She is there week after week, down on the Ginza strip, up in Aoyama and over in Shinjuku, maneuvering from gallery to gallery on the Tokyo contemporary art exhibition opening party circuit. She is Kazumi Sugita, a retiring middle-aged woman (she does not give out her age, thank you very much), and chances are that before you see her she will spot you, and probably snap a picture.
What Sugita does is document the showing and swirling and schmoozing that goes on at opening parties. Unlike gallery-hired photographers, Sugita is there every night snapping away for the love of art and artists. Some 60 of Sugita's black-and-white photographs are now at the nice old Gallery Kobayashi in Ginza for a show appropriately called "The Opening."
Sugita's pictures are printed uncropped, with artsy film sprocket holes even, and stuck up on the walls side by side, unframed. The product of visits to more than 100 opening parties from January to November of last year, they show Japanese and foreign artists mixing it up with well-known Tokyo gallerists, collectors, and critics.