Yuki Tawada

Yuki Tawada’s Background and the Materiality of Photography

Yuki Tawada began studying photography in earnest after becoming drawn to the medium while visiting the University of California, Santa Barbara, as an exchange student from Tohoku University. After graduating, she majored in photography at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, and completed both master’s and doctoral programs in Intermedia Art at the Graduate School of Tokyo University of the Arts.^*1 At Camberwell, her attention shifted from composing only what appeared in the image to the physical properties of the photograph and the possibility of altering its surface.^*12

Tawada’s turn toward paper and surface cannot be understood solely as material experimentation. In a later official statement, she explains that she works with photography because, although publicly regarded as an objective medium, it acts deeply on personal emotion and the unconscious.^*2 The photographic surface became a meeting place between the depicted content and the bodily response of someone touching the image.

Her master’s thesis at Tokyo University of the Arts, A Method of Healing Memory Using Photography, examined through phototherapy how photography might contribute to psychological healing. According to the review summary of her doctoral dissertation, On the Contemporary Meaning of Magic Realism, Tawada sought to introduce aura and emotional movement into still photographs through tactile methods inspired by sympathetic magic and art therapy, thereby expressing invisible forces at work within everyday life.^*14 Healing here lies in reconfiguring one’s relationship to memory and fear through the process of touching a photograph, not in a finished work providing a medical benefit. Tawada has written that when she applied a hot iron to a self-portrait, she felt as though her own face were actually being burned. This indicates that a photograph is experienced both as a paper object and as a surrogate for its subject.^*6 This duality carries her alterations of the surface beyond formal experiment and toward acts that engage memory and emotion.

Rematerializing the Photograph

In her official statement, Tawada explains that her aim is not simply to reproduce magical or therapeutic effects. She seeks ways to make consumed photographs speak again amid the excessive circulation of information in contemporary life.^*2 Articulated later, this concern runs through her work in scraping, folding, and burning since WHITE OUT. Handwork does more than add an effect to an image: it records a history in which someone touched the photograph, hesitated, made a choice, and introduced a change that cannot be reversed.

In a 2025 workshop at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, Tawada likewise set participants the tasks of experiencing a photograph as an object, beginning a story through touch, and allowing traces to open memory and reality.^*11 She retains the reality recorded by the camera while leaving scratches, folds, and burns on its surface, giving memories and emotions that had no form at the moment of exposure a physical presence in the photograph. This idea translates Tawada’s concept of magic realism into a concrete working method.

The Photographers’ Gallery describes Tawada’s method as treating photographic prints like “vulnerable bodies,” and identifies her scraping, cutting, burning, and perforating as an insistence on the materiality of photography.^*32 This reading clarifies a defining feature of her work: image and support remain inseparable, rather than alteration functioning as painterly decoration. The sense that damage to a photograph also leaves the person or memory depicted there unable to remain unscathed connects her manipulation of the object to its psychological meaning.

WHITE OUT: Crowds and Scraping

In the major early series WHITE OUT, Tawada used erasers, needles, and sandpaper to scrape large-format prints of crowds gathered in stadiums and cities. An exhibition text from 2007 explains that she sought to capture the energy that arises once a crowd exceeds a certain size, rather than the expressions of individuals, and that by erasing the picture plane she produced a torrent of white light.^*7

A crowd photograph can record faces, clothes, seats, and architecture in detail, but the fervor, anxiety, conformity, and madness generated by the group do not appear as the figure of any particular person. Instead of adding information, Tawada scraped away parts of the recorded figures and made the white beneath the ink operate like light, smoke, or an explosion. The idea described in her doctoral dissertation—introducing “movement” into a still photograph to express invisible emotional forces—is enacted here through erasure.^*14 Scraping does more than weaken or destroy the image. It becomes drawing in reverse: removing the faces, clothing, and other information through which the crowd is read as a collection of individuals, while adding the group’s previously formless force as a white trace.

Burnt Photographs: Fire and Photographic Matter

In Burnt Photographs, fire joined the controlled method of scraping the surface. Tawada likens her process to drawing out and releasing something like the soul of a subject trapped in a print, and calls the burned photograph a “shell” that retains a presence after the substance has departed.^*6

Her subjects are not chosen at random. They include taxidermied animals, tropical plants in botanical gardens, dances performed for tourists, religious artifacts removed from temples and shrines, and people who left their places of origin for the city: things displaced from their original lands or purposes and made objects of display, performance, or observation in an urban setting. Tawada associates flowers, animals, Buddhist statues, halos, and dancing bodies with motifs once offered in sacrifice, writing that burning returns the still photograph to an organic state.^*6 Because photography can carry its subject into the city and fix it there as a specimen, burning opens that fixity to change once more.

