[Composition with Lace and Glass]

Certain materials are photogenic. Translucent yet solid, and penetrable by light, glass and lace have long preoccupied photographers. William Henry Fox Talbot’s pioneering studies of each, made in the medium’s earliest years, are touchstones for the field. About a century later, Iwata Nakayama continued to exploit their potential with the same photogram method that Talbot introduced. Nakayama’s techniques are not new, and neither are his subjects; here, the coupe glass and curtains tilt on the edge of domesticity. Yet while Talbot intended the photogram as a document of the observable world, Nakayama prized its creative potential. His composition—the starting point for a series of subsequent montages—anticipates a more expressive photographic approach.


Nakayama studied photography in Tokyo, and in 1918 was sent by the Japanese government to further his education in the United States. Following a stint in California, he spent several years operating a commercial studio in Manhattan, before relocating to Paris in 1926. There, he found a foothold in the city’s photographic avant-garde, crossing paths with Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy. Their darkroom experiments may have sparked his interest in photograms. For both artists, the photogram offered an escape hatch from objectivity. Created without cameras, by placing objects directly onto light-sensitized paper, their pictures were unburdened of any representational duty. Upon his return home, Nakayama began advocating for similarly liberated forms of fine-art photography in Japan. Through platforms like Kōga Magazine and the Ashiya Camera Club, both of which he co-founded, he urged photographers to privilege artistic visions over objective realities.


In works like this one, from the early 1930s, Nakayama combines familiar props into convulsive compositions. Later recapitulating the same scenario, with its elements of glass and lace, in a series of combination prints made with additional negatives, he introduced a cast of characters into the scene. In some, nudes swim along a lacy lane (1935); in others, cabaret girls cavort on the table’s edge (1932). With these manipulations, Nakayama pulls back the curtain on a series of dream worlds, spying something better than reality in the depths of his glass.