Contemporary Fine Art Photography

Born in Hyogo Prefecture, Atsuko Hayashi currently resides in Takarazuka City, Japan.

A graduate of the Kyoto Seika University Faculty of Arts with a concentration in oil painting, Ms. Hayashi initially focused on copperplate engraving before beginning her photographic career in 2000.  

After a series of successful solo and group exhibitions, Ms. Hayashi opened the photographic laboratory, “Photo Teraco” in 2015. She continued to participate in group exhibitions, and was recognized with another solo exhibition in 2017, at which time she introduced her “Shape of Water” portfolio. This work was selected for a participating gallery exhibition during the 2019 world-renowned Kyotographie International Photography Festival, gaining further international attention and leading to a solo exhibition in Seattle, Washington, USA in 2022.

Ms. Hayashi’s previous publications include “a Water - A_Z_2017” and “Shape of Water - Mizu no Katachi” in 2022.

In high school, I became interested in Dada and Surrealist artists through the writings of Shuzo Takiguchi, which led me to pursue painting at an art university. During my time there, I was influenced by Pop Art, and gradually my interests shifted from painting to printmaking. From the early 1980s through the 1990s, I worked primarily in copperplate printmaking. Since then, printmaking has remained the foundation of my creative practice.

One day, while working in the darkroom, I began to wonder whether analog photography might share something in common with printmaking. This curiosity led me to explore photographic processes.

In copperplate printmaking, for instance, one scratches into a copper plate with a needle to create grooves, then fills them with ink and transfers the image onto a support medium.

So, what is the equivalent of the "plate" in photography? In photography, it is the light itself — light that passes through the negative film. That light is transferred directly onto a light-sensitive surface (photographic paper) as a shadow. In other words, photography is printmaking with light.

Even before the invention of cameras and photographic paper over 150 years ago, experimental practices were producing fascinating images. These early challenges stemmed from a fundamental question: How can we record the simple elements of “light (or darkness)” and “time”? I believe that the unique appeal of these analog photographic experiments becomes all the more evident when viewed in contrast to today’s digitized photographic media.

What currently fascinates me most is the photogram — a camera-less photographic technique in which objects are exposed directly to light on photographic paper. The resulting images exist in a world entirely separate from the one seen through a camera lens. Due to the optical processes involved—ones that do not occur in the digital world — these images can only be created through the photogram technique. Using this analog method allows me to capture a world invisible to the human eye.

I spent my days searching for suitable photogram motifs — objects that transmit light — and immersing myself in darkroom work. Among these, I found bottled beverages from convenience stores to yield the most intriguing results. I initially worked with empty plastic bottles, but one day I used a bottle still filled with mineral water, and an image unlike anything I had ever seen appeared. It was a profoundly striking experience for me.

The light, shaped by the presence of water, is intricately reflected through the contours of the bottle and is recorded as a negative (shadow) image. What, then, is truly being captured in this photograph — or perhaps print — generated by light passing through the formless substance of water?

Fortunately, bottled drinks are inexpensive and readily available. Every time a new beverage is released, I encounter a new bottle design — each one representing a new encounter with a different Shape of Water.

2011: Solo Exhibition - “Planetone”

2012: Group Exhibition - Irorimura, Osaka

2013: Solo Exhibition - “How Many Worlds”

2014: Group Exhibition - Irorimura, Osaka

2015: Group Exhibition - “Realizing Photography as Printmaking,” iTohen, Osaka

2016: Group Exhibition - “Light Wave,” iTohen, Osaka

2017: Solo Exhibition - “a Water A-Z” - iTohen, Osaka

2018: Solo Exhibition - “Gravity and Light and Zero” 

2019: Solo Exhibition - “Shape of Water” - Voice Gallery, Kyoto

2022: Solo Exhibition - “Shape of Water 2” - Cafe Zingaro, Seattle, WA

2025: Solo Exhibition - Toki Art Space, Tokyo

The invisible and unseen has always fascinated us humans.

--Priyamvada Natarajan 

Light, water, form, function and more are brought together in Shape of Water by the artist Atsuko Hayashi. In the creation of her ethereal images Hayashi has taken what is usually unseen, seemingly mundane and ubiquitous--the water bottle—and challenged our notion of what beauty can be.  

In this current work the artist brings together her ongoing exploration of the foundations of the natural world, from exploring elements such as light, gravity, and water, that were the focus of her earlier photographs. But it is in Shape of Water that the artist has truly refined her vision.

Having studied painting and printmaking, Hayashi began to embrace photography and its relationship to creating an image by light rather than by ink or paint. In this time of digital photography, she has embraced an analog approach by doing away with the camera and laying the object, the water bottle, directly on the light sensitive paper. It was making the unseen visible that informed her use of the “technique of the photogram.” Hayashi feels that with this approach, “you can get a glimpse of a world that cannot be seen by the human eye.”

These seemingly infinite water bottles, in their various shapes, are everywhere in Japan. In a country with over 2.5 million vending machines for beverages alone, this allows the artist access to unlimited subject matter. A plastic bottle filled with water is placed on top of color photographic paper and exposed to magenta and yellow light from a color enlarger. The developed photographic paper becomes a negative, and the magenta and yellow light give it a cyan color. It is then scanned and converted into digital data. 

This deliberate choice of blue is to enhance the perception of water. Equally important, the blue references the camera-less cyanotype process used by one of the first women photographers, Anna Atkins. The cyanotype process was invented by Sir John Herschel, a family friend of Atkins, in 1842.  He painted paper with a solution of iron salts, and then dried the coated paper in the dark. By laying an object on the paper and exposing it to sunlight, it was then developed with water leaving a white outline of the object and a blue or cyan background.  Using this newly invented cyanotype process, Atkins, a botanist, embraced it as a means of capturing detailed images of the plants and algae that she collected. She was the first to produce a photographic book using the images she had created. Her precedent of using the cyanotype process to make photograms allowed her to “obtain impressions of the plants themselves.” Her scientific images were revolutionary at that time.

Beyond the blue of her images Hayashi’s work also relates to the typologies created by the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. While Atkins was a scientist who used photography to record her subjects, the Becher’s were artists who took a systematic approach to documenting examples of “types” of industrial architecture. Their work would be presented in grids or typologies, ranging from four to thirty images. Their collaboration began in 1959 and would help redefine contemporary photography.

While reflecting on these precedents to Shape of Water, one can see that Hayashi has embraced the same systematic rigor in her approach to collecting the water bottles and seeing the unique and individual qualities of her chosen subject matter. But she has taken a step beyond a typological presentation and its more formal qualities, to show the lyrical and poetic nature of water captured within the plastic forms of the bottles.

To create such beauty out of a disposable product of modern culture, gives viewers pause to consider so many aspects of what these objects represent. To create images by “exposing water, an object that has no form, to light,” Hayashi shows us that “light is reflected in complex ways in the shape of the bottle.” The elegant simplicity of her images reminds us of the true power of the simplest of elements, light and water, and their importance to our very existence.

It was the photographer Minor White who wrote,” One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.” Hayashi has shown that she sees beyond what is there and creates a new reality for her subjects.

Deborah Klochko 

Director Emeritus

Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego