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.
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.
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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Anyway the information is not completely outdated since there is an accompanying book published, available at Amazon.jp.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.
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)
