the blurry and grainy texture of the images, suggestive of the Provoke photographers’ style.
Kan Azuma, all works Untitled, c. 1975, from the series Other Land. Gelatin silver print, 24.2 x 35.5 cm. CMCP Collection. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © Kan Azuma Photos: NGC
Azuma conceptualized his Other Land series during a short visit to a sand quarry on the north side of Toronto, while working as a darkroom technician at York University. In this series, he combined the shots he took at Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia, with those of a desert-like barren landscape captured at a construction site, contemplating the geological time required to break rocks down into sand through weathering and eroding.
Kan Azuma, Untitled, c. 1975, from the series Dodge Away. Gelatin silver print, 25 x 17.8 cm. Kan Azuma fonds, National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives, Ottawa. Gift of the artist. © Kan Azuma Photo: NGC
This exhibition also showcases other photographic series from the artist’s archival donation: Dodge Away, photographed around 1975 in suburban Toronto, and 88 Shrines Pilgrimage, taken in Japan in the mid-1980s. In collaboration with Canadian Heritage, twelve reproductions from the Dodge Away series are presented outdoors, in Ottawa’s ByWard Market until next year.
Photographs from 88 Shrines Pilgrimage feature the people he met during his trip to Shikoku Island, one of Japan’s four major islands. The local folklore of the island says that, if you visit all 88 temples with diligence, your deceased family members may come and see you. Azuma photographed pilgrims and workers at these temples on the pilgrimage route, in the hope of seeing his late mother’s face.
Kan Azuma, Untitled, c. 1995, from the series 88 Shrines Pilgrimage. Gelatin silver print, 12.7 x 18.9 cm. Kan Azuma fonds, National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives, Ottawa. Gift of the artist. © Kan Azuma Photo: NGC
Most of Azuma’s photographic series are not the result of fastidious planning and execution. Just as Azuma’s coming to Canada was a spontaneous decision, the scenes he visited and the photographs he created at those sites reveal his affective response to the scenes he experienced with an acute sense of immediacy.
In the 2022 interview, Azuma explained that photography was not just a tool of capturing picturesque landscapes or objects of interest. To him, it was a way of communicating his emotional engagement with the world, as he formed instant communities to which he could belong. These photographs were an invitation to a place for others to join, as much as for him to join the place that matters to him.
Kan Azuma: A Matter of Place is on view in Room C218 at the National Gallery of Canada until June 24, 2024. Share this article and subscribe to our newsletters to stay up-to-date on the latest articles, Gallery exhibitions, news and events, and to learn more about art in Canada.
