18:49, 14/02/2010

Hiro(re)mix

↑ Miss K, Untitled self portrait, February 13th 2010

I bought this new t-shirt from Top Shop yesterday and was trying it on with various outfits before going out, and decided to get the camera out. With my new determination to up the ante with my self portraits, I spent a moment planning the photos, clearing the space around two big pieces of art on the wall and rearranging the lighting.

I wanted to get big, colourful, harshly flash-lit compositions with casual, almost accidental framing and it worked out pretty well.

As I looked at the results, I realised that the images reminded me a lot of the work of the Japanese photographer Hiromix.

↑ Miss K, Untitled interior, February 13th 2010

I came across her work quite accidentally about 10 years ago - I was walking round SoHo in New York and wandered into this art bookstore. Somewhere in the jumble of photography titles upstairs was a newly published collection of her work called simply Hiromix. I was instantly gripped by her canny mix of self-portraits (she's very pretty in that dissociated, alien-lookig way that I find so attractive and try and ape in my self portraits), urban nightscapes, cluttered interiors and throwaway portraits of friends and others.

There's something loose about her work which makes it extremely engaging. She has a magpie eye and a knack for colour and use of mixed light; her uncanny ability to frame herself in interesting ways is addictive. I bought that book in New York that day, and was pretty obsessed with it for a while, but it had been lying unopened on my shelf for a while until I had the sudden realisation yesterday as I was picking shots to upload.

Not only was my mix of self portraits and land and cityscapes pretty Hiromix-like (or perhaps Hiromix-lite), but that she's almost like a prototype for a certain type of (mainly) female vernacular self-photographer that you see all over the Internet these days.

I definitely fall into that category I think.

↑ Miss K, Untitled self portrait, February 13th 2010

When Hiromix emerged in the 90's by winning the prestigious Canon New Cosmos prize (co-judged that year by another of my photographic heroes, Nobuyoshi Araki), she not only established herself, but started a massive craze for photography among Japanese urbanite girls who suddenly turned the national obsession for treasuring ephemeral snaps into a self-obsession and an artform. The trend was made particularly forceful by the emergence of digital photography, where Japan was, in the mid-90s several years ahead of the rest of the world.

Now, decades later, flickr seems to be the spiritual home for that type of photographer. The trend's gone global and Hiromix's pretenders have inherited it. I wrote a while ago about Nan Goldin being a prototype photo blogger. Now I realise that Hiromix is one branch further along the evolutionary tree, an embryo flickrista who was doing what we do ten years before anyone had flickr, or deviantart, Facebook or Picasa accounts.

So here's to you Toshikawa Hiromi, whatever you're doing now. These photos are a tribute to you. I'm one of you, without me, or you, ever realising it.