The photograph of emptiness – on Haruo Ohara

Abstract

This article focuses on the Japanese- Brazilian photographer Haruo Ohara, little known among us, and who distinguishes himself from other photographers for his daring aesthetics that tends towards an emptiness: it captures the presence of things and not their sense. His intense photographic production is strangely held in parallel to his activity as a farmer. Ohara creates moments of “empty spaces” of happenings, which attest to a state of pure contemplation, in which the photographer gives the viewer simply the poetry of forms. Ohara’s style tends, by hypothesis, to that principle of zen naturalness which distinguishes the traditional Japanese art: a nothing especial which refers to a state of things expressed in its naturalness. We here aim to embark on this particular case.