On Photography by Nobuyoshi Araki (1989)
I love this book.
The last page has technical information on the tools used to create these pictures. I haven’t shot Try-X before…
May 22, 2011
April 21, 2011
New Vacuum Press: Omni Polis by Shogo Yamada
The latest publication by the Osaka based photobook publisher Vacuum Press is Omni Polis, by Shogo Yamada.
Omni Polis follows soundly within the visual groove that he and his fellow photographers have established. On the train ride from Sokyusha home I kept comparing Omni Polis to Citizens and Kokubyaku Note in my head but it is best to let each photographer stand on their own strengths. While Vacuum’s hometown of Osaka seems to have unending ragged concrete surfaces populated with pigeons and citizens, compared to Abe’s bewildering framing Yamada’s visual interest often lies in establishing a narrower depth of field on a more direct subject matter.
Some samples from the book:
This is Yamada’s second book with Vacuum Press. His first, Black Pot (top), is also quite good.
Like all of the other Vacuum Press publications, both of Shogo Yamada’s books are available from Japan Exposures.
March 29, 2011
Mika Kitamura & Yuki Watanabe: Two Sights Past
For the better late than never files: Two Sights Past by Mika Kitamura and Yuki Watanabe.
Bambinart Gallery has been working to give young artists exposure in Tokyo. Two Sights Past was an exhibition held there back in January and February of this year, a continuation of an ongoing collaborative project between Mika Kitamura and Yuki Watanabe. Part of a larger series of work dating back to 2002, Two Sights Past received its first major recognition in 2006 from Kotaro Izawa in the Canon New Cosmos of Photography.
In their own words in regards to this project:
Mika:
I think longing and envy is what motivated me to first photograph her.
And I remember that before we were friends I mostly photographed her on the sly. But at that time affection and the desire of possess mingles when the distance between us accidentally diminished. Over four years – a long-time yet short all the same – we changed more than a little and so naturally the way we took pictures of each other changed too. Were I a painter I don’t think I would paint her, and if I were a sculptor I don’t think I would sculpt her. Always looking at her from the same distance, I learned both the joy and hardship of continuously photographing the same person. I now realize that this feeling is something only photography can capture. And so with affection I will gaze upon her with these mingled feelings of affection and jealousy, of superiority, inferiority, and love. And I will capture them all in a single photograph. I think that everything is okay.
Yuki:
first encountered her when I was 20 and that is already 4 years ago*. We spent more and more time together, and yet while our time together is more precious than anything it is with conflicting emotions that we photograph each other. Even now these emotions change, surface, and vanish.
And though the temperature difference of emotion may stay under the surface, she is a constant presence. I believe continuing things will discover some things. Over time our surroundings, relationships, emotions, will inevitably change. The preciousness and hardship of being together, the joy of having met. And I hope that we can change time into form. I thank her for my feeling this way.
*4 years in 2006, which would be 9 years now. Seeing as how time keeps flowing, that puts these ladies nearly halfway to a point Izawa mentions in his statement of selection:
The photos wonderfully capture the passage of time. David Armstrong and Nan Goldin have done work based on the same approach, so what they are doing is not completely new. Still, the photos are a pleasure to look at. The relationship between them has a sister-like quality that conveys a sense that they share a great many things. Their photographic technique is about the same level, which I think gives the work good balance. They’re both young, and they have not been shooting each other for very long. If they’re still doing this in 20 years they will have created something truly exceptional.
Is the series exceptional yet? Certainly in its overall beauty. Time is dealt with loosely with the resulting images being less formal than the obviously more well known series of the Brown sisters, another set of images which invite comparison. While it’s not imperative to know that the exhibition at Bambinart is essentially a pretty waypoint on an attractive photographic timeline, that external context can put things in perspective to provide further contemplation/enjoyment of the work.
Some meta-context would be this: This particular exhibition was of pictures Mika and Yuki took in Budapest, Hungary while visiting a gallery there that exhibited their earlier Two Sights Past portfolio in 2009. In some of the newer images you can see their earlier photos framed in the background. Such a vortex of self-referencing creation would make Michael Gondry proud. I find the lightheartedness and beauty of the images something worth enjoying. Such elements of this project counters more “serious” portfolios which depend on overwrought forced intellectualism/conceptualism as a reason to exist. Two attractive and skilled women photographing each other in Budapest? I can see no problems with this.
The Bambinart exhibition was composed of monochrome and color inkjet prints from their Hungry trip pinned as a grid on the wall. Two larger framed prints (seen in the top two images above) served as an anchor/introduction to the rest of the show.
A small collection of pictures accompanied the exhibition. These “prints” were inkjet-made, the same as what was pinned on the wall, although fewer in number. Orders were placed and and paid for at the gallery and were sent out a few weeks later.