Erasers and needles allow relatively fine control over the movements and forms made by the hand, whereas fire irreversibly changes not just the image but also the paper’s contours, strength, and thickness. Tawada’s feeling that her own face was actually burning when she burned a self-portrait reveals a state in which photograph and subject cannot be fully separated psychologically.^*6 This structure, in which an action performed on an image is felt to extend to what the image denotes, overlaps with the logic of sympathetic magic, according to which an effect passes between similar things or things once in contact.^*20 Burning carries the conflicting sensations of violence, sacrifice, and release; Tawada herself has described both the pleasure of breaking a taboo and, ultimately, a sense of being forgiven by the subject.^*6 Through the irreversibility of fire, the psychological identification of photograph and subject is borne by the damaged paper.

I am in You and Family Ritual: The Sea and Family Memory

Against the background of her intensified fear of the sea after the Great East Japan Earthquake, Tawada burned photographs of breaking waves together with her mother for I am in You. During a gallery tour, she explained that she repeatedly burned away the water’s surface while leaving the sea foam, seeking to soothe her fear of and wounds associated with the sea.^*19

Here, fear of the sea is not replaced by another symbol; fire is applied to the photograph that records the sea itself. By repeatedly touching an image that points to a past reality and deciding with her mother which parts to preserve and which to remove, fear moves from an emotion enclosed in the mind to a concrete task they can undertake together. Shadow Dance and Family Ritual also use photographs and archival images from her maternal family. The roles of photographer, owner, subject, and person altering the print overlap, extending the work into a process of addressing personal memory among family members.^*4 Healing appears as the process of creating an order and duration in which fear and the past can be approached through photographs, more than as a result in which they disappear.

Layering, Suspending, and Hanging

Tawada does not press her burned prints flat against a wall. She layers them, holds them away from the wall with pins, and sometimes hangs them from the ceiling. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum exhibition Seeing as Though Touching approached photography as matter with a support, surface, and mode of installation, beyond its depicted content, and presented I am in You as one of its central examples.^*5

A flat photograph hung on a wall readily encourages the viewer to read its image head-on. Hiroshi Uemura argues that experiencing photographs as objects requires forms of display that prompt shifts in viewpoint—walking around, peering into, or looking up at a work.^*10 When prints are layered away from the wall, another water surface or the wall itself appears through the burned holes, charred edges cast shadows, and the images overlap differently as the viewer moves. Missing areas do not remain mere blanks; they become spaces that transmit light, reveal another image, and set the viewer in motion.

WHITE OUT and Missing Folklore: Crowds and the City

In WHITE OUT, Tawada stripped information from images of crowds and rendered the force generated by the group as a whole in white forms. In the subsequent Missing Folklore, erasure expanded to architecture, roads, and night views, replacing the contours and signs that identify a city with white traces.^*3 The Japan Times introduced the exhibition as a group of large works whose urban photographic surfaces had been scraped, blurred, and scarred.^*8

Even as the subject shifts from people to the city, the underlying problem remains: outward appearances captured by the camera cannot fully express the emotions and memories that animate a place. When information identifying place names, functions, and individuals is reduced, the city changes from an explicable location into a psychological site where heat, tension, and forgetting overlap. The white scars do not replace urban reality with fantasy; they add forces that exist within reality but cannot be photographed directly.

From Shadow Dance to Ash and Ceramics

In Shadow Dance, Family Tree, and I am in You, burned family photographs and images of the sea are reassembled in multiple layers, so that missing areas, supports, and shadows form a single work. The 2024 book Her smoke rose up forever includes series addressing maternal family memory as well as a collaboration in which the ash of burned photographs was used in glazes for Fuku Fukumoto’s ceramics.^*15

In her work with Fukumoto, the photograph remains fixed on a ceramic surface as ash even after it can no longer be read as an image.^*16 As the support shifts from print to charred paper, ash, and glaze, preservation and disappearance cease to be simple opposites. The image’s information may be lost, but the matter that constituted the photograph and the history of its making pass to another support. Tawada’s “shell” is a form for sensing presence in the matter left after the image has gone, not destruction that leaves nothing behind.

