Seen: Charanga
Who: 甲斐啓二郎 Keijiro Kai (website)
Where: Totem Pole Photo Gallery, Shinjuku
When: May 14 - 26, 2019 / 12:00-19:00 / Closed Mondays
Keijiro Kai has for several years now been wading into high-impact, testosterone-filled festivals around the world with his Mamiya 7 and rolls and rolls of Fuji Pro 400H film. His current exhibition, “Charanga”, is of Tinku festivities, a Bolivian Quechua of traditional, ritualistic combat.
In amongst the dust and men and flying fists Kai pulled out images that never directly explain “why” and just barely “where”- rather than explain, Kai’s work carefully, through it’s denial of traditional travel/sports photographic technique, denies a clean reading of the possible meaning of what’s shown.
A freelance sports photographer, Kai knows how to do his day job- but his personal work is exciting precisely because it is unsettlingly shot, chaotically shot, and beautifully presented. He’s self-published two books already: one of the rowdy red-faced Royal Shrovetide Football Match in Derbyshire, England called Shrove Tuesdayand Wounded Bears, a book of the Dosojin fire festival held in Nagano, Japan.
Neither of his books have answers in their pages- National Geographic or Magnum, this ain’t. Rather than work as an objective, morality-focused eye, Kai’s work transcends sport and even culture altogether. In his photographs he shows how parameters of ritual barely contain an atavistic presence in man which society has worked so hard to collar.