Ghost in the Shell, Cut No. 341, Solegraph Edition

HIROMASA OGURA (B. 1954)
Ghost in the Shell, Cut No. 341, Solegraph Edition
numbered and signed by the artist (lower edge)
solegraph high-grade fine-art print on Radiant White 270 g/m² archival cotton paper
sheet: 16 1/2 x 23 3/8 inches (42 x 59.4 cm)
image: 10 5/8 x 15 inches (27 x 38 cm)
original background painted in poster colour on paper in 1995. this is one of 25 numbered examples. solegraph edition produced by Yamada Photo Process, Toyama, published by Riekeles Gallery in 2023. supplied unframed.

Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell (1995) drew its city from Hong Kong, and much of the film's realism comes from how those city views were assembled. Location photographer Haruhiko Higami traveled to Hong Kong once the first storyboards existed, and shot the streetscapes that could carry the film's vision; his photographs were taken directly into the backgrounds and kept in black and white so as not to constrain the art director and colour designer in their choice of palette. The layout of Cut No. 341 is virtually identical to one of Higami's photographs, and the result looks almost as though it had been shot on location. Hiromasa Ogura has described how the picture came about: it was the rainy season, and when the team entered shops the air conditioning was blasting in stark contrast to the humidity outside. They were documenting on film without realising it would produce a lens-flare effect, and it turned out to be exactly right — very atmospheric, and the images look almost wet. Buildings in Hong Kong always had exhaust fans dripping with water, which mixed with the rain and combined into a soup below, and the photographs caught all of it with the light blurring beautifully. Ogura thought about how to carry that feeling into the painting: the main palette stays subdued, and bright colour is used only to mark the focal points.

A print of this kind shows something the film never did. At the edges of Ogura's paintings the first broad and forceful brushstrokes remain visible. This underpainting, called jinuri, is the foundation on which the background is built, and in his work it can be read as a metamorphosis: coarse strokes at the margin, condensing towards the centre into finer lines and layered colour until a building stands there, shimmering in pale light. The tension between the abstract force of the first strokes and the surgical precision of the finished passages is where his mastery lies. In the cinema, the frame cropped all of that away.