When Félix Nadar took the world’s first aerial photographs from a balloon in 1858, Parisians saw the city from above for the first time, thanks to photography. Today, at a time when aerial photography technology has become commonplace, it is difficult to really imagine the wonder and excitement felt by the people of Paris at the time. This decline in imagination is due in part to the fact that, alongside the development of flying technology, the camera has always served as an extension of the human eye, while people have always had a strong yearning to “see” beyond their own bodies.

In 1907, German Julius Neubronner invented the “pigeon camera” as an aerial photography technique. A camera with a timer was affixed to a lightweight aluminum harness that was then attached to a pigeon, which was allowed to fly around. Even today, cameras are attached to birds, marine creatures, and land animals to capture moving images for the purpose of studying animal life.

Looking back on the history of photography, the main field for this form of artistic expression was literally on the ground. In Japan, straight snapshots on the street have become a popular form of photographic expression, establishing themselves as legitimate. Even within this context, however, Yuki Onodera’s practice has carved out its own niche. The works in “Parcours: Between Airmail and Carrier Pigeons” are not straight, even if their field is the street. Their objective is not to wander the streets on foot in search of encounters with their subjects. Neither do they seek to articulate a sense of the photographer’s body in any way. Onodera’s work is akin to a roller coaster ride: it guides and manipulates the gaze and consciousness of viewers as they float up into the sky before plummeting down to the depths of the Earth.

Speaking of roller coasters, seeing as how this gallery used to be a post office, I wanted to imagine what it would be like to experience the pneumatic postal system, one of the key elements of this work, not as a receiver or sender of such mail, but as a piece of mail itself. This is an experience that gives me an inexplicable sense of excitement while reaffirming the existence of my own body amid the violence of being swept away, which is also what I have experienced when viewing Onodera’s previous works.

The photograms on the photographs of urban scenery presented in this exhibition usher the consciousness of the viewer into an underground space that is actually invisible to the eye. A photogram is a method of producing images with shadows by intentionally creating areas on the photographic paper that are not illuminated during the exposure of a silver halide print. The fact that this method of “not illuminating” causes the invisible pneumatic postal circuit hidden underground to appear on the image is something that bears a relationship to the nature of that underground network.

These works also incorporate an element of time travel, with unpublished images from Onodera’s own past work, and collages from the French scientific magazine La Nature. Unlike animals, which move around in a limited field, such as the sky, layers of earth, or the sea, or other photographers who keep close to the ground in pursuit of the social conditions of the same era, Onodera seems to avoid being too grounded in a specific technique, style, or sense of contemporaneity.

Onodera herself often used to point out that her early body of work in particular was “all imbued with a sense of floating or levitation.” According to her, “the fact that my subjects are suspended in midair is probably a reflection of my own attitude toward nomadic living. Being unstable is preferable and natural for me,” and this sense of suspension can also be observed in these works.^[1] However, Onodera’s sense of floating is not something that can be described as soft or airy. Rather, it is the same kind of chilling, suspended feeling that one gets when riding a roller coaster, and all of one’s organs seem to become exposed.

Through her creations, Onodera seems to be trying to fulfill the longing that humans have had for “seeing” beyond their own bodies since the beginning of the history of photography in a completely unique way. This series of work might be described in terms of experiencing an expansion of one’s ability to see, with an insatiable appetite for that seeing, unconstrained not only by the human body, but also by time and space. Rather than achieving a complete and unobstructed view of the world, these works seduce the viewer by inflicting an intentional kind of damage on that image, and then compensating for it with imagination.

oct 8th, 2024.