Archive for Exhibition
August 7, 2006 at 20:27 · Filed under Exhibition, Photographer, Publication
If you happen to be in Tokyo area I would highly recommend a side trip to the Kawaski City Museum to see the exhibition about “Yônosuke Natori and Nippon Studio (1931-1945)” (until Sept. 3).
Yônosuke Natori (1910-62) was a professional photographer, founder of “Nippon Studio” (“Nippon Kôbô” in Japanese) and publisher of the international, multilanguage magazine “Nippon” (Japan). With his studio and the magazine Yonosuke Natori introduced to Japan cutting-edge photographic techniques and design that he studied in Germany.
At the end of the 1920s beginning 1930s there were several epicentres for modern photography in Japan, in cities with Avant Garde culture like Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe and Ashiya. All photographers – mostly amateurs - were organized in groups like the “Tanpei Shashin Club” (Osaka), “Ashiya Shashin Club” (Ashiya) or “Shinkô Shashin Kenkyûkai” (New Photography Research Society), Tokyo.
Yônosuke Natori didn’t belong to any of these groups. 1928 at the age of 18 he went to Germany, where he studied arts an crafts in Munich. From 1931 he worked as a photo journalist for German newspapers and returned to Japan as a contract photographer for Ullstein Verlag, a publishing house behind several newspapers and magazines in Germany.
Following the Japanese habit not to work alone he founded the group “Nippon Kôbô” in 1933 (after an assignment in China). “Nippon Kôbô” became a core group of modern photo journalism in Japan, with photographers like Kimura Ihei (who left in 1934 to found a new studio with other photographers), Ken Domon and Masao Horino (both joined in 1934).
In 1934 Natori founded the magazine “Nippon” (Japan). The magazine was designed to promote Japanese culture to the West and was published in English, French, German and Spanish until 1944. Utilizing designs and techniques from German magazines “Nippon” was much higher in quality than other magazines of the same kind in prewar Japan, but became a very rare item soon, since most of its copies were distributed overseas.
The exhibition is the result of a joint research of curators from Fukushima, Tokyo and Kawasaki. It gives the first comprehensive overview over of the careers of Yônosuke Natori and his young photographers and designers in the 1930s-40s, with 400 magazines, printed works, photographs and documents on display.
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Recommended books:
Natori Yonosuke and Nippon Studio (1931-45) [Jap.]
Natori Yonosuke. Japanese Photographers Vol. 18 [Jap.]
Also:
NIPPON vol. 1
NIPPON vol. 2
NIPPON vol. 3
July 24, 2006 at 21:43 · Filed under Exhibition, Photographer
Daido Moriyama is currently exhibited at Foam (Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, until August 23).
Those who are a little bit into Japanese photography will know his work. Daido Moriyama is one of the most important photographers of the 20th century and IMHO his book “Farwell Photography” (1972) is more radical than any western photography book of the beginning 1970s. At the moment I am waiting for a new reprint of “Farwell Photography” and I will write more about it after it has arrived from Japan.
Moriyama is one of the most important Japanese artists in the medium today. His work has had an enormous influence on the development of modern photography. This exhibition at Foam presents prints of pictures taken in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, including photos from famous books such as ‘Farewell Photography’, ‘Light and Shadow’ and ‘Platform’. Most of the pictures shown are vintage prints.
Daido Moriyama (b. 1938, Osaka) began photographing at the age of 21. After moving to Tokyo he worked for a while with the eminent photographer Eikoh Hosoe. In 1963 he set up as a freelance photographer and began his extensive and now legendary oeuvre, which continues to expand to this day.
Moriyama generally takes his photos with a compact 35mm camera on the streets Japan’s principal cities. The images betray the speed at which they are made. Often the horizon is crooked and the photo is blurred, or the grain is visible and the contrast is turned too far. His subjects range from underexposed, obscure bars to strip clubs and dark alleys. He seems to be interested more in the suggestion of form than in a clear, well delineated figure. His visual idiom is rough and ready, and he often directs the lens at details that are out of context thereby evoking a fragmented and stifling atmosphere.
Moriyama’s visual idiom is rooted in the 1960s. Those years represent a crucial period in Japan’s modern history. This was a time when the world began to forgot about the Second World War and a postwar generation of artists arose in Japan that focused on the contradictions in Japanese society. For while Japan experienced a period of unprecedented economic growth, Japanese society was also plagued by a profound sense of guilt, shame and fear.
[Quotes: Foam]
[Addendum]
I just saw that Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, shows a short film by Daido Moriyama “shinjuku 1973, 25pm” (until Aug. 26). The film is a premiere and hopefully I will be able to see it in the near future.
This film was originally shot in 1973 with an 8mm portable VTR, by the request of Shinjuku Ward for promotion of the city. However, the completed film was rejected by Shinjuku Ward because it was a sequence of unidentified images in which one cannot identify the country in which it was shot. Thus the film was shelved for over 30 years.
