Rinko Kawauchi receives the Sony World Photography Award 2023.

One of the most important Japanese photographers working today, Kawauchi has achieved international renown for her intimate and luminous images, capturing ephemeral moments of everyday life.

More than thirty images by the photographer will be shown at the Sony World Photography Awards 2023 exhibition, which returns to Somerset House, London from 14 April – 1 May 2023. The selection, made by the artist, spans over twenty years of her career and highlights significant milestones and themes across some of her most iconic series: Illuminance (2011), AILA (2004), Utatane (2001), and Ametsuchi (2013).

Kawauchi was born in 1972 in Shiga Prefecture, Japan and first began taking photographs at the age of 19. In the early 1990s she worked as a photographer for an advertising agency, before moving to a Tokyo studio to focus on making her own work. She first gained international attention in 2001 after the publication of three photobooks, Utatane, Hanabi, and Hanako. Two of the series went on to win Japan’s most prestigious award for emerging photography, the Kimura Ihei Award.

Kawauchi is influenced by Shinto, which holds that everything has a spirit or energy, called ‘kami’. Accordingly, Kawauchi’s lens is patient and empathetic towards its quotidian subjects: shimmering lights reflected in a mirror, a pair of hands braiding thread together, sunbeams flooding through the canopy of a forest. Her photographs have been compared to haikus, a style of short-form poetry originating from Japan which through its lines often reflects upon a wider meaning or truth. So too, Kawauchi’s spare visual language gives these seemingly small moments a sense of great weight and significance.

Image :Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, from the series "Illuminance”, 2011, c-print, mounted on Alu-Dibond, ed. 2/6, 101 x 101 cm, courtesy PRISKA PASQUER GALLERY