All photos © Hiroyo Kaneko
About Hiroyo Kaneko:
Photographer Hiroyo Kaneko emigrated to the US in 2002, but it took 8 years for her to find a subject to photograph in her new homeland. Though already an accomplished artist with numerous exhibitions and awards, she felt “there was a hurdle I needed to overcome to take photographs as a foreigner.” She began photographing children, with whom she felt a shared sense of both incipience and vulnerability. When a music-teacher friend invited her along to photograph children singing, she stumbled upon the subject for her body of work Appearance. It was in the moment of singing, first with children and eventually with adults, that Kaneko discovered a certain uninhibited, universal experience which became her subject for almost a decade.
Appearance, published as a book in 2020, brings this series of Kaneko’s work together. As a collection of photographs they represent the artist’s effort to capture “the space of appearance” -- as defined by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition -- and to share this experience with the viewer. The paradox of using a visual medium to describe an aural experience gives the photographs an intriguing dissonance. Kaneko’s subjects, caught in a fleeting instant of performing, are both self-aware and unguarded. The visual record each photograph slices from the continuous delivery of song reveals a peculiar sort of portrait: expressions divorced from the sound on which they are focused, yet full of the gesture and emotion released in the act of singing. They are people whom Kaneko encountered in her daily life, including neighbors, coworkers, and friends, each lending their individual spirit to the unique space in which this body of work resides.
Hiroyo Kaneko was born in Aomori, Japan and is currently based in Oakland, CA. She received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BA in French Literature from Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo. She has received awards for her photography from Center, Santa Fe, the Philadelphia Museum of Art Photography Portfolio Competition, and Photographic Center Northwest. Kaneko’s work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Rayko Photo Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.
About Appearance:
Appearance
by Hiroyo Kaneko
Published by Seigensha, 2020.
In Japanese/English.
144 pp., 11x11".
Appearance is available for purchase at:
Green Arcade
Photo-Eye Bookstore
PhotoAlliance Collector Print Program:
Hiroyo Kaneko, Sentimental Education, 2007
PhotoAlliance has one remaining Hiroyo Kaneko print available through our Collector Print Program.
20% discount for August and September, 2021 only.