20-year-old Japanese photographer Izumi Miyazaki’s body of work is a surreal catalogue of ‘selfies’. Unusual, humorous and slightly bizarre, her imagery incorporates the most disparate of props – including bottles of ketchup, loaves of bread, kitchen knives, butterflies, and even whole raw fishes – and turns the physical world around her upside down.
Boasting a candidness reminiscent of street photography, the images that make up Miyazaki’s collection are staged in everyday places but are manipulated so that the mundane becomes magical. Almost all of her work focuses on self-portraiture, something she believes come from her having been a bit of a lonely child: “I don’t feel lonely when I make and watch photos of a double me,” she explains.
Playfully experimental with her composition, Miyazaki’s work insulates her inside a fictional photographic world of her own creation. From an image that sees the young artist doing a high kick while standing atop an oversized Onigri (a Japanese rice ball) to a shot that sees her replacing her own eyebrows with miniature sardines, Miyazaki’s shots are fearless and playfully mock cultural clichés.
“I don't really feel that I have a style,” Miyazaki tells CNN. “I try to do what I want do, when I want to do it. I don't really have a guideline or any steps that I like to follow. It is likely that one could classify me into one kind of style or another, but I just try to work in the moment.”
In 2016, the imaginative young photographer made her solo gallery debut at the Wild Project Gallery in Luxembourg and this year, her work will be immortalised in curator Charlotte Jansen’s new book Girl on Girl – a compendium of female photographers and artists whose work is rejecting the male gaze and reclaiming the female perspective.
