The Japan Collaboration: Michael Day and Ron Caplain

This exhibit is a collaboration between retired NIU professor/photographer Michael Day and photographer/printmaker Ron Caplain, who are both members of DeBlois Gallery in Middletown, Rhode Island. Day and Caplain have each spent a great deal of time in Japan over the past four decades and taken many photos. Through photographs and collages, the exhibit captures both artists’ admiration for Japan and its culture.

Ordinarily, Michael Day “doesn’t do people.” He walks several miles a day around the NIU campus and Prairie Park taking pictures of birds and wildlife. But in October 2022, the color, costumes, and pageantry of the Festival of the Ages (Jidai Matsuri) in Kyoto Japan offered a rare opportunity for Day to practice photographing people as they paraded through the city streets.

When street photographer and printmaker Ron Caplain saw the photos and Day’s collection of photo memorabilia from Japan, he proposed the collaboration exhibit, which includes Day’s original photographs, Caplain’s collages using Day’s photos and photo memorabilia, and Caplain’s original collages. The exhibit had its first showing as a set of about 30 framed prints that were part of the Into the Mystic show at DeBlois Gallery in Middletown RI in July 2024.

Day’s images are straight photographs taken in a single photo shoot of the Jidai Matsuri (Festival of the Ages) in Kyoto in October 2022.

Caplain’s images are all collages using photographs taken during his many trips to Japan, along with images taken in museums in the US, and from books. About half of Caplain’s collages use images from Day’s photos.

Caplain’s collages were all printed on Asian papers. Hopefully viewers will see the textures and patterns in the digital reproductions.

All Images