Arata Dodo

Why Photography

Dodo studied photography at Osaka University of Arts, but he has described the starting point of his work as a desire to “see a world I do not know.” In a 2012 talk, he explained that, while thinking about how his work might differ from that of his photographer father, Shunji Dodo, he began looking toward “somewhere other than here” and making repeated trips to Shanghai, which he could reach by boat from Osaka’s Nanko port.^*19 As he repeatedly directed the camera toward unfamiliar environments, the question “What is happening in the world?” and his own position within it began to take form through the work.^*19

Shanghai was changing quickly as older neighborhoods were demolished and replaced. Dodo has recalled that seeing buildings and ways of life that he felt could “only be seen now” made him newly conscious of photography’s capacity to record.^*3 In the same interview, he said that he did not want photographs to repeat what could already be explained in words; photography should carry scenes that cannot be fully accounted for verbally.^*3 Traveling to unfamiliar places and recording things caught in the midst of change became the link between travel and photography in his work.

Family and Photographic Education

Dodo’s father, Shunji Dodo, is also a photographer. Dream Boat, a three-person exhibition that also included his younger brother Takeshi Dodo, placed photographs made by the family across an extended span of time alongside one another.^*8 Shunji Dodo is known for returning over long periods to places such as Osaka and the Kii Peninsula; Arata, by contrast, has moved through Shanghai, the Caspian coast, Mongolia, and Kyoto. In a text written around the three-person exhibition, Shunji likewise described photography as a way of leaving a record from within the course of a life.^*18 Arata himself locates the beginning of his own work in his encounter with Shanghai and in the question of why he was taking photographs, rather than in photography as a family profession.^*14

People and the City in the Same Frame

Ways of Shanghai repeatedly avoids extreme proximity to the face, keeping the body and the surrounding urban space together within the frame. In a text republished by AKAAKA with the later edition, Shomei Tomatsu noted that Dodo used few close-ups or medium shots and photographed Shanghai in full shots as though it were “his own city.”^*4 At this distance, facial expression alone cannot stand in for cultural difference. Clothing, walls, signs, construction sites, and the width of roads enter the frame with the same visual weight as the people themselves. Ways of Shanghai earned Dodo the Photographic Society of Japan Newcomer’s Award in 2000.^*7

Neighborhoods in Shanghai were being dismantled even while Dodo was photographing them, as the city was remade around him. He continued to work during a period in which old and new structures coexisted.^*3 Under those conditions, keeping people together with nearby shops, signs, roads, and construction sites recorded the changing environment more fully than isolating a symbolic person or building. Tomatsu’s emphasis on the full shot identifies this refusal to separate people from place as central to Dodo’s “way” of photographing Shanghai.^*4

Travel as a Condition of Photography

Taigan was made while traveling through the five countries bordering the Caspian Sea: Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Iran. AKAAKA describes the work as a form of “witnessing” both the character of the land and the activities of the people who live there.^*1 Dodo has said that, alongside his desire to see unfamiliar countries beyond the Silk Road, he traveled far from home because of the question, “What is happening in the world?”.^*19 Travel became a working condition that removed him from familiar surroundings and required him to keep deciding, on location, what deserved to be photographed.

About a decade after Ways of Shanghai, while continuing to work in commercial photography, Dodo arrived at the question of “what should I make sure to see in the time I am living through?” and chose the Caspian Sea as one answer.^*3 In Taigan, that question takes form in a sequence that places oil fields, roads, houses, religious dress, children at play, interiors, and night scenes alongside one another without organizing the work around the romance of travel. An exhibition at the Nikon Salon ran alongside the publication of the book, so Taigan was presented in both photobook and exhibition form.^*10

Borders Within a Single Book

Taigan divides the five countries into separate chapters, yet gestures, clothing, roads, interiors, play, and rest recur within a shared photographic rhythm. AKAAKA links the title, meaning “opposite shore,” both to a geographical shore across the water and to the photographer’s own sense of distance. The chapters mark national borders, while the continuity of the pages preserves similarities in everyday life that are difficult to classify by country alone.^*1 The book keeps national differences intact while placing recurring forms of daily life across those borders within a single sequence.

Connecting Places Through the Photobook

In Dodo’s work, the order in which photographs are placed matters as much as movement between locations. Taigan is a 176-page book organized by country across five chapters, with art direction by Bunpei Yorifuji.^*5 In a public conversation between Dodo and Yorifuji, the time accumulated in the book and the discoveries made through its construction became subjects in their own right.^*15 The photobook allows gestures, colors, and recurring forms of life from geographically distant places to connect across pages, holding national chapters and cross-border similarities in the same structure.

