Playing up to its title, Small Myths by Mikiko Hara begins with a few small moments plucked from daily life. Cut flowers in a vase in the sink. A little boy—the photographer’s son—splayed out on the floor, his back covered in dots of cream. Sausages frying in a pan. Then, a beige curtain hanging in front of some trees. Flowing one after the other, these minor scenes carve out significance, a quiet power growing as they come together to form a rhyme of domestic life. The next photograph is a vivid blur of orange flowers, moving us into the city where we come across a sequence of faces, a flurry of different people in transit.
It’s like we are walking with the photographer—from the things she was tending to at home, out the door and into the chaos of the outside world. Rounding off this first stroll is a short story; a memory recounted by the photographer about a small plot of land, open to public use, that her late husband used to grow potatoes and tomatoes in. Following a dispute with a tenant, the plot was closed off, the soil was sprayed with herbicides and the large cherry tree that used to bloom there eventually stopped blooming.
Small Myths is peppered with minute observations like this one: everyday happenings sometimes in private, sometimes in public, sometimes at the juncture between the two. A close collaboration with Marseille-based publisher Chose Commune, who approached Hara to show them “something new and something old,” the book is a retrospective of sorts that contains images taken between 1996 and 2021. This broad proposal drew the Japanese photographer into an encounter with her past to piece together the different fragments that have captured her attention over the years.
Though known for her street photography, this collection of pictures moves between the photographer’s intimate family life to her fleeting encounters with strangers. Hara was recently told by an acquaintance that her photographs have “no subject”—a description she took as a sign of infinite potential and interpretation. In Small Myths, everything is worthy; the unnoticed is radiant and the tiny joys and pains of the everyday magnified so we readers may encounter them. Sidestepping genre with an open embrace of whatever she comes across in her daily life, the book reads more as a personal reflection on what it means to use a camera as a way of being in this world.
Hara’s arrival to photography was not a straight path. The camera became a tool that suited the ebbs and flows of her life, after first studying cinema then becoming part of an underground theater troupe. It came as the next step, the two art forms sharing a resonance in her mind.
“In photography school, we were assigned the task of taking street snapshots. Looking back now, I feel that the act of entering into the hustle and bustle of the city to take pictures was similar to the elation I felt when I stood on stage,” she reflects. “Snapshots are a physical act, so perhaps I was originally attracted to the physical approach.” Immersing herself in the choreographies of the street early on, her gaze eventually extended into the intimate walls of her own home when her reality shifted and grew to encompass caring for her three children.
Describing her style as “virtually unchanged” since her first solo exhibition in 1996, a sense of embodied presence runs like a strong undercurrent through all of Hara’s photographs, her camera acting as an extension to her body. If it were an organ, it would be one that allows discovery; the kind that engages the senses and the instinct rather than the mind. And one that—perhaps surprisingly in the context of photography—values feeling over looking, leaving the visual details to chance.
The camera that finds itself in close companionship with Hara’s body is an old analog Ikonta, and the way she engages with it is to shoot from the chest without looking through the viewfinder. “Freed from thought,” her philosophy is almost meditative; a mode of allowing various states and feelings to rise to the surface and coexist.
“Rather than thinking about good composition, I prefer to value the feeling I get when I first encounter and look at a subject,” Hara muses. “By not sticking to the viewfinder, the boundary between what is in and out of the viewfinder becomes ambiguous. In a way, I don’t know what range I looked at and what range my camera looked at. I do not set a theme in advance, nor do I try to convey my own message through my photographs. By taking photographs without a set theme or desire to shoot in this or that way, I would like to keep myself in a state of openness to the external world around me.”
There is no attempt to make sense of nor pass judgment on the world that is spun across the pages of Small Myths. We roll past the tedium of train carriages of commuters, a couple tenderly holding hands, fish swimming behind glass, a pair of small legs emerging from a bush of flowers, a baby asleep in the car, two sunlit children engrossed in a game of cat’s cradle. People alone, people together, objects, daily tasks. Everyday rhymes and reverberations emerge between the moments that she has collected.
Unsentimental about photography’s limits, its inability to transport us to what she describes as “another world,” Hara’s images speak firmly of this life, of reality. In another short story later in the book, she writes of watching her son through her camera as he read a comic book. A brutal phrase about killing pops out at her and she involuntarily releases the shutter, prompted by “impulse, awe and disgust.” The violence of the text, and the emotions it triggers in a mother looking at her son, are released to haunt the images that follow; her kids kicking dirt outside, a small, angelic-looking child bathed in light inside, her son pressing a spoon down on a fried egg, its yolk on the brink of explosion.
“There is not much photography can do,” Hara says. Using her camera as a tool to face and be in the world amidst all its ambiguities, snatching moments as a way of letting something go, Small Myths invites us to pay close attention to the ordinary. “The camera cuts out scenes that I seem to be seeing but I am not, bringing new discoveries,” she concludes. “I gather the fragments that emerge through my act of photographing. Neither an affirmation nor a denial.”
Small Myths
by Mikiko Hara
Publisher: Chose Commune
ISBN: 979-10-96383-34-4