‘Aya’ and the Power of Female Friendship

Last spring the 25 year old photographer Francesca Allen spent one month with the musician Aya Yanase, 24. Her first book retraces a unique, nascent, yet intense friendship.

Aya, better known as Aya Gloomy, is represented by Big Love Records, an important name on the independent Tokyo scene. The two women met briefly a year before through a mutual friend. Allen had found herself in Japan for two weeks, supposedly on holiday, but in reality in search of inspiration.

Instantly charmed by Aya, Allen returned to visit her last spring with the intention of creating a book on her. With neither of the pair sharing a common language, the two had to come up with alternative modes of communication. During the month that they spent together, largely in silence, sometimes, in emergencies, using translation applications, the two learnt to communicate through images, pointing things out to one another in their surroundings.

However it is through the camera lens that the pair built the strongest and most intimate links. Allen became Aya’s shadow, following her everywhere from her home in the suburbs of Tokyo, to her grandmother’s house, through long evenings with friends. The selection of photos is a mix of snapshots of the artist working in her studio, alongside more spontaneous images taken at bus stops or in bedrooms. Through this one person, a beautiful portrait of Japanese youth begins to emerge, with intimate images taken by a trusted relation. With each of the images published demonstrative of the relationship between the pair, the book, titled simply Aya, is rather self evident. Published by Libraryman, there are just 500 copies available.

The photographer does not appear in the images herself, but her presence haunts the work. Her book documents both process and digression, a story of two girls getting to know one another. Allen, born in 1993 works mostly for magazines such as Dazed, Riposte or Vogue, where her work often explores femininity. Her first large-scale work published in the magazine ID in 2015 delicately documents her younger sister’s adolescence. The photographer has discovered through her work with Aya, a largely unexplored theme within journalism: female intimacy. ‘There’s not enough journalism about female friendships, they’re not given the same credit as romantic relationships’, Allen told the British Journal of Photography in an interview, ‘but I actually think they can be so much stronger’.

This unique link with Aya is not just demonstrated through photographs, it is also present in the drawings and manuscript notes written by Allen and Aya and peppered through the book. Aya’s notes in Japanese are left untranslated, as a means of preserving the authenticity of her writing, but also as a means, one way or another, of conserving a small secret at the heart of this relationship laid bare.