KOJI ONAKA

Born in Fukuoka in 1960, Onaka studied photography in Tokyo before joining the Image Shop CAMP workshop led by the influential photographer Daido Moriyama. Since the 1980s, he has developed a distinctive style marked by warmth, spontaneity, and subtle humour. Emerging within the vibrant photographic milieu of late twentieth-century Japan—alongside figures such as Masahisa Fukase and Takuma Nakahira—Onaka nevertheless forged an independent path. Guided by intuition rather than the aggressive, jagged aesthetic of his contemporaries, he became a master of the personal “snapshot” style. A dedicated craftsman, Onaka continues to hand-print his own work, a practice that imbues his prints with a tactile, intimate quality central to his artistic identity.

The exhibition’s title series, Distance, represents one of the earliest coherent bodies of work in Onaka’s career. Originally produced during the 1980s and serialised in Asahi Camera over a single year, these black-and-white photographs explore marginal landscapes across Japan, small harbours, factories, and the quiet outskirts of towns. These are places that exist on the periphery of attention, suspended between presence and disappearance. Photographed with gentle sensitivity, they carry a sense of nostalgia without sentimentality, evoking environments that remain vivid in memory even as they slowly fade from the contemporary landscape.

If Distance reflects the early foundations of Onaka’s photographic language, Tin Roof & Chimney reveals its continued evolution into his signature use of colour. Photographed between 2021 and 2024 across Japan—from Hokkaido to Kagoshima—the series turns its attention to rural towns and ageing architecture. Following his transition from monochrome to colour negatives in the late 1990s, Onaka’s recent work utilises a soft, evocative palette to capture tin roofs, smokestacks, and weathered shopfronts. Rather than presenting these scenes as relics of the past, Onaka approaches them with warmth and curiosity, suggesting that fragments of memory remain embedded within the shifting landscape.

Completing the exhibition is Memories of Younger Days in Shinjuku, a deeply personal body of work made between 1982 and 1994. Living and working in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, Onaka photographed the neighbourhood’s streets and social circles while participating in the CAMP community and later co-founding Gallery Kaido. The images capture both the restless energy of the city and the intimate social world of photographers and artists who gathered in the narrow alleyways of Golden Gai. Looking back decades later, the photographs form not only a portrait of a place, but also a glimpse into the bohemian creative culture that shaped a generation of Japanese photographers.

Spanning more than four decades of image-making, the works presented in Distance reveal the quiet continuity of Onaka’s vision. Across changing landscapes, his photographs trace moments of everyday life with sensitivity and restraint; together, they reflect a lifelong engagement with the subtle ways memory and place shape our experience of the world.