The Historical Book Award and The Contemporary Book Awards
The Historical Book Award goes to the best thematic book or monograph published between 1 June 2009 and 31 May 2010. The Contemporary Book Award goes to the best photography book published between 1 June 2009 and 31 May 2010. The Book Awards winners are chosen by the five Discovery Award nominators, Rencontres d’Arles president Jean-Noël Jeanneney, and LUMA Foundation founder Maja Hoffmann.

Yutaka Takanashi, Photography 1965 – 74
Editors: Roland Angst, Ferdinand Brueggemann, Priska Pasquer
Essays by Ferdinand Brueggmann and Hitoshi Suzuki
Published by Only Photography, Berlin
116 pages, 41 images, Triplex, hardcover, ed. 500
Text: German, English, Japanese
ISBN 978-3-9812537-2-6

As a member of the small Provoke collective, Takanashi was able to find a new theoretical approach and its visual language. The influence of this group and of the magazine on the photographic scene in Japan was immense. In the following years the Provoke photographers produced major works in terms of photographic history, whereby Yutaka Takanashi defined the high point as well as the end of this era with the publication of his first book, Toshi-e (Towards the City), in 1974.

This two-part book set new standards in terms of design, materials and craftsmanship. In a compartment behind the larger volume, Toshi-e, one finds an earlier series in the smaller format volume, Tôkyô-jin; it seems to have provided the basis for the larger book.

Our book, Yutaka Takanashi, Photography 1965–74, presents a representative cross-section of these two pioneering photographic series in 35 full-page illustrations and 6 large format plates. An extensive biography, list of exhibitions and a bibliography round off our newest publication.

The book is available at Only Photography and at Schaden.com. It was published on occasion of the Yutaka Takanashi exhibition at Galerie Priska Pasquer, Cologne.
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The Historical Book Award went to a book on Japanese photography as well:
“Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s” by Ryuichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian, Aperture 2009.

And a third  book on Japanese photography was honorably mentioned at the prize giving ceremony in Arles:
“Yutaka Takanashi: Toshi-e (Towards the City)“. Books on Books #6, published by Jeffrey Ladd, Errata Editions 2010.

The young women photographer  (born 1985) was awarded the Kimura Ihei Commemorative Photography Award for her two photo books “MID” and “GROUND” and a solo exhibition at TARO NASU gallery.

This award is given to new photographers who achieve outstanding results in creating photos and presentation activities. Because it is the most prestigious award of its kind, it is also referred to as the Akutagawa Award of the photography world. Previous recipients include Mika Ninagawa, Rinko Kawauchi, Taiji Matsue, Masafumi Sanai, Tomoko Sawada, Ryûdai Takano and Lieko Shiga.

Kotaro Iizawa writes about Cozue Takagi’s series “MID”:

The “MID” series is in front of us now. At one time it was called “Mother”. So this group of images which at the first glance seems multifarious, randomly picked and scattered out may, for Cozue, be the “mother”. (…) We should be able to put the complex structure of Cozue´s photographic work into focus.
But this effort quickly gets caught in a labyrinth and arrives at a dead end. The information we’re given is too fragmented. (…)
What is “MID”? It means the midway of something. The midway of what? Cozue immediately replies: “The midway between life and death.”
[Quote: Kotaro Iizawa, in "MID"]

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While “MID” consists of straight photography “GROUND” contains digitally created photo collages (some of them measuring around 3m).

The collages were created by layering images using a computer for to make visible the intricate illusion that weaves reality and fiction together.
[Quote: Tokyo Art Beat]

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Both books “GROUND” and “MID” were published 2009 by Akaaka Art Publishing.

Part II    (Part I of the interview here)

Ferdinand Brueggemann:
Speaking of institutions and the galleries I would like to ask about Rinko Kawauchi. She is highly successful in the West, with many solo shows in Europe, in the USA and even in Latin America, but so far she has had only one solo exhibition in a Japanese museum, and that was in the countryside a long way out of Tokyo. Do you have an explanation for this gap?