In Lachrymatory, presented at Fotogalerie Wien in 2025, participants burned personal photographs they had brought with them, and the ash was used to glaze tear vessels. The work was described as transferring personal memories into tangible form while questioning the materiality of images and the fragility of memory.^*21 In a French article on the Rencontres d’Arles, curator Mariko Takeuchi explained that Tawada also uses remnants of consumer photographs she has found to address invisible connections between her own family and anonymous families.^*22 Even after private photographs lose their original owners and contexts, their burned remains and ash become materials for creating other relationships.

In Scent of the Sky (2025), Tawada also tested a structure in which intervention by the viewer or owner becomes part of the work’s transformation, leaving its final state and moment of completion to the owner.^*23 The transformation of photography extends beyond the passage from paper to ash or ceramics to questions of time and ownership: who touches the work and where its completion is determined.

Post-Photography and Singularity

With Shigeo Goto and others, Tawada organized Photography Transforms: MUTANT(S) on POST/PHOTOGRAPHY, presenting photography as a medium that changes state across print, three-dimensional form, video, and digital processing.^*13 In an essay on the project, Keiju Kita takes Tawada’s remark, “For now, it is still possible to let the material speak,” as a starting point. Kita analyzes how THEGIRLWHOWASPLUGGEDIN reuses images made for a photobook and repeats them as matter in the exhibition space.^*18

Post-photography here does not mean a time after photography has ended. It is the idea that each time an image moves among book, print, cut paper, installation, ash, and ceramics, it acquires another temporality and mode of touch. In 2025, Tawada said that in an age when AI generates images resembling reality, she treats photographs as “tangible dreams” that retain traces of the hand.^*12 Scraping, folding, and burning do not constitute a return to analog photography. They leave an infinitely reproducible image with the history of a particular person’s touch, judgment, and irreversible alteration.

In this respect, Tawada’s materiality differs from nostalgia for pre-digital photography. It presupposes an environment in which generated and reproduced images readily proliferate, while irreversible actions performed on their supports give each image a distinct history. The critical force of the work lies in bringing photography’s reproducibility into collision with the singular time of its making, without rejecting photography as a reproductive technology.^*12

Dates and Methods of Alteration

Examples of WHITE OUT date from 2006 and employ a method of scraping inkjet prints with erasers and sandpaper.^*26 An exhibition record for Burnt Photographs dates to 2012, by which time burning had developed as an independent working method.^*27 A 2015 “burnt ink jet print” survives from I am in You, showing continuity between scraping and burning as operations that turn an image into an object bearing a singular scar.^*28

In the principal sources reviewed here, “applying light” cannot be confirmed as an independent third method of alteration comparable to scraping and burning. Official records clearly identify burning as part of the artistic process.^*27 In exhibitions, light passes through holes and cutouts in burned prints and casts shadows on the wall, emphasizing the relationship among image, support, and exhibition space. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s Seeing as Though Touching likewise presented I am in You in a context that directed attention to supports and material textures as well as images.^*29

The Materiality of Photography Since the 2000s

Describing Tawada’s work solely as a “reaction to the digital age” would obscure its personal necessity, yet omitting its broader photographic-historical setting would also be inadequate. The International Center of Photography’s 2014 exhibition What Is a Photograph? observed that, since the 1970s, artists have reconsidered not only light, color, and composition but also the support and materiality themselves, and that practices treating photographs as “photographic objects” continued to expand after the spread of digital images.^*30 Tawada cannot be claimed as an artist directly influenced by this exhibition’s lineage. Her work of scraping, burning, folding, and hanging prints nonetheless clearly connects with a contemporary effort to reconsider photographs as objects as well as information.

Within Japanese photography, scholars have also argued that the medium’s materiality was reconfigured after 3.11 to address traces and memories of disaster.^*31 Given that I am in You arose from Tawada’s growing fear of the sea after the Great East Japan Earthquake, her burns and holes can be situated as a personal method for inscribing the distance between the image preserved in a photograph and the memory of reality into the support itself, more than as a style representative of contemporary disaster imagery.

