Archive for Photographer
July 22, 2006 at 2:41 · Filed under Photographer, Publication
This book took almost a year until it reached Europe, but now it leaves a strong impression on those who have had already the opportunity to see it. Recently Markus my local photo book dealer told me that this book is doing very well and just yesterday a friend from France praised the quality of the photographs published in “A KA RI” by Tamotsu Fujii.Most will not have heard the name of the photographer before, since his work is rarely exhibited or published outside Japan. However in Japan Tamotsu Fujii is well known as a commercial photographer who did advertising photography for major companies like JR East (Japan Railway) or Suntory. Fujii won amongst others the ACC (All Japan Radio and Television Commercial Confederation) Award, Japan’s most prestigious advertising award for commercials, and in 2003 he received the Tokyo Art Directors Club (ACC) award for his Muji campain.
Tamotsu Fujii for Muji
[I have only seen the Muji poster on the web yet, but if someone has one left over at home, don't hesitate to send it to me :-).]
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July 15, 2006 at 19:25 · Filed under Photographer, Publication
Last fall the publisher of the bilingual magazine European Photography asked me to write a short review on the book Aoisora Polgasun by Aoi Sora. At that time I had never heard the name of the photographer and a short search on the web revealed that Aoi Sora is not a photographer by profession, but a Japanese idol and porn star, who made a series of self portraits on request of the publisher PowerShovelBooks, a publisher who is involved in Lomo photography.
5 Japanese popular idols are asked to take self-portrait. They are given more than 50 films and few days for it. They are asked to take the cameras with them all the time, anywhere they go and anywhere they are. As if the cameras are their boyfriends or undetestable stalkers. The girls are Nao Oikawa, Aki Hoshino, Rei Ito, Kyouko Nakashima and Sora Aoi. Their mission is to keep on popping shutters until they get sick of doing it.[...]
(Later) we asked Sora to take pictures continuously. We were desperate to see more photographs she takes. Sora was kind and curious enough to take photographs with many cameras we provided, such as BabyHolga, Babylon4, Holga and GR. Most of the photographs taken by Sora with those cameras were very interesting. However, her photographs have been completely changed since she started using POLGA. (You know, POLGA is Holga Polaroid holder for Holga.)
[Quote: Hideki Ohmori/ PowerShovelBooks]
[Polgasun short review] Photography became the preferred medium of self-expression for young woman in Japan in the mid-1990s, giving rise to a veritable boom in girl photographers (onna no ko shashinka). For them, the camera represented a tool in their search for identity in a society that still offers women little more than the traditionalroles of mother and housewife or minor employee. The first book by a girl photographer by Yurie Nagashima in 1995 consisted mainly of self-portraits in the form of nude photographs à la Nobuyoshi Araki and Nan Goldin. Since then, the term “self-nude” for this kind of photography by young women has gained common currency in Japan.
Having been given a Polga (Polaroid) camera in the context of a photography project, Aoi Sora also chose the theme of the “self-nude”. The result is the book Aoisora Polgasun (Tokyo, 2005) containing nude self-portraits in both black-and-white and color which play with intimate and lascivious poses. And therein lies the decisive difference to earlier girlphotographers, whose self-nudes were rather timid, reticent, cautious. Not so Aoi Sora, who is a celebrated Japanese nude idol and well-known porn star, accustomed to showing off her body and all its details in public. It would appear that in Polgasun she is trying to swap the wretchedness and banality of the pornography genre for intimacy and authenticity, and, as Mariko Takeuchi a Japanese critic suspects, find a way back into the mainstream of society through this more accepted form of self-presentation.
(Slightly altered version of the review published in:
European Photography, No. 78, Fall/ Winter 2005)
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Recommended book:
Aoi Sora: Polgasun
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
———
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”.
———
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…
———
Recommended books:
Naoki Honjo: Small Planet
Marc Raeder: Scanscape
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