Sakiko Nomura’s intimate, inky nudes

Sakiko Nomura pictures it all: beauty, sex, death and the painful, elastic sense of time that makes grief too long and love all too brief. She does so with photographs of dying flowers, cityscapes seen from skyscrapers, graves under fresh snow and youthful male models in anonymous hotel rooms. Her images are soft and still and silent except for the drag of cigarettes, the sweep of bedsheets and perhaps the sound of the housekeeping in the room next door.

When Nomura started out she was one of a kind: a woman photographing nude men. It wasn’t quite a scandal – her pictures are erotic, but not explicit – but it was a shock even for the provocative world of post-war Japanese photography. Despite her daring, and her exhibitions across Japan, she’s not widely known outside of her home country. Now, she’s bringing her work to Photo London with Galerie Écho 119, a Parisian gallery and bookshop that specialises in Japanese photography.

Nomura was born in Yamaguchi, Shimonoseki, Japan in 1967. The first photograph that she remembers seeing was one of her uncle, who had died young during the Second World War. At the end of the war, Nomura’s grandmother had burned all of the family photographs to prevent them from being looted, but she had kept this one and hidden it behind the family altar. Like many who experienced the war, her grandmother rarely spoke about it. It was only later in life that Nomura discovered why there were no photographs of her grandmother in her youth. “That story has continued to weigh heavily on my photographic life,” she writes over email ahead of Photo London.

Nomura was around 18 when she started shooting her own pictures. In 1991, she graduated from Kyushu Sangyo University. Within a year, she had moved to Tokyo to work under the photographer Noboyushi Araki, the Japanese master who at the time was on the brink of global fame. Nomura was Araki’s first and only assistant. She learned a lot in the years that she worked for him, however, she never took on his direct, explicit and – in the view of some critics – deeply masculine approach to erotic photography. Reflecting on the relationship, she writes that, “rather than teaching me about photography, most of all, Araki has shown me a way of life.”

I ask which other photographers she has learned from. She replies that while she’s moved by many, what she’s learnt from them is another matter. She finds less influence in “great photos” or particular films and books, and more in trivial events and the lives of strangers: “Where I saw that movie, the conversation of the people next to me, or even the weather that day are all the things that lead to the photograph.”

More than anything, she finds inspiration in men, youth and beauty. She tells me that from a young age, she wanted to photograph “everything. Especially nudes.” She took her first male nudes in university. Now, they’re a staple of her photobooks, such as Nude / A Room / Flowers (2012), an early collection of portraits and still lifes; sex/snow (2014) which contrasts frozen landscapes with the warmth of two bodies joined in bed; GUN (2016) for which Nomura and six male models travelled off into a forest for three days; and in her 2017 book Ai ni tsuite (About Love), a 400-page collection of her favourite photographs of 100 different models, taken over 20 years.

Nomura often shoots her nudes in hotel rooms. It’s a practical meeting ground for photographer and model, but there’s something about the particularly drab locations preferred by Nomura that provides the perfect contrast for her subjects. When I look at these hotel rooms, with their kettles, their thin curtains, and their cheap furniture, I think of wandering travellers, anonymous encounters, transactions of fake names and numbered keys. Nomura sees something similar. She says that once she’s inside a hotel room, the relationship between photographer and model “can shift in some ways. It becomes a secret, quieter time.” I ask what runs through her mind in those moments. She says that with each person it’s different every time, but perhaps surprisingly she says, “I am shy by nature, so I feel a little safer in a small, closed room.”

Nomura’s hotel nudes draw you in with their apparent honesty and intimacy, but they never let you fully enter. It’s hard to shake the feeling that the secrecy and the opacity of the hotel room has bled into the picture. In an unrelated question about her interest in snow, Nomura mentions something that sticks with me: “when it snows, the whole town turns white and it looks like nothing is happening, but underneath the snow there is a world that has not disappeared.” It’s the same with her hotel pictures: we’re only catching a glimpse of what’s going on. There’s much more under the surface and behind the scenes.

Sometimes, nudes serve as a distraction to heighten contrasts within a series. “I am particularly interested in the mixing of life and death and the fact that beauty and pain exist together,” she writes. For example, take her 2021 photobook, Fate in Spring, made following the death of her beloved grandmother. The tall and narrow book is designed to resemble a kyohon (経本), a book of Buddhist prayers for the dead, but it’s a strange vision of death. There are  no dead bodies or funerals, instead there are trees at night, flowers, a python and a seabird, views from plane windows, and, of course, men and women grappling in bed. After her mother died in 2023, she made a similar series, published in Tsukiyo (Moonlit Nights), which pairs colour pictures of flowers on her mother’s grave with black and white portraits of a young man.

The photographs she’s showing at Photo London are from an earlier series, Another Black Darkness, originally published in 2016 by Akio Nagasawa. The series takes the subjects familiar to Nomura’s work – nudes, cityscapes, dying flowers – but presents them in solarised prints that are almost perfectly black. At first, it’s difficult to see what exactly is going on. They force you to spend time with them, turning them in the light to catch all the details. Nomura has previously said that she thinks of books as intimate moments between her and her viewers. Looking at these pictures, I understand why.

I ask Nomura if the image or the feeling it evokes is more important. “I can only photograph what I can see, but I also know that I can only see as I feel,” she writes. It sounds intuitive, but it’s not always easy. There are still moments today when she finds creating photographs difficult, “but I never hesitate whether to take a picture or not,” she writes. “Taking the photograph will solve the problem.” She says that when she isn’t taking photographs, her daily life “looks faded.” When I ask if there’s anything she hasn’t photographed but wishes to, her answer is simple: “What will happen tomorrow.”