Sohei Nishino

Fig. 1 London (May – Aug 2010)

I have briefly referred to Nishino’s work before, although not looked at it in detail. It is related to walking, mapping, and psychogeography – all areas which have interested me in the past. I must confess when I first saw the work, however, at Michael Hoppen’s gallery many years ago, I thought it a bit gimmicky. But then I found I could not stop looking at it…

Nishino walks around a location, usually a city, for around 3 months taking thousands of film photographs. He then prints these as contact sheets and uses them (some reviews say all of them, I am not sure if this is true) to reconstruct his memory of the city, layering the small rectangles to produce an overall picture he calls a Diorama Map. The map is not accurate in that he can choose what he wants to emphasise according to what stands out in his memory. In a way it looks a bit like one of those hand-drawn map guides for tourists where the points-of-interest are larger than the scale would suggest.

One point Nishino’s work makes is that maps are always subjective projections. As such they speak not just of the territory described but of the maker who is doing the mapping. Nishino’s maps emphasise and celebrate this point.

They also show how our personal records of place are comprised of our memories, which traverse time and space far more easily than our bodies. Places and events in those places will occupy different space in our minds – some will loom large, others will soon be forgotten. Yet more might occur suddenly, like a chance meeting round a corner.

Nishino’s maps are also a record of a walk, but reversing this it is the walk that creates the map. A particular walk through a particular place at a particular time – the map could not be recreated. The walk is also a creative act, and the map becomes a record of or begat by this creative energy.

My interest in this wrt my work at Rye Harbour is that the Nature Reserve, ostensibly a natural place, is very much constructed. Harbour walls, flood gates, the movement of shingle to counter littoral drift, the conversion of gravel pits to islands, the building of nesting islands and the recreation of the salt marsh are just some of the activities that keep Rye Harbour “natural”. This is in no way a criticism – for me it is part of the narrative of humans coming to terms with living with the natural world.

Creating a map of this constructed landscape using photographs as building blocks therefore seems an appropriate process. Furthermore the iconic elements preserved within the landscape – such as the red hut, the castle, the pillboxes and the Old Lifeboat Station, can be added in that larger-than-life way that emphasises their importance within the flat landscape.

There might also be the possibility of including other references within the work – specifically rare plants or maybe the people who worked on the construction of the reserve. I particularly like this last idea, as it plays with both the meaning of the creation/construction and the timescale over which it occurs.

Fig. 2 London (detail) (May – Aug 2010)

Studying Nishino’s work in detail, several clues to the practice become clearer:

• His work is physical, using contact prints from film stuck onto backing sheets
  • I intend to work digitally
  • All my images will be linked to the original image – this means the original can be updated or found at will
  • It will be possible to make a physical copy of my final digital map
  • I will have the option to add further functionality to the map (e.g. click on the image to see it enlarged, or perhaps reveal reference information to various sections or buildings)
• He tends to draw an outline to work to, and uses a paper map as reference
  • my work will use a map of the nature reserve as a background with low opacity which will then be deleted
• He builds up small sections separately which are then pasted whole to the map
  • The point here is that details make sense, in that small scenes are played out
  • However the map also makes sense from afar – the shape of the terrain such as rivers or coastline combined with references to iconic elements such as tall buildings make it recognisable
  • At some point there must be a breakdown between the near and the far – it cannot make seamless sense at every focus distance
• Areas of sky, cloud, water or river are composed of a collage of prints (presumably close ups of these elements) – a tonal texture is created, perhaps using different exposure times
• The POV of the viewer is always used – i.e. it does not matter if the camera is facing south or north in reality. Images are not shown upside down, for example.

Nishino has mostly worked in black and white, although recently he has included colour including colour drawing/painting. I suspect that it is easier to work like this in b&w (although I will miss the red of the hut roof) and my work will in any case be simpler than Nishino’s, due to the territory I intend to map out. This is not a bad thing, however, for a first attempt with this working method. I note that since my digital workflow is non-destructive,the photo map will be made up of lots of links to affinity files and it will be possible to update the images (or convert them to colour). I will also have the option of a physical construction afterwards – since all the elements are tagged I will know which images to print and have a pre-arranged layout for them, although this will obviously take some time.

WATER LINE

I really wanted to get hold of some physical representation of Nishino’s work, so that I could examine it in more detail. I’ve seen a few examples at exhibitions, but prints are rare and expensive. There is a poster series but these are also surprisingly expensive – they come with 10 of the actual photographs used in the construction so are more collectable art objects – the buyer can choose which 10 (assuming they are still available). Cheap posters are available from China but I did not really want to get one of those (I was not sure of the quality since they would not have the source file but mostly out of respect for the artist since he is obviously getting ripped off).

I did manage to get a copy of Water Line, which is a book about a journey down the River Po in Italy. This is interesting as it has lots of examples of how he copes with water, and edges such as water/land and river/sea (estuary). The book extends his work by making more of the individual images, a select number of which are printed for the publication (N.B. these tended to be portraits and details so I think they had been produced especially for this purpose rather than for use in the diorama map – the book text suggested this was the first time he had done this, I was not sure if this was true…). Sometimes these portraits were in pairs – the same subject at different times moments apart – suggesting time passing.

There was also clever use of the same scene telephoto to wide angle, joined in a line to look like a river flowing.

Perhaps most interesting, however, was the quote from an Italian writer who accompanied him for part of the trip: “He already knew the shot he was looking for. He knew it so well that sometimes, while truing to make it happen, one almost had the impression that it already existed. (Nishino, 2019:9). Here we have useful references to the construction process and also the notion of the precession of simulacra.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Nishino, S. (2010) London. At: https://soheinishino.net/dioramamap-london (Accessed 18.10.2022)
2. Nishino, S. (2010) London (detail). At: https://soheinishino.net/dioramamap-london (Accessed 18.10.2022)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Nishino, S. (2019) Water Line: A Story of the Po River. Italy: Damiani