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There’s a selected form of exhibition that makes you need to put your digital camera down for a minute and take into consideration what you are truly attempting to do with it. Playing the Piano Upstairs, which has simply opened on the Print Sales Gallery, inside The Photographers’ Gallery in London, is a kind of reveals.
On the floor, it is a few photographer’s relationship together with her sister, constructed and rebuilt within the years after their mom died. But for anybody who spends their weekends fussing over publicity and grain, what’s most attention-grabbing is what Ichida did after she put her digital camera away.
Ichida, who was born in Niigata, Japan in 1985 and is now primarily based within the UK, spent this collection photographing her sister towards the snow-heavy landscapes of their hometown; usually alongside sticks, reeds, antlers and different discovered types that appear to echo the human physique again at itself. The pictures are quiet virtually to the purpose of vanishing, with silhouettes and reflections doing numerous emotional work.
What actually grabbed my curiosity, although, is how these photos had been made. Ichida has hand-printed each picture utilizing photopolymer photogravure onto Japanese washi paper, layering in archival pigments as she goes. This is a sluggish, bodily demanding course of that has extra in widespread with etching than with something most working photographers would decide to at this time.
The case for sluggish pictures
Photogravure has been round because the 1870s, and it fell out of on a regular basis use exactly as a result of it is so awkward. A photosensitive gelatin plate must be uncovered, etched and inked by hand, and each print carries the tiny variations that include that. For many of the twentieth century, that made it a distinct segment follow for printmakers moderately than photographers.
I discover it fascinating that Ichida has resurrected this antiquated method within the 2020s. She’s working on this arduous manner at a second when the occupation is going through the results of instantaneous smartphone pictures and the flexibility of AI to make an instantaneous photorealistic picture, with no lens even being concerned.
To be clear, Ichida isn’t discussing any of that; the press release makes clear that this series is about grief and sisterhood, not technology. But at the same time, there’s something quite profound about a photographer choosing, in 2026, to route her most personal work through a 19th-century printmaking process.
Ichida has said her snowscapes function as “visual metaphors for memory itself; mutable, obscured, yet softly glowing just below the surface”. And I don’t think it’s stretching things to say that description applies just as well to the photogravure process as it does to the pictures themselves.
Memory doesn’t render at full resolution. Neither does a hand-inked plate.
What photographers can learn
Ichida’s compositions lean hard on negative space, on letting a figure occupy a small fraction of a vast, pale frame, and on using reflections in still water to double a subject without ever showing their face. None of that, importantly, requires specialist kit. Instead it requires patience, a willingness to wait for flat, windless conditions, and the confidence to leave most of the frame empty.
There’s a deeper lesson here, I think, about process. Ichida’s choice of technique isn’t incidental decoration around the pictures – it’s doing as much narrative work as the compositions themselves. That’s worth thinking about in a world where photographers are often chasing the fastest possible workflow; from card to cloud to client. While that’s often commercial reality, it’s sometimes worth asking the question: would a slower method be feasible, and might that end up pleasing the client or customer more?
Playing the Piano Upstairs runs till September 13 at The Photographers’ Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW.
Prices for prints begin at £675 plus VAT, with income going in direction of the gallery’s public programme, and consumers pays in instalments by the Own Art scheme. The present runs alongside Japanese Women Photographers: From Fifties to Now, additionally on at The Photographers’ Gallery till September 27. Entry is free.
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