In the desert

Overview

To the desert
One day, I met dressed camels in a desert.
The camels live in the desert with the Bedouins.
The Bedouins compose poetry.
I will make a work about the camels and the Bedouins.
Noguchi Rika

It could be said that what Noguchi Rika tries to unfold is something like an open-ended potential, found in a simple on-going incident or situation. Noguchi’s photograph capturing a situation is taken from afar or discreetly from behind. But it somehow reminds us of a situation in a novel.

Noguchi often photographs a scene of an activity, such as people working on a construction site or walking somewhere in silence. A photograph extracts one particular part of a situation. This gets separated from what happened before and after and from other surrounding circumstances. Therefore, a photograph is not necessarily able to convey correctly the situation that is actually happening in the frame. Noguchi conversely takes advantage of this defect and is eager to decipher again the suspended situation. By employing what might be described as a novelistic imagination, she creates an open-ended situation to establish what she calls "a new way of looking at the earth".

The series included here is entitled New Land and was taken on a new island reclaimed from the sea. The construction site itself is "a site where an incident is taking place" and what is being created there is new ground, i.e. "a site for something to be constructed", a site where something might happen, a site with an open potential of creation – Noguchi’s photographs are always presented to us as scenes where such possibilities are formulated or as sites where a new way of looking at the world opens up. According to Noguchi, "Any place is capable of becoming somewhere."1 What supports it is the photographer’s imagination and our imagination receiving it.

Rei Masuda, "[sait] site/sight" / Photography Today 2 - [sait] site/ sight, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 2002, pp.90-91

1 Although this statement was made in reference to a series entitled Dreaming of Babylon, it is also suggestive in appreciating other works by Noguchi


This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 8.