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| "London NW11, July 1993" (from ("Ruthbook") color photograph by Nigel Shafran |
If national stereotyping has not fallen completely out of fashion, it would probably be accurate to say that Nigel Shafran is the quintessential British artist. It is necessary, however, to qualify this so as to differentiate Shafran from the bumper crop of YBAs, or Young British Artists, who have taken the art world by storm over the last five years. For while Shafran is, at age 36, still "young," his style includes little of the flash found in the oeuvre of YBA look-at-me's like Damien Hirst. Shafran's approach better fits the tradition of the English eccentric: quiet and studied and weird. One is not so much shocked by what the London-based photographer is doing as intrigued.
Three of Shafran's projects from the last eight years are now showing at the Taka Ishii Gallery, a pleasantly avant-garde space stuck up in the nether regions of Tokyo's Toshima Ward. About 30 black-and-white and color pictures make up "Photographs by Nigel Shafran 1992-2000," a well-balanced show that is one of the best the Taka Ishii has mounted this season and a bright spot on Tokyo's end-of-the-year exhibition schedule.
First up are selections from the artist's self-published "Ruthbook" (1992-1995), a sort of photo documentation of the early years of Shafran's relationship with his still-girlfriend, Ruth. Where an attention-hungry lensman might have posed his girlfriend in an erotic manner (witness the tremendous success of Mark Helfrich's voyeuristic "Naked Pictures of My Ex-Girlfriends," published last spring), Shafran's snapshot aesthetic finds Ruth sitting at the breakfast table in a gray sweater, looking like she is waiting to go out and rake leaves in the yard with a thermos of hot tea and sugar. Here one is looking at a real person, and through Ruth one sees Shafran and the pair's very human relationship. It's all so refreshingly demure.