SUKITA MASAYOSHI EXHIBITION IN OSAKA

The Sukita Masayoshi exhibition was being held in the Big Step in Amerika Mura, downtown Osaka. It was early afternoon and, heading south from Umeda on the Midosuji line, it had been quieter than usual despite this being a public holiday for the Emperor’s birthday. I could still remember when the old emperor had been on his death bed in 1989, the news in Tokyo broadcast details about his vital signs every night until the end.

 

After eating o-mu Raisu for lunch at Meijiken, an old favourite in Shinsaibashi that had been there since the 1930s, we found our way to the entrance of the gallery and straight away I recalled several of the photographs that Sukita san had used in his book on David Bowie for the launch of which he visited Melbourne and the Silver K gallery in 2012. Particularly the shots of Bowie wearing the Yamamoto Yoji designed clothes. After looking at the extensive selection of photographs we sat in some comfortable chairs and watched some videos… There was a news special from New Zealand about the book launch for Sukita’s photographs of David Bowie, there was a video of AKB48, there was another music video and then some scenes for a counter-culture inspired film in the early 1970s, Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets… Elsewhere in the exhibition there were photos of Western musicians such as Wayne Shorter, Iggy Pop and David Sylvian as well as bands such as the B 52s, Bow Wow and Devo. There were lots of Japanese musicians including photos from the Solid State Survivor sessions for the Yellow Magic Orchestra and some landscapes and an interesting shot of some PET bottles that were filled with some kind of eerie light. One photo taken in Nagasaki in the early 1960s showed a man with some horrendous scarring on his neck. The shot was very grainy but it didn’t disguise the extent of the burns. Presumably he was a victim of the atomic bomb.

 

Despite his father being killed during the war when he was a child, Sukita still remembers him taking photographs. As a child he had been obsessed with films from the West starring actors like Marlon Brando and James Dean and he sometimes rode his bicycle 100 kilometres to see these films. As a result, he became a photographer and later travelled to New York and London to photograph various musicians such as Jimmy Hendrix, Marc Bolan and David Bowie...