Archive for June, 2006
June 30, 2006 at 3:28 · Filed under Exhibition, Photographer, Publication
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”.
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.
“Could you take a photograph of a building that is scheduled to be torn down?”
The request sounds like: “Could you take the portrait of a person who will die soon?”
Just as a portrait of a deceased person is needed for people to reminisce about that person, an architectural photograph is needed to reminisce about a building which no longer exists.
Another sense of nostalgia always comes to mind for the photographer who takes such a photograph; the nostalgia for the original role of photography,
“to serve to the memory of human beings,” requested simply of him. He does not know why, but it makes him feel nostalgia for this.
“Record” is always based on the premise of a vision that comes from the future.
The photograph is like a boat carried to the future endlessly even if the vision one sees comes from the past. I think as this way; “Record” belongs to the future, not to the past. Otherwise I cannot understand the reason why I always
have a feeling of hope on my fingertip when I release the shutter.
[Quote: Naoya Hatakeyama]
[Addendum:]
Currently Naoya Hatakeyama has another exhibition in Tokyo area:
“Two Mountains” together with the Swiss photographer Balthasar Burkhard. This is a commissioned work too about Swiss and Japanese mountains exhibited at the new constructed private Tokyo Art Museum (architecture by Tadao Ando).
all photos: Naoya Hatakeyama
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Recommended books:
Naoya Hatakeyama: Zeche Westfalen I/ II Ahlen
Naoya Hatakeyama: Two Mountains
June 25, 2006 at 21:49 · Filed under Photographer, Publication
Last autumn I promised to introduce some photo books I bought in Tokyo. Over the next weeks I plan to introduce some my favorite acquisitions from this trip - promised! ;-)
Does anybody know Hiroo (Hiroh) Kikai?
I had never heard of him until I saw his book “Persona” last year. “Persona” contains portraits of people from Asakusa/ Tokyo, whom Hiroo Kikai photographed for three decades since 1973.
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.**
That Asakusa still isn’t a faceless neighborhood inhabited mostly by salary men and their families show the monochrome photographs by Kikai. His `personae´ are all invididual characters, but not of the flashy, fashion addict type. They are mostly ordinary people with a touch out of ordinary, who emanate the aura of something special, of living an unadjusted life in a society which asks for maximum conformity.
Apparently, when living in a congested city of over ten million people, individuals develop a yearning to discover their own identity. Mr. Kikai’s camera captures these people of Tokyo with great accuracy. He accomplishes this feat through quiet contemplation of his subjects, an inimitable style born from his understanding of human nature. Perhaps this explains why Hiroo Kikai´s subjects are able to liberate themselves from constrains such as vanity and appearance when they stand in front of the camera.
[Quote: Andrzej Wajda]
In fact Kikai is one of the photographers - like August Sander or Diane Arbus for example - who find an amazingly balance between their own strong visual idea and letting their subjects have enough space to exhibit a facet of their personality.
My work as a photographer began from a chance encounter with the works of Diane Arbus. The first collection of her work that I purchased gave me a jolt. On each page, strangers spoke to me of the unfathomable depths of life.
[Quote: Hiroo Kikai]
“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 strikingly 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, but a new version of “Persona” was published last autumn.
** A very vivid description of the bustling live of Askakusa in the 1920th can be found in in Kawabata’s novel “The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa”.
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Recommended books:
Hiroo Kikai: Persona
Yasunari Kawabata: The Scarlet Gang Of Asakusa
June 18, 2006 at 3:09 · Filed under Photographer, Publication
Jean Snow pointed me in his blog to the recent publication by Naoki Honjo “Small Planet” (Tokyo 2006).
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]
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.
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
June 16, 2006 at 22:28 · Filed under Photographer, Publication
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.
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.
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]
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]
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
June 16, 2006 at 20:48 · Filed under Unspecific
Hello,
I know I neglected my blog for a long time. But now I am back again with a new web address and a new layout (it still needs some tweaking, but I think it’s almost perfect for the beginning). My previous blog at Blogger.com was good for the start, but the WordPress blog software is far superior to Blogger and even for me as a complete noob concerning web design it did not take long too long to set the new blog up (okay, I went to bed at sunrise last night).
I hope you will like Japan-Photo.info :-)
Ferdinand
