As seen through a glass contaminated with Vaseline
The digital revolution seems to have ended successfully. Photographs seem to work fully digital now. but there is always some stubborn worker who can't say goodbye to his analog camera. Because there is something about these cameras. Clicking devises, that are still able to intrigue people. In the dark images appear of a forgotten youth.
Okuyama is a photographer seems to be well aware of this nostalgic power of this medium. With a self-made pinhole camera, a portable camera obscura. The photos that occur are in a good way blur at the edges and occasionally not sharp, as if the photographer photographed through a glass contaminated with Vaseline. Again, such an old forgotten trick of photographers. with this do-it-yourself camera, Okuyama photographed images with quit some suspense of which Hitchcock would be jealous of. A barn appears out of the dark dramatically, with on the foreground a tin with a readable label. Is it a trace, does this label have a meaning? It ought to be.
But Okuyama is able to do more. She builds and photographs models for the series Safe Playground with a twin-lens camera from the fifties. This way of working reminds us at photographs of Edwin Zwakman, who for instance builds houses on scale and then makes photographs of them. His work is dry and formal and not comparable with the photos of Okuyama.
On Circus (2005) a tent is been lit. The characteristic lines of white and red on the fabric can be seen in ones mind, despite the image is really black-and-white. The shadow of the toy-horse looks alive against the fabric.
This circus looks like that in Carnival, the sepia-colored, suspense-like American tv-series, which is set during the Great Depression.
A compatible atmosphere and suspense can be seen in Okuyama's black-and-white photographs.
Strange enough, none of this dark atmosphere can be seen on the smaller sized color-photographs, made by a real-working Japanese toy-camera. Still we see enigmatic images: a bus on the sideway, a pink flower in a green bush. But now daylight has chased away all the shadows. This work is far less dramatic. But still over these photos there lies a soft velvet layer that pixeled photos never have. The distortions, as if photographed by a fish-eye-lens make sure that the subject photographed catches the eye: a snake in the garden, two polyester penguins as a water fountain. But that clear focus does not help at all to understand these images.
Okuyama's photography exists by the grace of a lively imagination and un-expected associations.
Go with that, and you end up in a shimmering fairy tale-world, in which you not only encounter Hitchcock, but also David Lynch, busy tracking a bizarre storyline.
Machteld Leij