In Love With Satan | The Pranks

日本語

IN LOVE WITH SATAN

Japanese photographer Junai Nakagawa is someone I admire greatly. Looking at photos he had taken of the streets of Tokyo, I was struck by the notion of how interesting it would be for these photos to be combined with the works of the art unit Pranks. I spoke to their producer, Mr. K, about this, and our conversation provided the impetus for “111 Daydreams”, a collaboration between the two artists. But this was just the beginning.

Mr. K mailed me, asking me to add captions to the 111 images making up the collaboration. “Both parties would like you to let your imagination run free and write whatever you want”, he wrote. This really fired me up. I decided it would be fun to create 111 captions, one for each image, with each caption linking together to form a story. So with this work, it was the illustrations that came first; the story came after.

Margaret boy

PROFILE

Junai Nakagawa

Born in Tokyo in 1948. As a commercial photographer, his unparalleled sense of the artistic soon led to him becoming the darling of the world of fashion magazines. He has been active in a variety of media since then, all the while continuing to roam the city streets taking shots of what takes his fancy in the pursuit of his life’s work. Nakagawa acted as the official photographer for the first WAF (Wall Art Festival) in Bihar, India in 2010. As he photographed mural paintings and art workshops for the festival, he was struck by the vitality of the people living in the village, and this led him to break new ground and take up shooting family portraits. Nakagawa also collaborates actively with artists in a variety of different fields and has produced a large number of experimental works.

The Pranks

An art unit that collaborates mainly with respect to drawings. They have created more than one thousand carefree pictures that seem to have been drawn from the unconscious. Their pictures have the power to elicit stories in the minds of those that look at them; they provide a chance for creators across different genre to work together. The Pranks have not released a detailed profile.

Margaret boy

A writer who works with The Pranks. He worked with The Pranks and Junai Nakagawa on their collaborative work, IN LOVE WITH SATAN, in 2021, putting each of the 111 images from the project in order and writing captions for each of them. These captions were then joined together to create a novel.