Japanese photographer Asako Narahashi is best known for her color landscape photographs shot while the artist herself is half-submerged in water. The rising and falling waves occupy the majority of the frame—often obscuring the lens—leaving the viewer with only a partial view of buildings, bridges, people, and icons of Japan. In these framed confrontations between land and sea, water takes on an abstract quality as it threatens to overwhelm the figurative elements of the photographs—land and sea becoming a formal tension played out on the surface of the image. Simultaneously, Narahashi herself is faced with the danger of submersion during her process, which she sees as a broader meditation on the fragility of man-made structures and technologies when faced with the vicissitudes of the natural world.
Asako Narahashi
Jhonanjima (from the series “half awake and half asleep in the water”)