Mariko Takeuchi:
Perhaps it is not appropriate to judge an artist’s success only by his or her solo exhibitions in Japanese museums. Nevertheless it is still not easy for Japanese photographers to be recognized and promoted by Japanese museums. For example, Yutaka Takanashi, who played a leading from around Provoke Era at the end of the 1960s will have his first museum-scale solo exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo next January. As you know, even though there are several museums which collect and exhibit photographs, it is still not easy for a photographer to get a solo show in a museum. In spite of that, Rinko Kawauchi, for example, is amazingly successful in Japan. Her photobooks are very popular. The common way to success for photographers in Japan is to first publish a photobook.

Talking about photobooks I would like to come back to the John Szarkowski’s show in 1974. In the exhibiton catalogue Shoji Yamagishi, the Japanese co-curator, made the very important observation that the photobook is the most important tool for Japanese photographers to communicate their work. He gave three reasons for this: the aesthetics of the book, the shortage of exhibition venues and a non-existing art market: “Japanese photographers have only a limited opportunity to present their original prints to the public and no opportunity to sell their pictures to public or private collections. [...] Japanese photographers usually complete a project in book form…”

Is Yamagishi’s observation that the photobook is the most important medium for a photographer still valid?

Yes! Even though the situation has changed with more galleries and museums which encourage young photographers to exhibit their works and to become more aware of how to install their works on the wall, it is still clear that the photobook is the most important medium for most Japanese photographers. Many photographers consider the book as being the final format of their projects.

There are several reasons for this. The main reason is that books and magazines have been central to the photography scene for decades while the market was and is still very weak in Japan. If photographers wanted to show their works, they had no other means than to publish them in the magazines or in book form. In this situation, many Japanese photographers naturally became keen on the reproductive nature of photography. The downside of the precedence of photobooks is that most artists have to publish them at their own expense. And also, historically speaking, in the Edo Era (1603 to 1868) woodblock prints of Ukiyo-e were highly popular with the public. This might not be related directly to photobooks, but there seems to be some historical parallel with the popularity of photobooks in Japan.

As you said, the number of galleries has increased and a quick look at the art guide Tokyo Art Beat confirms this; it lists 101 photography exhibitions open today, that’s a remarkable number. But why do galleries in Japan still only of minor importance in the career of a Japanese photographer?

It is true, that it’s not normal for most Japanese photographers to start their career with gallery exhibitions. There are many talented photographers who are not represented by a gallery in Japan. The main reason is that Japan has its own peculiar gallery system. There are many galleries, but most of them are rental galleries; they are rented by artists to show their works and do not work continuously with artists. There are company-managed galleries such as Nikon Salon or Canon Salon which are non-commercial galleries open to both professional and amateur photographers, and while the number of commercial galleries which operate similar to European or American galleries is increasing they are still not yet dominant in Japan.

You could please name some very recent photography books you find interesting?
Masafumi Sanai recently started his own label Taisho (Contrast) and he publishes what he really wants to show in his own way. This summer he published Trouble In Mind. Other must-see books are for example Canary by Lieko Shiga and I am by Atsushi Okada.

As a guest curator for the Paris Photo fair, I find it very important to have introduced these and other photographers outside Japan. Since many of the photographers are not represented by galleries and since the book is their main medium, we invited five Japanese publishers for the central exhibition at Paris Photo to present their programme.

How does a young unknown photographer find a book publisher?

Many photographers send their photographs to magazines. They show their works to small publishers, such as Sokyusha or Akaaka, though it isn’t easy to find a publisher nor for the publishers to finance a book .

Do awards like Hitotsuboten (“3.3 sqm”, the size of the space given to each photographer at the award exhibition) and New Cosmos of Photography promote the career of a Japanese photographer?

Yes, since the early 90s these two awards for young photographers have become important in photography scene in Japan. On the basis of the social, cultural, technical and institutional background as we have talked discussed, young people find these awards exciting and many young people enter the competitions. Winning an award does not guarantee success in a country with such a small art market. Actually, I have seen many young photographers who have won the prize who did not succeed afterwards, but there have been some very successful photographers who achieved recognition through these awards such as Yuki Onodera, Rika Noguchi and Tomoko Sawada.

These awards are important for another reason. Since the early 1990s they have provided a space where the young generation can see works by their peers and where they can communicate with each other. Hitotsuboten for example throws the final selection meeting open to the public, with artists’ presentations and discussion among judges in front of the audience. New Cosmos of Photography has award exhibitions and offers lectures. This did not happen before these awards were established.

