Izima Kaoru

From the Fashion Magazine zyappu to Landscapes with a Corpse

Izima worked in advertising, music, and fashion magazines from the 1980s, learning to bring clothes, models, locations, and the sequence of a spread into a single image system. In the early 1990s, while looking for a project distinct from existing Japanese fashion photography, he arrived at the idea that “it would be interesting if the model were a corpse.” Established magazines did not take the project to publication, so in 1994 he founded the quarterly magazine zyappu. Published through 1999, the magazine allowed him to move among the roles of editor in chief, photographer, and the fictional persona “Arizona Gorō,” creating a medium in which he could sustain the project at a distance from existing editorial policies and advertisers’ decisions.^*1*2

In zyappu, Landscapes with a Corpse did not end with a small group of photographs. The images appeared alongside fictional reports of the incident, the model’s name, and fashion-brand credits.^*3 A reader opened the magazine expecting a fashion story, found a tiny body in the landscape, and turned the page to identify the clothing and face. Izima brought commercial lighting and styling into an art project, while also using the magazine’s editorial capacity to assign images a sequence, text, and information about prices and brands. What began as a surprising premise became a long-term form because each issue could reconstruct the reader’s movement through discovery, approach, and identification, rather than relying on the image of a corpse alone. ^*4

Fear of Death Emerges through the Long-Running Series

Izima later wrote that he had no clearly defined intention to make death his subject when he began Landscapes with a Corpse. Over fifteen years of work, he recognized the intensity of his own fear of death and began to think about religion and prayer as ways of gaining distance from that fear.^*5 Asking sitters how they wished to die also became a form of portraiture that elicited how they wanted to live and how they wished to be remembered, rather than a collection of outlandish deaths. Izima’s statement similarly links the consideration of an ideal death to the consideration of an ideal life, and explains how the techniques of fashion photography gave visual credibility to extraordinary scenes.^*6 His ability to translate his fear of death and the values articulated by his sitters into clothing, place, body, and light allowed the initial idea to develop into a sustained body of work.

The viewpoint of the series changed as the work continued. The early sequences largely approached a body in the landscape from the position of the photographer or discoverer. Later works introduced the idea that the dead person’s soul had left the body and was looking down on the last landscape it would see; the Japanese photobook title became Saigo ni Mita Fūkei (The Last Landscape Seen).^*1 This shift from looking at death from outside to imagining the dead taking leave of the world deepened the project from an unusual fashion feature into a prolonged reflection on fear, separation, and mortality.

From Long Shot to Close-up: The Viewpoints of the Discoverer and the Dead

A scene usually unfolds across three to five photographs. In the first image, a mountain, road, beach, or interior fills most of the frame, while the body is small enough to be overlooked. The next photograph moves closer, and the final image reveals details such as clothing, face, wounds, or flowers. The Hatje Cantz photobook likewise identifies the repeated movement from long shot to close-up as the series’ basic structure.^*4 In the early work, this movement resembles the viewer’s discovery of a corpse. The later sequences also carry a movement in the opposite direction, as the soul leaves the body while looking at the landscape for the last time.^*1

How Magazines, Brands, and Exhibitions Structure the Time of Looking at Death

Titles name the model and identify brands through phrases such as “wears Prada” and “wears Alexander McQueen.” Clothing does more than decorate the scene: it attaches the person to the fashion industry, consumer culture, and a specific social image at the moment of production. Viewers who already know the actress or model bring memories of her face, profession, and clothes to the image before they encounter the body as an anonymous dead figure. Celebrity recognition and the value of luxury brands remain attached to the corpse. Death appears as a common endpoint, yet the figure never fully escapes the hierarchies and commodity values of life. ^*7

Because the series appeared in zyappu alongside advertising and fashion features, the act of identifying a brand flowed directly into the act of searching for a body. In a photobook, turning the pages produces the movement from long shot to close-up; in a large exhibition, the viewer’s walk toward the wall performs the same approach. Death arrives through a process in which the viewer discovers the figure, moves closer, and registers beauty and unease at the same time, rather than through the shock of a single image. ^*4

Landscapes with a Corpse: Translating the Sitter’s Idea into a Long-Term Production

The series began in 1993 and expanded to actors and models in Japan and Europe. Each production started with the sitter imagining a desired death, clothing, and location. Izima, stylist Tomoko Yasuno, and the production team then spent several months translating those ideas into a site, season, and bodily pose.^*1 The sitter’s answer was not simply reenacted on the day of the shoot. It had to be reconciled with accessible locations, loans of clothing, and the practical conditions under which a body could safely lie in place. The final image therefore brings together the sitter’s fantasy, the brand’s contribution, the production team’s decisions, and the camera distance chosen by Izima. Any account of the work must distinguish this collaborative dimension from the photographer’s authority over the final image.

