Archives for the month of: June, 2006
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Naoya Hatakeyama at Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo

June 30, 06 //
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In 2003 the “Regionale 2004″ a project by North Rhine-Westphalia (a federal state in West Germany) commissioned Naoya Hatakeyama to document the defunct coal mine “Zeche Westfalen I/II Ahlen”.

Naoya Hatakeyama: Zeche Westfalen I/II Ahlen

From October 2003 to February 2004 Hatakeyama photographed the sites and structures that were home to tens of thousands of workers for over a century. The series, which I have not seen yet, neither on the wall nor in the book with the same name published just recently by Nazraeli Press, is on display at Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo.

It seems that Hatakeyam kind of returned with the following series to a topic with which he ‘blasted’ into the Japanese photo scene in 1995, literally.
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Hiroh Kikai “Persona”

June 25, 06 //
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Does anybody know Hiroh Kikai?

I had never heard of him until I saw his book “Persona” last year. The photobook “Persona” contains portraits of people from Asakusa/ Tokyo, whom Hiroh Kikai photographed for three decades since 1973.

“Persona”, published in 2003, is a large format book and the black and white portraits of people from Asakusa are printed in quadtone in a striking quality. The book won the 23rd Domon Ken Award and the 2004 Annual Award of the Photographic Society of Japan. Unfortunatley it is sold out and it took me some time to find it in Tokyo. A new, smaller version of the photobook was published last autumn.

Hiroh Kikai: Persona (book cover)

Today Asakusa is best known for its Senjoji Temple, a temple famous for Tokyo’s biggest festival taking place late spring every year, while in the first half of the 20th century Asakusa was the major entertainment district of Tokyo.(1)
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Notes

  1. ↑1 A very vivid description of the bustling live of Askakusa in the 1920th can be found in in Yasunari Kawabata’s novel The Scarlet Gang Of Asakusa.

Naoki Honjo “Small Planet”

June 18, 06 //
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Jean Snow pointed me in his blog to the recent publication by Naoki Honjo “Small Planet” (Tokyo 2006).

Naoki Honjo: Small planet (book cover)

Containers, urban buildings, express highways, Tokyo station, parks and people, of which Honjo’s works are consisted. Photographing cities from high places, it would be only colors rather than details of subjects that appeal to people’s eyes. It is like a magic transforming organic view of “created world” into inorganic “fictional world”, like a diorama exquisite yet cheaply made. The strange sense to feel real scenery as fabrication through downward view is the sense of distance of artist’s expression who has seen cities as alien space. A feeling of strangeness as if looking in the border between fiction and reality attracts audiences. A long-awaited debut photo book of the artist is now on sale.
[quote: Little More]

Naoki Honjo: Small Planet

In another comment Jean Snow wrote about the “tilt shift lens photography (or imitation thereof) madness” and I think that he is right with his observation that several photographers from the younger generation are using this technique.

Naoki Honjo: Small Planet

Another photographer who is using the same technique and who comes to my mind immediately is the German photographer Marc Raeder with his Scanscape series. Raeder’s work is IMHO a perfect example of this kind of land-/cityscape photography, which is constantly oscillating between the factual desription of real places and producing the impression of an miniature landscape we know from toy-train landscapes…

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Recommended books:
Naoki Honjo: Small Planet
Marc Raeder: Scanscape

Asako Narahashi “half awake and half asleep in the water”

June 16, 06 //
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Recently someone asked me about Narahashi’s series “half awake and half asleep in the water” and this reminded me that I was looking for publications with the series last year in Tokyo.

Asako Narahashi: half awake and half asleep in the water

I am very fond of this series which was photographed by Asako Narahashi at several places around Japan in 2000-2003. The curator Michiko Kasahara (today working at the MOT) was instrumental in promoting the series when she included the series “half awake and half asleep in the water” in the exhibition Kiss in the Dark: Contemporary Japanese Photography.

Asako Narahashi: half awake and half asleep in the water

The title of the series [...] is very cleverly expressed. Her works, while betraying the stereotyped images of resort areas, somehow make visible as a shared recognition the image of the sea that people embrace. Therein, an uncomfortable felling like seasickness and a pleasurable feeling of floating and entrusting yourself to the sea lodge side by side.[...] They call forth an ambivalent feeling.
[Quote: Michiko Kasahara: Kiss in the Dark. Tokyo 2001]

Asako Narahashi: half awake and half asleep in the water

Not in the water, but the water´s edge. The resulting photographs were of a sort that I couldn’t tell wether they were not wanting to go over to the other side (= other world), but standing on this side (= this world) and peeping over a the other side, or looking over at this side from the other side.
[Quote: Asako Narahashi]

Asako Narahashi: half awake and half asleep in the water

By the way besides being published in group exhibition catalogues some images from “half awake and half asleep in the water” are contained in Narahashi´s book “Funiculi Funicula. Photographs 1998-2003″, Tokyo 2003, and the series is very well printed in the exhibition catalogue “Imagine”, Tama City Cultural Center 2003.

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Recommended books:
Asako Narahashi: Funiculi Funicula. Photographs 1998-2003
Michiko Kasahara: Kiss in the Dark: Contemporary Japanese Photography

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