_valerian

Published in 1990, “Party” is a collection of photographs taken by Tsuchida Hiromi of people at various parties in Japan in the late 1980s. This unwieldily, tall book is a clever expression of it’s era by it’s construction: Ungainly and tall but shallow in depth, it is covered in a silky pink satin and with the title inlaid in gold. This is from the outside, is an extremely tacky looking book. But the physical size (almost comical) and gaudy cover lend itself extremely well as an introduction to the photographs inside.

If war pictures are not of individual conflicts but of one long never ending war, the same can be said of Tsuchids’s Party pictures. It is readily obvious that these pictures were taken at different times, but each party is any party. Every shot is lit up with his flash, with the light just reverberating across and into everything. Gold frames of glasses, fillings, sequins and confetti and jewlery and table legs and beer bottles and skin and eyes, everything is harshly glowing. This page with the shimmery kimonos is almost nauseating in person.

The artificiality of flash over surfaces matches the mood of the pictures. They are witty, intriguing and often funny, but not terribly pleasant.
Despite the best efforts of how people present themselves to his camera, the flash betrays and highlights the gap between who they might like to be vs. the person that the camera makes them appear to be for that one 1/3000 of a second.
It seems to reduce people to ghastly exaggerations, frozen human characters that amplify the visual irony between their presentation and physical reality. (This concept has (obviously) been worked with by Winogrand, Friedlander, Arbus, and Kurata Seiji to name just a few.)
The fact that a photograph is an abstraction from reality further complicates these (and any!) pictures, adding another aspect to interpret. So does the fact that these photographs are at least 15 to 20 years removed from the present, and are of a time that is not Cool or really even mentioned in current popular culture. Don’t forget that they are also bound together in a large pink satin book.

If Counting Grains of Sand was Tsuchida’s bemused and bewildering response to large masses of Japanese humanity, Zokushin was a much more thoughtful and contemplative body of work looking at individuals and their place in nostalgic culture. Party then, is this contrasty mixture of visual wit tempered with slight disdain that makes for one interesting photo book.