I’ve mentioned before that in Japanese the term Photobook 「写真集」 shashinshu is comprised of three kanji. The first two mean “Photograph” with the last one detonating “collection”. Unlike the term “Book”, no binding is guaranteed or implied. Mika and Yuki submitted a thick handmade bound book with several hundred pages to the Canon New Cosmos back in 2006 (sadly it fell apart as a stream of visitors flipped through it every day for 3 weeks) but this current little collection of Two Sights Past is different. Coming in at thirty 5×7 sized “pages” (six fewer than a roll of film) it is concise, sweet, and a glimpse at even better things to come.
March 18, 2011
Takashi Honma Diaries 2010~2011
There’s a certain interest in self publishing in Tokyo- photographic zines and other assorted smallish photobooks are growing in popularity. Recently the photomag Photographica published a special of what looks to be a zine with really high production values showcasing recent work by the cerebral photographer Takashi Honma. Rather than picking it up in some obscure artbook shop in Aoyama, I found my copy sitting on a shelf in an average bookshop near an average station in an utterly average suburb of Tokyo. It was with the other camera publications next to the Apple product and ham radio operator mags.
Flipping through, you can’t but help imagine that the designers of this issue had a field day. Font and paper stock selection is extremely varied yet comes together quite nicely. Photos are spread across the gutter- one half will be monochrome while the other is firmly set in Honma’s thoughtful color palette. Half of the same image may be reproduced on thickish glossy paper while the other part is on something as rough as newsprint. This is actually the reverse of the glossy stuff. Enjoying this book is an interesting tactile experience.
Halfway through is (on deep red stock, naturally) reprints of correspondence Honma held via email with Alec Soth and Martin Parr. Thankfully, like much of the rest of this book it is in English and Japanese.
The issue also has sections devoted to the work of Honma’s students. It works as a fine companion to his book, Enjoying Photography. The attention to detail and level of graphic design employed in this publication is simply excellent.
So what might be the point of releasing something like this? I mean, really, who cares about some guy’s visual diary? What gives him the right or even the necessity to make something like this? How is a photo of empty contact lens packs on a sink a picture worth publishing? Why not just load a bunch of worthless photos up onto a tumblr or blog?
Exactly!
Those to me are perfect reasons to do something like this. Honma, and a lot of other people, are bringing it back to print, to paper, to a book. I do find Soth’s bit in a picture above about enjoying the photographic freedom of the internet well worded and relevant. But I’d wager that the desire to create something physical is something we all have within us. A draw of online image sharing is naturally the simple fact that anyone with the right tools can see what we did, from anywhere in the world. Do you think Tokyo Camera Stylewould be interesting as a bunch of pictures stuck in an album and kept on a shelf in my apartment? Hell no. The Nippon Camera thing aside, I think TCS is at its best as an online experience.
But I do have small photo albums which I keep on shelves in my apartment. The pictures have never been scanned and these just get shared with friends. A recent addition to this set is a small cloth bound sad little album that I made of a good friend’s funeral last December. I can’t help but feel I would be cheapening that experience and our friendship by uploading those images online for everyone to see. Likewise I have been keeping photographic scrapbooks/journals (on #25 now) since 1999- for now these too are going to remain private.
But maybe there is some stuff that is worth putting out there. And since the person doing the putting out is in control, why not include soft pictures of a kitten in a bag, or a crusty pile of empty contact lens packs? At this point there is no need to fall back on whatever the rules were that governed the worthiness of which images were to be sent to the printing press. What the internet has done wonderfully is to bring slices of the world into our homes and faces, filtered through two dimensional and electronic means. Since we photographers are already comfortable with the second dimension, that part isn’t new or a challenge. The challenge for many photographers was/is to find ways to widen the audience for their images as much as possible. With the internet, this is possible in ways that those old Life photo jockeys couldn’t have imagined. What I sense now among at least the photographers I know and talk with, is that the dry sense the monitor providers is now perhaps a barrier instead of an almighty window. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a luddite call to chuck ipads out the window or question the importance of being able to check the magnitude of the latest earthquake aftershock off the coast of Chiba. I am strictly talking about difference in experiencing a photograph on a monitor or on paper in your hands. I think that Honma is quite aware that much of the charm of turning back on that potential for a large audience desire lies in the physical reality that there are only so many people who can pick this book up in their hands and experience it as an object. (Yes, on the internet I share this.)
A while back I said I was going to share more Japanese photo publications and zines and then I didn’t. In the meantime I have collected a stack of quirky photobooks with small press runs that really are worth sharing on this blog. I’ve also realized the importance of creation in light of so much destruction, but I do not want to suggest a connection between my blogging of paper products as something worthwhile to counter the horrors that the people of Tohoku have had to endure. That’s what the Red Cross is for.