Gallery13 is pleased to present the exhibition “A Japan Love Story: Visions of Araki, Daido and kenna”, which will be open to the public from Thursday 24 April to Saturday 24 May at its exhibition venue in Via Roma 34/b, Reggio Emilia.

This exhibition is a journey into the soul of Japan, through the eyes of three great masters of photography: Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama and Michael Kenna.
Three artists, three approaches, one country – enigmatic, layered, mutable.
With Araki, we enter an intimate, personal Japan, where eros, memory and death intertwine in a visceral tale. His photography is diaristic, sometimes crude, but always profoundly human.
Daido Moriyama transports us to the streets of Tokyo, to its blurred edges, to the fast movements of the city. His grainy and provocative aesthetic shatters the linear narrative and returns fragments of a reality experienced in urgency.

The voracity of these two artists driven by urgency contrasts with the calm and placid observation of Michael Kenna.
Kenna’s foreign gaze – a Westerner deeply fascinated by Japanese culture – leads us into a silent Japan, suspended between spirituality and nature. His black and white photography are meditative visions, where time seems to stand still and the lines of the landscape dissolve into abstraction. With essential framing and a masterful use of light, Kenna transforms landscapes, temples and solitary trees into poetic icons. Each image is the result of long contemplation, often made in the liminal hours of the day, when the light is most rarefied and the world dissolves.
Together, these works compose a multifaceted portrait of Japan: a country where tradition and modernity coexist, and where the photographic gaze becomes a mirror of the invisible.

Their works, while distinct in style and approach, converge in capturing the essence of a culture in perpetual evolution. Araki invites us to explore the intimacy and sensuality of Japanese life, Moriyama reveals to us the shadows and lights of its chaotic streets, while Kenna leads us into serene and meditative landscapes, often venturing alone into the boundless expanses of snow of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island.

These three artistic sensibilities, through the power of their visions, invite us to reflect on a country that, despite its modernity, has never ceased to seek contact with its past, its history and the invisible. After all, Japan is never just a physical place, but an idea that takes shape in every shot, in every fragment of frozen time.

The exhibition closes with an invitation: let these images not only tell us, but transform us, revealing new aspects of a world that, although so distant, resonates deeply within us.