Michiko Kon
Subtitle: still lifes
By: narrative by Ryu Murakami ; essay by Toshiharu Ito.
Contributors: Murakami, Ryū, 1952-; Ito, Toshiharu, 1953-
Publisher: Aperture
Published: 1997
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 124
Subjects: Kon, Michiko; Photography, Artistic; Still-life photography
Other titles: Still lifes
Description: Michiko Kon: Still Lifes presents this unique artist's photographs of the impossible objects she has created in her studio. These objects are assembled from fish, flesh, and fowl with a Surrealist sensibility reminiscent of the works of Man Ray and Meret Oppenheim.

Michiko Kon's photography deftly makes a permanent record of subjects that only exist temporarily: a garter belt fashioned from fish; a pair of melons covered with octopus tentacles; and a boot made of shrimp, among many other non-delectables.

Michiko Kon takes the classic tradition of the still-life photograph and gives it new life through the reanimation of object parts and body parts in new forms.

Kon writes: "A fish with legs, a vacuum cleaner turned into an animal, a light bulb turned into a pear, a remote device turned into a living creature...." It is this exchange of the inanimate with the animate that imbues the stillness of her photography with the dynamism of the balance between life and death, the fashionable and the commonplace, being awake and dreaming.