One doesn't often associate the experimental design studio Bauhaus, active between 1919 and 1933, with photography, but notable exceptions crop up from time to time. The Japanese photographer Iwao Yamawaki is one example. Though to be honest, what I like about this work is generally in stark contrast to the Bauhaus principles of formal experimentation. What I like about Yamawaki’s pictures is actually how many, though not all, of them are actually pretty simple. They fit the bill in terms of the whole finding-the-surreal-in-the-real vibe that defined so much of the creative zeitgeist in the 1930s when he and his wife Michiko Yamawaki studied at the Bauhaus, initially under Joseph Albers. But they’re much quieter in terms of that experimentation; he didn’t seem out for what so many in art are out for, then as now, experimentation for experimentation's sake. It's hard to hit that bullseye anyway. Some of his pictures approach the abstraction that his contemporaries aspired to, but most possess something sweetly straightforward, even in his architectural photography which is often shot from unusual angles. My favorite is of a white cooking pot.
Now that I think of it, his pictures remind me of the ones my brother used to take whenever he'd steal my film camera in high school. I'd get the role developed and notice these blurry pictures that didn't really seem to be of anything in particular: a table leg, the tail of one of our dogs, an orange juice carton. I'd be furious with him for wasting my film on pictures of nothing, not realizing that it wasn't nothing he was shooting—-it was a way of looking at simple objects in a way that was both recognizable and surreal. They feel haphazard, obviously taken on purpose, but also a little bit not. Yamawaki’s best pictures have the same sensibility.
-Eugenie Dalland