Output details

'At Home in Japan', A multi-sensory, interactive exhibition

at the Geffreye Museum

The exhibition 'At Home in Japan' commissioned by the Geffrye Museum was based on my photographic research and the ethnographic study made with visual anthropologist, Dr Inge Daniels, for our publication 'The Japanese House – Material Culture in the Modern Home' (Berg 2010). The use of photography within the book questioned the supremacy of text within conventional academic publications and this was further developed within the museum context.

Co-curated with Daniels the exhibition was based on the layout of a Japanese apartment, presenting photographic work as freestanding, life-size, light-boxes, image/text and screened moving images. A visual device placed photographs in dynamic relation to each other and promoted a multi-perspective viewpoint. Photographic material, objects and texts were interwoven in an original and innovative way. This multi-modal approach does not treat culture and experience as text, but creates an immersive space where active participation disseminates complex anthropological knowledge. The work set out to challenge western stereotypes of the minimal Japanese house and to develop a new curatorial approach to photography within a museum context.

The photographs were made in participants’ homes through negotiated agreement based on my research into contemporary documentary approaches, my direct experience as a practitioner and in relation to anthropological methodologies. Participants were shown my previous work to familiarise them with the approach and time was spent in informal conversation before photographs were made. This created a framed interaction between the ‘subjects’ of the research and us as researchers.

The project was presented to the ’Intimacy Discussion Panel' of the Society for Photographic Education in San Fransisco 2012 where the approach to collaboration and image/object/text was critically explored with peers. The exhibition was reviewed in The Guardian, Japan Times, Telegraph, Evening Standard, and Time Out and discussed on websites for Geffrye Museum, British Council and Culture 24.