Does this communication space apply to the photobook as well? And are the photobooks only of interest for the photography scene insiders, like in Germany, where you will find photobooks only in specialized book stores?

Generally speaking, photobooks as artist’s books are not available in many bookstores, other than a few popular ones like Umeme by Kayo Ume.

Could you please explain about Kayo Ume’s book Umeme?

The book by Kayo Ume describes witty or slightly perfidious moments that you come across by chance in ordinary life. Over 100.000 copies have been sold. To understand why Kayo Ume’s book is so amazingly popular, we have to be aware of the amateur photo culture in Japan. We have such a huge number of older and younger amateur photographers. Ume’s humorous and slightly ironic work embodies the most popular aspect of Japan’s photo culture in her visual style and her motifs. For the audience Umeme is not seen as art, but rather as something to share and to enjoy. There’s a certain amateurish aspect to Japanese photo culture.

We have talked about how young photographers became attracted to the medium. How important is in this context the role of art academies and photo colleges?

There are no specific schools or colleges which are recognized in Japan as offering an outstanding education. On the contrary, many photography schools and colleges have recently been facing a fall in student numbers. One reason is the drop in population due to the low birth rate. But in fact there are more and more young people who are interested in photography. The recent technical developments and the popularity of the medium encourage increasing numbers of young people to work with photography more freely than ever. Some who want to become photographers do not deem it necessary to attend a photography college or a university. Others cannot find an appropriate school which meets their demands. Often the schools focus too much on teaching the technical side of photography and do not pay much attention to the intellectual and cultural potential of the photographic medium. In my opinion it is important for the future of Japanese photography that photography education be reformed. This is the reason why I am currently spending six months as a research fellow in New York. I am researching photography education in the USA with a view to developing a new approach to teaching photography in Japan; an approach which includes the appreciative aspect in photography education: how to look at and discuss photographs on different levels. The Japanese are said to be not very good at debate in general, but I think we should make more efforts to develop dialogue and discussion around photography at the photography colleges and universities in Japan. I’m sure it’s important for photographers, curators and everyone living in this visual society.

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Born in 1972, Tokyo, Mariko Takeuchi has curated exhibitions including “Charles Fréger: Rikishi (Art Gallery of Yokohama Museum; A.R.T. Tokyo, 2005). She has written numerous texts for catalogues and photography books including “Ryudai Takano: 1936-1996” (Sokyu-sha, 2006) and “Ryuichiro Suzuki: Odyssey” (Heibonsha, 2007). She is a regular contributor and photography critic for various magazines such as Asahi Camera and Studio Voice. She is also in charge of the Japanese photography section and writing for “The Oxford Companion to Photograph” (Oxford Univ. Press, 2005). She is Associate Professor at the Kyoto University of Art and Design.

Some time ago I became director of Galerie Priska Pasquer, Cologne, were I am responsible for the program of Japanese photography. Already in the years before we had some solo shows with Japanese artists at the gallery: Iwao Yamawaki (Modern photography), Eikoh Hosoe (his first solo show in Germany), Daido Moriyama and Rinko Kawauchi. In the beginning we did not receive much response, but this changed very much in the recent years, because Western curators and private collectors alike became more and more aware of the history of Japanese photography and of the quality of the works coming from Japan.

In the last 12 month our gallery intensified the program in regard to Japanese photography with a series of shows: Rinko Kawauchi “Utatane” produced by our partner Antoine de Vilmorin in Paris; the group show ‘Review / Preview: Japanese photographs by Osamu Shiihara, Shomei Tomatsu, Daido Moriyama, Nobuyoshi Araki, Issei Suda, Asako Narahashi, Rinko Kawauchi and Mika Ninagawa; a solo show with Asako Narahashi’s great series “half awake and half asleep in the water”; the first solo show since many years in the West of Issei Suda’s in my opinion still undervalued photographs and lastly the overwhelmingly colorful works by Mika Ninagawa.

