She is there week after week, down on the Ginza strip, up in Aoyama and over in Shinjuku, maneuvering from gallery to gallery on the Tokyo contemporary art exhibition opening party circuit. She is Kazumi Sugita, a retiring middle-aged woman (she does not give out her age, thank you very much), and chances are that before you see her she will spot you, and probably snap a picture.

What Sugita does is document the showing and swirling and schmoozing that goes on at opening parties. Unlike gallery-hired photographers, Sugita is there every night snapping away for the love of art and artists. Some 60 of Sugita's black-and-white photographs are now at the nice old Gallery Kobayashi in Ginza for a show appropriately called "The Opening."

Sugita's pictures are printed uncropped, with artsy film sprocket holes even, and stuck up on the walls side by side, unframed. The product of visits to more than 100 opening parties from January to November of last year, they show Japanese and foreign artists mixing it up with well-known Tokyo gallerists, collectors, and critics.

The personalities, art groupies and opportunists are here too, crowding the buffet tables or basking in the elucidation of apparently interesting illuminati. One of the revealing aspects of Sugita's work is that very few people in her pictures are actually looking at the art, which is pretty much the way it is at opening parties everywhere.

And so what we have to look at here is a lot of people wearing black, with drinks in their hands, standing around in front of a lot of art hanging on white walls. That's it, as far as the viewing experience goes.

Unless you happen to recognize somebody in one of the pictures, and, of course, most local art insiders will. This probably explains why Sugita's own opening party saw a slow, steady stream of solipsists working their way around the space, scrutinizing the pictures, looking for themselves.

Among the people pictured here are Belgian Luc Tuymans, last year's local painting sensation Mika Kato, the Nishimura's Takanobu Kobayashi (looking quite the tour group leader as he points to a new painting while a throng of guests looks on), and ubiquitous art maven and Tate Museum man in Tokyo Johnnie Walker.

A shot taken at Masato Kobayashi's opening at the Miyagi Prefectural Museum of Art is representative of the work. The artist, in a dark suit, is standing before one of his sculptures and explaining it to an NHK interviewer standing to his left.

On the other side of the frame are the camera and sound technicians. Here, as in many of the pictures, the subjects are so firmly fixed in their respective roles that the scene looks staged. Which, in a sense, it is, when you get to thinking about what an opening party really is.

Sugita's modus operandi is simple: With her Minolta T-1 rangefinder in hand, she hovers on the periphery that surrounds the artist, and shoots away.

"I prefer pictures where both the artist and the art are visible," says the improbable paparazzo, pointing to a photograph to illustrate her point. "See," she explains, "here is the creation, and here is the creator."

This is the sixth consecutive year that Sugita has mounted this sort of exhibition at the Kobayashi, and these are the only shows she has ever done. She says she works this way because she likes to get involved, to be a part of it all.

Searching for something more, a conceptual undercurrent informing the work, is vain, but then the demure Sugita does not aspire to the title of conceptual artist. She just takes pictures at openings.

"The Opening" is not exactly self-absorbed, it is merely a little self-congratulatory. For those not immersed in the Tokyo contemporary art scene, it may come off as dry and no more interesting than looking through a stranger's family album. But if you regularly make the rounds of Tokyo galleries, the show will recall a host of impressions from last year's art people and places. And you might even find yourself.