IKKO NARAHARA

Ikko Narahara was determined to never shoot any photographs in museums or restaurants. Commanded, however, by Shuzo Takiguchi’s unrealized dream to write a book with images of Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, Narahara entered the legendary premises of the Philadelphia Museum of Art one fall day in 1973. Luckily, the fountain, which could be seen through the window that had replaced a wall, but often stopped, begun to spout.

Looking back on what had brought him to this day, the photographer said that he had been a drop of water landed on a mountain top. Having traveled on a dark underground road, it arrived at the root of a tree, which sucked it up and brought it into one of its leaves. He thought of the Large Glass as a leaf and his photographs of it as a drop of water.

That whole day, the drop of water devoted itself to watching the changes in light over time as it passed through the cracked glass. After many years underground, that drop of water has now been revived as crystal prints, waiting to splash in a brilliant, mesmerizing coincidence.

Takashi Hiraide, ‘Dispersal of a Drop,’ text written for Ikko Narahara’s portfolio Rrose Sélavy

The Rrose Sélavy (1991) portfolio features seven photographs from Narahara’s ‘Large Glass’ series, which had not been published as his work at the time. Narahara’s close friend Mitsuo Katsui designed the portfolio and the images, which were selected by another close friend the artist Kazuo Okazaki, were printed on crystal photo paper to emphasize transparency and vividness. The Rrose Sélavy portfolio not only provides occasion to reexamine Narahara’s photographic work but also evokes the various relations that shaped the work, between the artist, Katsui, and Okazaki, as well as that between Duchamp and Takiguchi.