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Yesterday I had a chance to go to Syabi for the afternoon. Each Fall, Canon sponsors a massive photographic exhibition that is composed of entries to their contest, called the New Cosmos of Photography. Each year more people submit portfolios/handmade books to Canon. For 2006 1,505 people did. This year, 1,277. Looking through the catalogue, it seems that most people submit portfolios consisting of anywhere from 7 to 850 individual photographs. I’d guess that a number between 40 to 100 would be the average though. If you are wondering what 6 judges going through all that work looks like, click on this.
This year’s exhibition was held in the basement of the museum, which allowed for a different kind of layout than I had seen before. I honestly don’t have much to say about the six winners’ work. Every year Araki nominates a similar (to his) kind of pictures and Mr. Moriyama always goes with a porfolio laden with black and white grit. Of the six, Daisuke Nakashima’s “Soshitsu-metronome” stood out as a body of photographs with heart. On the other hand, I really could not get with Yuuki Aoyama’s blurry/narrow focal plane schoolgirl leg pictures.

However– the winners’ photography is not the reason to go to this show every year. In addition to the 6 major porfolios, you are able to get to peruse through 27 photobooks created by the Honorable Mention crowd. The books were the submissions to the contest and are all handmade, one of a kind creations. Each sits on it’s own shelf, with photographs from each portfolio hung on the wall over that photographer’s “station”. For me, the best work of the New Cosmos show is within these books. Granted, not all are amazing, and maybe only about half are really good. But there are a few GREAT ones that make it worth the time it takes to look. In particular I keep thinking about Sun Woo Yan’s portfolio: “Chewing Gum”. I met him earlier this year at his exhibition and the guy’s work is intense. It is one thing to play around with a camera in Kabukicho for fun, but hot-damn he is on the inside of that world and his resulting pictures are not anything anyone else could have taken. Gritty black and white is both All The Rage, and a technique that can cover up an unfeeling eye by making things at least look dramatic, but Sun Woo’s pictures of his life are wrought with both gusto and sensitivity. This balance is not easily faked in photography.
As a side note, his was one of (at least) three other portfolios where the photographer was makin’ portraits of his girl while biblically “knowing” her.
I was also a fan of the pictures by Hiroyuki Sato, Masahiro Ito, and Tetsuomi Sukeda. Check out Sukeda’s site to see photographs of his previous solo shows.

The New Cosmos is a chance to see so many portfolios of young Japanese photographers who get it. I spend a lot of time looking at Western portfolio sites online (not on Flickr) and try to keep up with all of the interesting blogs on photography as well. I also spend a lot of time in bookstores looking through the imported foreign photography books. The prevailing mood seems to be that one needs to “tell a story” through a photograph, or really make it Of something. It’s like everything needs to be static, and “deadpan” or Overly Conceptual to be taken seriously as Art. Why is that the only way to go about it? To me, the best thing about Japanese photography is that the motives (often) rely less on trying to make some big social statement, and instead are fueled by a continuous and photographically beautiful search for self. The individual pictures are less concerned with being OF something, and instead (as they build upon another) are more about something.
Photographs, when taken purely for oneself, are born from distinct and personal experiences with the world. This is not selfish. It is a way of dealing with one’s existence. I don’t see why someone might want to dismiss this kind of work on grounds that it is frivolous and shallow simply because strongly deals with the life of the photographer who made it. This kind of photography has a strength that is rooted in the joy of the immediacy of the medium.

The show is up until Nov. 11th and is FREE so if you are in Tokyo you ought to stop on by.