Situating Tawada in photographic history since the 2000s requires attention to an environment in which, after digitization, photography became detached from the singular material object and was reproduced, altered, and shared as on-screen data. Principles of Contemporary Photographic Art takes as its premise the major transformation of the conventional idea of photography as “capturing truth” through the ubiquity of smartphones, social media, and digital images; it includes a “Workshop / Phototherapy” by Tawada herself.^*35 Issue 47 of Bijutsu Forum 21, in a special feature titled “Photography as Material / Photography as Concept,” also discusses the work of Tawada and others through the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum exhibition Seeing as Though Touching.^*34 Tawada’s burning and perforation can be understood as a contemporary response that asks whether photography can once again become body, material, and singular event, rather than as nostalgia opposed to the digital.

Phototherapy, Ritual, and Memory

In the healing addressed by Tawada’s master’s and doctoral dissertations, the emphasis falls on a process of changing one’s relationship to memory and fear by touching photographs, repeating actions, and working with others, more than on a completed artwork providing medical benefits to viewers. In I am in You, continuing with her mother to burn the water’s surface while leaving the foam transformed fear of the sea into a duration they could address together. The work presents no outcome in which fear has been conquered. It shows the sequence and continuity of actions constructed to approach that emotion.

Charred edges, lacelike holes, and layered shadows have a strong visual effect. This creates a risk that the technique of burning photographs or the beauty of handwork will come to the fore while questions of family history, fear, and subjects gathered in the city recede. In a 2018 exhibition review, Kotaro Iizawa wrote that although the works’ physical presence first catches the eye, behind it lies Tawada’s conviction and urgent need to apprehend reality through this method.^*9 Reading the work therefore requires looking beyond the shapes of its wounds to what the photograph depicts, who altered it, with whom, and to what extent.

Photographic Materiality and Magic Realism

Photography historian and anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards argues that understanding photographs solely through their depicted content overlooks their status as objects that are made, touched, stored, and damaged.^*17 Art historian Toshiharu Ito, noting the succession of changes to photographic supports over the medium’s short history, writes that photographic images have searched for bodies in which to reside. He situates Tawada’s handwork as an effort to awaken the magical materiality and aura inherent in photography.^*2 The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s Seeing as Though Touching considered photography and moving images as material media that act on the viewer’s senses.^*5 Tawada’s work can thus be placed within discussions of photographic materiality and post-photography that have become active since the 2000s.

Work concerned with photographic materiality is not exclusive to Tawada. The 2024 international exhibition I’m So Happy You Are Here organized the work of Japanese women photographers around three axes: observations of everyday life, critiques of social roles, and experiments with and expansions of photographic form. Alongside prints, it presented installations, moving images, and photobooks as part of photographic history.^*24 Tawada’s work was also introduced within this movement extending photographic form beyond the flat plane.

In its description of her book, The Photographers’ Gallery Bookshop likewise characterizes scraping and burning as a practice that crosses the boundaries of photography, painting, and sculpture while pursuing the possibilities of “photography as a material medium”.^*25 This is an example of her reception abroad, rather than an academic positioning, but it shows that Tawada is presented as an artist who expands photographic form beyond material experimentation alone.

Tawada has extended the exposure of the support into questions of photography’s surrogacy and emotional force. She draws on the way a photograph, though received as objective evidence, acts emotionally as a surrogate for its subject, turning physical changes made to an image into actions that engage invisible forces, fear, and memory. Magic realism in her doctoral dissertation is defined less as a technique for creating fantasy detached from reality than as a process of psychological healing that makes emotions and aura operating within visible everyday life manifest through tactile traces.^*14

The “aura” and magical force invoked in her official statement do not imply a literal revival of old beliefs. The terms describe a way of restoring irreplaceable histories—scratches, burns, the hand’s hesitation, and collaboration with family—to images that are reproduced and consumed in great quantities, allowing photography’s effect on emotion to be experienced anew. Tawada’s place in photographic history rests on more than her treatment of photographs as three-dimensional forms and installations beyond the flat plane. By acting on prints that bear traces of reality, she expresses what photographic objectivity struggles to capture, bringing material change, psychological healing, and rituals of folk belief together as a single working method.

The Japan Foundation’s 2025 exhibition in Hanoi introduced Tawada’s photography as an interface among “memory, myth and matter,” presenting the trajectory from her studies in biochemistry to photography, video, and sculpture as a continuous development.^*33 For Tawada, scientific training in handling matter and an interest in folk belief and sympathetic magic are not opposing concepts. By physically changing an image and observing how that change acts on memory and bodily sensation, she brings matter and spirit into the same working procedure.