White Map on the Silk Road (2019) brought together work made at different times and in different regions, including Taigan, Ways of Shanghai, Ulaanbaatar, and Nara.^*2 Case Publishing’s English text states that Dodo is not searching for an “elusive other,” but looking at the varied ways in which people organize their lives.^*2 The book rearranges several journeys across the geographical divisions of earlier publications, allowing the identity of each series and recurring forms of life across them to appear at once. Genkosha’s account likewise records the relationship between the exhibition and the photobook across Shanghai, the Caspian Sea, and Ulaanbaatar.^*9

Ways of Shanghai

Ways of Shanghai, first published in 1999 and later reissued by AKAAKA, is a central early work.^*4 Made amid Shanghai’s rapid redevelopment, the photographs repeatedly include people, construction, roads, shops, and interiors within a single frame. Dodo’s account of becoming more conscious of photography’s documentary capacity during this period frames the work as a record of the city while it was still changing. It preserves the density of a city in transition before that change could be organized retrospectively into a settled historical image.^*3

Taigan

Taigan was published by AKAAKA in 2012 and received the 38th Kimura Ihei Award.^*6 The photographs are organized by country, but as the pages accumulate, signs of political and religious difference intersect with shared activities such as eating, resting, family life, and play. Akiko Otake’s observation that a gaze searching for difference coexists with a sensation in which difference disappears is closely tied to the book’s editorial structure.^*17 The National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, also records Dodo’s receipt of the 38th Kimura Ihei Award in 2013.^*12

White Map

White Map on the Silk Road was published in conjunction with a 2019 exhibition at the Irie Taikichi Memorial Museum of Photography Nara City.^*2 The 45-page publication rearranges different series made in Shanghai, around the Caspian Sea, in Ulaanbaatar, Nara, and elsewhere. Case Publishing describes local differences as appearing along a continuum, with everyday life in each place forming a many-sided world.^*2 Where Taigan develops one region as a sustained series, White Map on the Silk Road makes the act of re-editing several earlier journeys across regions part of the work itself.

Kyoto and Film

Dodo also worked closer to home. In Oni ni mo Fuku ni mo: Mou Hitotsu no Kyoto, he photographed people, festivals, and daily life in Kyoto, focusing on layers of lived experience distinct from the city’s familiar image as a tourist destination.^*13 AdverTimes. records that he photographed 26 municipalities across Kyoto Prefecture over parts of three years beginning in 2015.^*11 Dodo worked as the still photographer on Naomi Kawase’s An, then served as director of photography for the first time on Hikari (2017) and again shot Vision (2018).^*3 Across still photography and film, his work continues to depend on staying in a place long enough to register both human movement and the time unfolding around it.

Critical Responses to Taigan

Critical writing on Taigan has centered on the distance through which travel was translated into a photobook, rather than on the novelty of its locations. Dan Abbe distinguished Dodo’s work from travel photography that turns a destination into a stage for the photographer’s own fantasy, praising the way Dodo remains within the uncertainty of the journey itself.^*16 Akiko Otake argued that a gaze trying to identify the cultural signs of the five countries repeatedly reaches moments where those signs become impossible to distinguish within the photographic sequence.^*17 Kimi Himeno likewise explained that the book was edited as a work about distance between self and other, rather than as a straightforward travelogue.^*19 Together, these readings position Dodo’s travel photography as a record that preserves the distance between photographer and place instead of treating distant locations primarily as information to be delivered to the viewer.

Family Lineage and an Independent Direction

Arata Dodo is often introduced as the son of Shunji Dodo, and Dream Boat brought together photographs by father and brothers within a single exhibition.^*8 Shunji’s best-known work is grounded in accumulated return to places such as Osaka and the Kii Peninsula. Arata moves from Shanghai to the Caspian Sea and Ulaanbaatar, recalibrating his distance each time the location changes. The family’s photographic culture remains an important background, while Arata’s own method was formed by his experience in Shanghai, the question of why he was photographing, and the travel series that followed.^*14

Within Japanese Photobook Culture

Dodo’s major projects extend through the editing of the photobook, which functions as a unit of the work rather than as a secondary record of photographs already complete. Ways of Shanghai received the Photographic Society of Japan Newcomer’s Award, and Taigan received the Kimura Ihei Award.^*6 For White Map on the Silk Road, Case Publishing rearranged several series within one volume, re-editing previously published work beyond its earlier regional groupings.^*2 Editing photographs from different journeys into the time of a single book allows separate locations to function within one sustained work.

TOTEM POLE PHOTO WORKSHOP, directed by Shinya Arimoto, placed Dodo’s method within a tradition of travel snapshots “continuing for more than half a century,” making the question of how he formed his own work from this established method the subject of a public lecture.^*20 Dodo’s contribution lies in bringing three elements into one sustained body of work: the distance that allows people and city to occupy the frame together, noted by Shomei Tomatsu in Ways of Shanghai; repeated movement across borders; and photobook editing that places different locations in relation to one another.^*4