The Expansive Joy of Mao Ishikawa’s Photographs

It’s an understatement to say that we live in a world that is at least partially defined by a surfeit of images, and that the photographs we like, or remember, are those we take ourselves. Selfies or photos documenting travel, anniversaries, the great and boring events of life—we cling to these pictures as a way of navigating where we’ve been and who we’d like to be. But these images of our smiling, idealized selves, no matter how true they may be to how we want to feel and be regarded, rarely make room for pain, let alone the more troubling aspects of existence, and we stare at the colorful snapshots taken from our bubble of self-regard, wondering why their fiction of order and happiness sometimes makes us feel so sad.

A number of twentieth-century photographers, ranging from Lisette Model to Alvin Baltrop, made brilliant forays into desentimentalizing the image of the self by recording people as they were—or, more specifically, by recording what goes into being a social creature—on the streets of Nice, say, in the nineteen-thirties, or on New York City’s West Side piers in the nineteen-eighties. Other photographers have produced images that encourage a more private view of their subjects, even as they move through the theatre of being. The Japanese photographer Mao Ishikawa’s black-and-white works—more than thirty of which are currently on view in her show “Rogue,” at Alison Bradley Projects (through June 13th)—are significant for their depiction of intimacy and of the role that politics play in who we are and what we do. Ishikawa doesn’t take photography for granted; nor does she use it solely as a tool to examine her own subjectivity—that is, what she feels about herself, her singularity, in a universe crammed with others. Rather, her pictures are marked by an expansive joy, one in which the medium plays a part, for sure, but the majority of which comes from her subjects and their willingness to display themselves before her camera, an instrument that mystifies even as it elucidates. It’s important to remember that some of Ishikawa’s images were made as long as fifty years ago, and their vibrancy demonstrates how far ahead she was when it came to seeking out subjects she found interesting, not framed by “difference,” but not afraid of it, either.