The “Blurs / flows / rough images,” which are characteristic of Moriyama’s photography, obviously appear in this film. The screen sways as if in the wind, the night town a trace of light that comes and goes, the camera tracing a monochrome world which is situated somewhere between the border of figuration and abstraction.
On the occasion of screening the film, we will exhibit new photographic stills which Moriyama shot from the rediscovered film. The repetition inherent in this project serves as further evidence of Moriyama’s continuing concern with the act of copying.
[Quotes: Taka Ishii Gallery]
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
March 21, 2005 at 21:47 · Filed under Exhibition, Photographer, Publication
Today is the last day of the exhibition Moriyama • Shinjuku • Araki at Tokyo City Opera Art Gallery. I wanted to write about it much earlier and I contacted the gallery for some more images and information since the website on the exhibition is still not finished yet. Unfortunately I haven’t received an answer and now I am a little bit late.
Anyway the information is not completely outdated since there is an accompanying book published, available at Amazon.jp.
Exhibition and book concentrate on one prominent place in Japan: Shinjuku, an entertainment, business and shopping area in Tokyo with the largest red light district, Kabukicho, in Japan. Both artists photographed in this district from the 1960s until today.
I don’t know if Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki ever worked together before this exhibition, but this is surprisingly the first show focussing on the two masters and they produced for the exhibition a series in Shinjuku last August. In total the exhibition features around 900! photographs, half of them not published yet. While Araki exhibits a mix of b/w and colour photographs Moriyama shows as usual his b/w photographs. Moriyama’s colour photography has not made it into museums yet, but it was already exhibited and published for the first time outside Japan in 2004.
Araki and Moriyama met very early in their careers at the end 1960s when Araki wanted to join the “Provoke” group (Takuma Nakahira, Daido Moriyama, Yutaka Takanashi, Koji Taki, e.g.), but was rejected, because he worked as a commercial photographer at that time. In 1974 Moriyama and Araki taught together at the private photographic workshop/school founded by Shomei Tomatsu. The other teachers were Eikoh Hosoe, Akihasa Fukase and Noriaki Yokosuka. Latest at the beginning of the 1990s Araki became Japans most famous photographer, notably when his international career took off with the “Akt-Tokyo” travel exhibition produced by Camera Austria, Graz/ Austria. Even Moriyama’s photography was/is highly influencial in Japan his international career just began a few years ago when in 1999 the SFMOMA held the first Moriyama (travel) exhibition outside Japan and then in Europe with an one man show at Fondation Cartier, Paris.
Note: It is not unusual that the final break through of a Japanese artist *in Japan* happens after he became a star internationally.
January 15, 2005 at 2:06 · Filed under Exhibition, Photographer
Well-respected female photographer, Miyako Ishiuchi, who was selected by Commissioner Michiko Kasahara to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale this year, has revealed her plans for the show.
Ishiuchi will present her new “Mother’s” series, a group of photographs documenting her mother, an apparently stong-willed woman who lived through tumultuous times stretching from life in colonial Manchuria in the 1930s to wartime Japan where she worked as a truck driver. Ishiuchi’s tribute will start with a photograph of her mother, but will consist mostly of “portraits” of her clothing and possessions: chemises, combs and other personal effects. It promises to be a deeply personal, unassuming installation.
(source: Japanese Art Scene Monitor )
The series “Mother” is exhibited at Third Gallery Aya (Jp.) in Osaka from today on until February 19. Third Gallery Aya is a very good place IMHO which had a lot of interesting shows over the years.
I am really looking forward to see the “Mother” series in Venice!
Besides this new work and her fantastic first book “Yokosuka Story”, which is already included in the recently published histories of photo books, Ishiuchi’s book “1 9 4 7″ is another of my favourites. In the book Ishiuchi depicts women born in 1947, the same year she was born. But the book only shows the hands and the feets of the women and the delicate photographs tempt the viewer to read much more into the surface of the skin as actually is visible.
Miyako Ishiuchi (*1947) was born in Gunma prefecture and raised in Yokosuka. She studied textile design in the design department of Tama Art University, but left before obtaining a degree. She first became known with “Yokosuka Story” in 1977 and “Apartment” the following year, then won the Fourth Kimura Ihei Prize for photography in 1979 and the Eleventh Shashin no Kai Prize (Photography Association Prize) and Fifteenth Higashigawa Prize for Japanese Artists in 1999. Major works include “1 9 4 7″, “Hands, Legs, Flesh, Body” (photographs of the poet Ito Hiromi) in 1995, “1906 to the skin” (photographs of the Butoh Dancer Kazuo Ono) and “Chromosome XY” (close-up photographs of the male body) in 1995, and “Mothers” (documentary photographs of objects belonging to the artists mother) in 2002 and Kizuato (studies of cuts on a body) in 2004. Lives and works in Tokyo.
(source: Japan Foundation)
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