Combined passions: Japanese travel photographer exhibits unique art style

Hiroko Okahashi stands out in a crowd gathered in the Virginia Carten Gallery at Abbot Library in Marblehead.

Dressed in a silk kimono, she shuffles from guest to guest in her Japanese tabi socks and geta sandals, offering greetings with a warm, genuine smile in obvious appreciation for the many art lovers in attendance at her reception. In fact, holding her Nikon camera, she snaps photographs of attendees throughout the reception as a keepsake.

Okahashi's fine-art exhibit runs through Nov. 29, and is a must-see for anyone in search of new and nontraditional photography. Her work incorporates haikus, calligraphy, a Japanese silkscreen technique and another technique unique to Okahashi: darkroom smudging, a process that is not for the patience-impaired.

"It takes hours, especially using three negatives," she says.

One such print Okahashi developed, while living in Hawaii, proves her efforts are worth her while. Many attendees stop to admire the three-fold image, clearly a conversation piece.

Although she says her work is fashioned after the classical style of painting, Okahashi's methods of manipulation in the darkroom are all but conventional. Many of the crafts practiced were learned throughout her career, one that began with travel photography while living in Japan. Once she began to travel, she found herself torn between the restraints of tradition and a life of freedom that other countries offered - especially America, which she refers to as "a foreign land." Her role as a Japanese wife began to wane; she was struck with a wanderlust that would soon change her life.

Like a documentary of the choices she's made in life - mainly love and travel - her artwork offers many elements of reflection, literally, through the use of mirrors that capture her many transitions since leaving Japan. And then she heads to the darkroom to develop her prints and add her personal touch, "personal" being an understatement. This artist creates strokes during a lights-out process intensely based on her feelings. Okahashi strokes and processes in the darkroom using a chemical she cannot see - it is white and is applied to white photographic paper. As her feelings shift, so does her art.

"It's coming from me," she tries to explain of the brush strokes layered over the photographic image.

Because she uses her feelings at the moment as her guide, she cannot duplicate one piece of her work; each is an original. She favors printing one paper using two negatives, dodging half of one image's projection and then the other to recreate two moments in time, possibly due to her inability to chose which image translates her emotions best.

Many of her pieces are signed in both American and Japanese, offering insight to a woman pulled by tradition, yet embracing newfound freedom since her 1980 arrival in America.

Okahashi lived two years in New York and spent some time in Washington, D.C., but ultimately settled in Cambridge, where her passion for photography hit full gear. Although she had experience working as a freelance photographer for a well-known Japanese travel magazine "TABI," she began a hot pursuit of art studies, first at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., then at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and at Harvard University's Extension School in Cambridge. She did so while living in a traditional Japanese marriage. Two years after her son was born, Okahashi was divorced - amicably, she offers. Suddenly a single parent, she decided to take her son and move to Hawaii, a place Okahashi was once sent on assignment for a Japanese travel magazine.

She recalls, "The first time I traveled to Hawaii, I thought, 'I have to come back.'"

True to her passion, she moved to Oahu and continued her art studies at the University of Hawaii. One of her works was purchased by the state of Hawaii for its archives, and many more have won awards, such as an "Acquisition Award" from the State Foundation on Culture and Arts in Honolulu, and a "Honolulu Printmaker Award" from Honolulu Printmaker.

Then, almost a decade later, she experienced "island fever" and returned to Cambridge.

By the time she was finished with school, she had much of her artwork complete, utilizing the darkrooms of the schools she attended. Today, she has no darkroom available, and her bathroom is too small, she says, so she can't do much.

Although she lives in Cambridge, Okahashi, true to her adventuresome form, drove to Marblehead for the first time two years ago. During the summers, she has been known to make the trip almost every day.

While visiting the seaside town, she decided to market her art at the Marblehead Arts Association in a juried members show. Her work received an honorable mention and attracted the notice of another member, who soon contacted Bonnie Strong at the Abbot Library. Almost a year later, Okahashi received an invite to hold a solo exhibit of her work.

The title of each of her exhibit pieces offers clues to her personal history, such as "Memory of Venice" and "The Day I Moved to Hawaii."

"This is my diary," she explains. "How I remember everything."

- cpeters@cnc.com