A Metamathematical Proposition.

Photographs by Shigeru Onishi. Text by Ryuichi Kaneko. Edited by Manfred Heiting.

Steidl, Gottingen, Germany, 2020. Japanese/English, 224 pp., 195 illustrations, 9½x11¼".

Photography as painting as printing: the avant-garde vision of an unknown postwar Japanese master

This book presents an overview of the astounding photographic oeuvre of Shigeru Onishi (1928–94) from the 1950s. Whether depicting nudes, cityscapes, trees or interiors (or combinations of these realized through multiple exposures or photomontages), what is most striking about Onishi’s photos are his unorthodox printing methods: using a brush to coat the photographic paper with emulsion, fogging, discoloration with acetic acid, creating the effect that the fixing process was incomplete, and color correction by varying the temperature during development.

The painterly results show Onishi’s interest to be not conventional representation but, in his words, the visual “formation of ideas,” and bringing out “the flavors of the image as they change” by embracing all aspects of chance involved in the photographic process. “In truth,” he argues, “if your photograph consists only of planned elements, it is essentially identical to a drawing of a single equilateral triangle.”

Also a mathematician, Onishi approached his work in this light: “To know the conditions of the object’s formation, this is the purpose of my photography, which is founded on a desire to pursue metamathematic propositions such as ‘the possibility of existence’ and ‘the possibility of optional choice.’”

Mathematical Structures, made in collaboration with MEM, Tokyo, is the first comprehensive book to present Onishi’s startlingly original vision.

“A Metamathematical Proposition is like a montage in a David Lynch movie or a fever dream in sepia and black ink: some clear views of a domestic life or of restful places like a shore’s edge or temple, then close-ups of chains, then trees ominous as insects and many things too messy to be distinguished and all the compacting double, triple, quadruple exposures – the images layered one on the other seemingly through an unknown, but inherently elegant logic. This is not what the artist intended, but if Dead of Night is depictions of car wrecks at rest after their follies, then A Metamathematical Proposition is the images that flashed before the drivers’ eyes as they crashed.

“Choice experiments, rather than terrible ‘happy accidents.’

“If you think the mind is a cryptic cage cut up and presented like a poem (lots of strong images, a strange sense of a deeper, though elusive and often changeable meaning), that order is an illusion or that the experimental is just a great good time, then this will slake you.” – Christopher Johnson, photo-eye Bookstore

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Cat# DT825H Hardbound $65.00 (9783958297067)
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