Through her work, Hideka Tonomura explores questions of intimacy and sexuality. In her series ‘Mama Love,’ her subjects were her mother and herself. In this series, ‘Die of Love,’ portions of the body emerge from the photographs through blurs and flashes of color and light, leaving us to imagine the stories unfolding behind them. Through this highly theatrical work, which lies somewhere between tragedy and comedy, Tonomura tells us about the highs and lows of desire. Like the French philosopher Georges Bataille in his essay ‘The Tears of Eros,’ she asserts that the irrepressible passions of humankind, the intense relationships between love and death, between sexuality and darkness, lie at the root of all art.
Hideka Tonomura has been using photography as a vital tool for battling trauma. This is also true of her ‘SHINING WOMAN PROJECT,’ a series of portraits dedicated to women who are fighting cancer, on view at Sfera in Kyoto during the festival. This project has also produced a change of consciousness in Tonomura herself, as she puts it, ‘from taking photographs in order to live, to living in order to take photographs.' Her work is an impressive example of the cathartic role that photography can play in dealing with traumatic experience, at both the individual level and the level of society.