July 8, 2006 at 15:53 · Filed under Publication
Rinko Kawauchi, one of my absolute favorite Japanese photographers**, has published a new book this week: Rinko Nikki (Rinko Diary). It’s a small book with Japanese text and some small images. Her notes and most of the photographs are taken from the website of her publisher Foil where she is publishing a diary since 2004.
**I will write more about her in the near future. For those who don’t know her work I would higly recommend to have a look into her book “Aila”. Currently works from “Aila” are exhibited at Foto Espana festival (until July 23).
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Recommended books:
Rinko Kawauchi: Rinko Nikki (Rinko Diary)
Rinko Kawauchi: Aila
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.
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.
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]
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]
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