Seen: 骨の髄 / Down to the Bone
Who: 甲斐啓二郎 / Kai Keijiro (website)
Where: Totem Pole Photo Gallery, Shinjuku
When: September 29 - October 11 / 12:00-19:00 / Closed Mondays
Kai, a freelance sports photographer, takes his Mamiya 7 and a bag full of film around to a slew of different cultural matches of endurance that seem to be bouts of loosely organized semi-mayhem wrung from tradition and general brute male-ness. His series Shrove Tuesday shot in England is perhaps his most well known example (buy the book!), and his Wounded Bears series is along similar lines. Down To The Bone shares a main aspect of his previous work- Again we see men in pitched contests of semi-violence- however this time the calloused and ruddied ham-fists of working class British villagers have been replaced with long bamboo poles- as in both of these series, no rules are explained or even suggested. Without any cultural context, the viewer is left to deal with ferocity of the faces and stances on their own.
Bamboo poles aside, further danger could come from the environment itself as these melees are held at night, often in poor weather, and if they’re like any other Japanese festival, copious amounts of alcohol can probably also be factored into the equation. A far cry from the organized contemporary athletics he makes a living covering, I suspect that the proximity he is allowed while shooting in the middle of these festivals is absolutely thrilling.