In general 2008 was truly a marvelous year for Japanese photography, with exhibitions like Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan at the International Center of Photography (ICP)1, with artists like Hiroh Kikai, – a year which finally culminated in the fair Paris Paris 2008 with Japan as guest of honor. Never before so many Japanese photo galleries exhibited outside their home country and I presume that the number of works exhibited at the fair set a new record outside Japan as well.

We had an exciting time at the Paris Photo fair with the presentation of our Japanese program and during the fair I had the pleasure to participate in a conference on Japanese photography together with Etsurô Ishihara, founder of Zeit Foto Salon (Tokyo) and Anne Wilkes Tucker, curator for photography, Houston Museum of Fine Arts and author of  The History of Japanese Photography. The talk was moderated by Mariko Takeuchi, guest curator of Paris Photo, who by the way wrote a very good essay on “Photography in Japan” on occasion of the fair.

Besides doing shows and art fairs I published some articles on Japanese photography: On contemporary Japanese photography books (Experiment und Spiel. Anmerkungen zu japanischen Fotobüchern der Gegenwart) for a special edition on photo books by the German magazine Photonews (on request available at Schaden.com). I did an interview for Foam magazine (#17) with the Mariko Takeuchi on contemporary Japanese photography and last month I published an essay on Issei Suda in Photonews (issue Feb. 09, in German language). In addition to the conference at Paris Photo I did some other talks on Japanese photography, most interesting and funny was a talk for journalists with Nobuyoshi Araki at the opening of the Araki’s “Kinbaku” exhibition at Jablonka Galerie, Berlin.

Looking back at the last decade it is really amazing how differently Japanese photography is regarded today. I still remember well the situation when I went to Japan as research fellow on Modern Japanese photography. At the end of the 1990s only a fraction of today’s English sources on Japanese photography were available and the history of Japanese photography was almost completely unknown outside Japan. At that time I had to spent months in museum archives and libraries for to learn the basics about the Japanese photography of the 1920s and early 1930s. And as I wrote before this was the time when I came in contact with more recent Japanese photography. But during my lengthy stay in Japan and even 5-6 years later when I started this blog I did not anticipate at all that I would be involved in so many exhibitions on Japanese artists…

PS: I have just added a page with my writings and lectures on Japanese photography.

I know I wrote a few times about Rinko Kawauchi – with whom I had a very pleasant dinner in Tokyo a few weeks ago -, but since this is the first time that her famous series “Utatane” from 2001 is exhibited in a solo show outside Japan, I thought it is worth to mention it.

Rinko Kawauchi “Uatane”, at Art77, presented by Antoine de Vilmorin (until May 3).

As far as I know there has not been much written about the series and book “Utatane” (in contrary to “Aila”)  and which has lead to Rinko’s national and international breakthrough. For “Utatane” (and for her book “Hanabi” [Fireworks]) the artist received the prestigious Kimura Ihei Award and the book was included in the “The Photobook: A History. Vol. 2″ by Parr and Badger. Badger wrote a very interesting comment on Rinko and “Utatane” in the photobook anthology:

Just when it seems that everything has been photographed, in every possible way, along comes a photographer, whose work is so original that the medium is renewed. Such a photographer is Rinko Kawauchi, who makes simple, lyrical pictures, so fresh and unusual that they are difficult to describe or classify.

Her images documentary everyday things, yet could not be described as documentary. They are generally light in tone, yet somehow dark in mood. They are almost hallucinatory, yet seem to capture something fundamental about the psychological mood of modern life.

To be sure, Utatane, the title of her book, means ‘siesta’, which brings in the notion of a dreamlike state, and each image in the book could plausibly be considered as a still from a movie about a dream. The presence of a number of animals – insects, seagulls, koi carp, rabbits – might suggest some kind of Freudian interpretation.

If Kawauchi in conjuring up a dreamlike state, she is also creating a powerful metaphor for life in the contemporary metropolis, which, at least economically, is comfortable for most people, on the surface. The dream evoked in Uatatane is not nightmarish. Nothing much untoward happens, yet there is enough off-kilter to awaken us from our nap feeling vaguely confused, depressed and anxious.
[Quotes: Gerry Badger]

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Recommended books:
Rinko Kawauchi: Utatane (2001)
Martin Parr, Gerry Badger: The Photobook: A History. Vol. II