Click on the images above to enlarge May 2002 When Koichiro Kurita read Thoreau's Walden Pond and realized how close it was to Japanese philosopher Zuangzi’s texts on nature, his life took on a new direction. Until then, the Manchuria-born, Japan-educated photographer had made a living as an independent commercial photographer. From then on, at age forty, he decided to devote himself to fine art photography. Armed with one camera and a botanical encyclopedia, he started on a quest that led him to remote parts of Japan. His newly acquired knowledge of plants was soon transcended in favor of a direct, deep and intuitive contact with nature. Like his subjects, shot in Japan but also, in more recent years, in the United States, Canada and Europe, Kurita’s images reconcile the best of Japanese and Western traditions: the thirty-five large-format images exhibited in New York are platinum prints on handmade Gempi vellum, a thin but resistant paper. This combination gives them extreme precision and translucence - evoking both the traditional Japanese paper-house walls and the white, vibrant sheen of a computer screen. Kurita focuses on minute passages in nature: the wind combs long marsh grasses; the wetness of a white rock stands against a torrent blackened by speed; branches and shadows disturb the quiet planes of a sand beach; the limits between earth and sky blur. In his work the minute displacements of smoke, mist and clouds, light and shadows, currents, estuaries and tides, hint at a world present beneath appearances, one where photography is lifted beyond drawing with light, to a place where seeing becomes this rare thing: a meditation on time. -- Carole Naggar Kurita’s exhibition is currently on view at The John Stevenson Gallery 338 West 23rd Street New York 212.352.0070 www.johnstevenson-gallery.com inquiries: mail@johnstevenson-gallery.com