Sakiko Nomura creates her images in the shadows. By photographing her models in places as bare as their bodies, she brings intimacy at the heart of her work. Her images evoke the muted atmosphere of rooms that we recognise without having visited them, the rustle of sheets, the rustle of a curtain that is opened to let in a ray of light.
She was Araki Nobuyoshi’s most important assistant, and although her work, like his, deals with the themes of eros and thanatos, her vision and approach are definitely different.
Combining and mixing places and times, embracing photographic and film accidents, Sakiko Nomura creates stories which are reinvented through the viewer’s imagination.
Sakiko talks little about herself, her practice or her images. She believes in the power of photography in the same way that we believe in something mysterious and powerful, something that is difficult to understand, and even more difficult to grasp in words. Perhaps this is why there are so few words written about her work: Nomura’s photographs speak for themselves. They don’t ‘say’, they make us ‘feel’.