In Tominaga Ai Wears Prada No. 405, the title binds together Ai Tominaga, Prada, the work number, and the series. The photograph retains the conventions of fashion imagery, in which who a person is and what she wears circulate with equal force, while depriving the body of movement. Exact styling and the pose of the corpse complete the image. Beauty softens the fear of death while creating the further problem of turning the dead into an alluring object.^*7

One Sun: From Fear of Death to a Prayer Directed at the Sun

As he continued to think about death and religion, Izima wrote that a stay in Weimar, in the former East Germany, made him acutely aware that the same sun shines regardless of political borders. Over several years, he developed the idea of photographing the sun as an object of prayer, using a fisheye lens and long exposure to record its path from sunrise to sunset in a single image.^*5 One Sun changes the form established by the staged death scenes while carrying forward their concerns with finite life, fear of death, and a form of prayer outside organized religion.

Post-Mortem Photography and Landscapes with a Corpse: Mourning and a Future Death

Nineteenth-century post-mortem photographs were made to mourn and remember family members who had actually died.^*8 In Landscapes with a Corpse, a living sitter imagines a future death and performs the role of her own corpse. Both forms leave a photographic image of the dead, but the earlier photographs preserve the memory of someone already lost, while Izima’s series stages a death that has not yet occurred. The comparison clarifies that his work reorients portraiture toward a future absence; it does not reenact the conventions of post-mortem photography.

Beautifying Death: Critiques of the Voyeuristic Gaze

Mudam explains that the works’ aesthetic construction tempers the fear of death while exposing the voyeuristic desire of both viewer and photographer to look at the dead.^*9 Japanese criticism has also argued that the low viewpoint, the approach toward a woman lying on the ground, the luxury clothing, and the carefully arranged body beautify the dead woman and reinforce a structure in which the recurrent figure of the “sleeping woman” in painting and photography is offered to a male gaze.^*10 The work unsettles fashion photography’s standards of beauty while deriving its appeal from those same standards. ^*11

The Sitter’s Participation and the Photographer’s Final Authority

The sitter participates in imagining the desired death, clothing, and location, so her conception remains visible in the photograph. Izima determines the final composition, the order of distances, the printing, the title, and the circulation of the series. Calling the work “collaborative” does not by itself account for the unequal authority of sitter and photographer, the female body idealized by the fashion industry, or the viewer’s gaze. Each work requires attention to whose fantasy survives in the image and who turns the beauty of death into a commodity or artwork. These tensions make Landscapes with a Corpse both a device for imagining death gently and a series continually challenged by questions about images of women and the institutions of beauty. As a magazine project moved into photobooks and museum exhibitions, the intimacy of reading a sitter’s wishes and the distance involved in treating a dead woman as an object of display assumed different forms in each medium.

Art Platform Japan records the artist as Izima Kaoru and situates his trajectory from fashion photography through Landscapes with a Corpse and later still-life works within Japanese museum collections and exhibition histories.^*21*13*22 Records from Kunsthalle Wien, Studio la Città, Von Lintel Gallery, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston show the international circulation of the series through exhibitions on the boundary between fashion and art, solo exhibitions, and photography collections.^*12*14*20*19

The outdoor installation at Echigo-Tsumari and a 2009 exhibition offer examples of how the movement from long shot to close-up, originally structured by the sequence of a photobook, was reread through a regional landscape and exhibition space.^*16*17*18 Recent exhibition texts and conversations with the artist have returned to the project’s development over time: the initial idea that “a corpse would be interesting,” the discussions with models, magazine editing, his fear of death, and the emergence of a portraiture concerned with how a person wishes to live.^*15*23*24