Koji Onaka: Made in Europe

Koji Onaka’s European Journey
Text by Li Yidi (Head of Place M China)

In 2004, the European Union allocated a public fund to invite thirteen Japanese photographers to document its then twenty-five member states. Koji Onaka chose to photograph Latvia and Spain—marking the beginning of his European journey. Over the following twenty years, he traveled across the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, and Georgia. Although his reasons for each trip varied, one constant remained: the color film that accompanied him. His 2005 photobook In-between Koji Onaka: Latvia, Spain includes his travel diaries from that time; alongside notes on date, location, and weather, Onaka meticulously recorded the number of rolls he shot each day—around eight rolls daily.

The sixty color works presented in this exhibition at Place M on Shanghai’s Bund are all drawn from Onaka’s recently published book Made in Europe. Behind his signature “Onaka tones” lies his unwavering “photographer’s eye.” He continues to focus on easily overlooked details of everyday life, combining the ordinary scenery of travel with snapshot-like compositions. Within these seemingly overly beautiful scenes, one always finds traces of humans or animals—deliberately placed by Onaka.

I have witnessed Koji Onaka at work. His pace is extremely fast, in stark contrast to the slow, lyrical atmosphere of his photographs. He quickly scans the street through the viewfinder and presses the shutter almost instinctively—often, by the moment he clicks, his eye has already left the viewfinder, without further observation. His tall, slender figure moves ahead, accompanied by the crisp shutter sounds of a Nikon camera. On that occasion, together with the Place M students accompanying us, we truly sensed what it means to have a “photographer’s eye.”