The blog DLK COLLECTION just posted an overview of the results of the ‘Photobook’ auction at Christie’s, South Kensington, May 21:

The results of the recent Photobooks sale at Christie’s in London were considerably stronger than the other photography-related book sales this season. While I don’t have access to historical photobook auction records, according to Christie’s, the inscribed Frank [The Americans] likely set a record for a regularly-published (not special or limited edition) postwar book, fetching a hefty £43250 ($62,194). Photobooks by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Richard Prince also soared to big prices. Overall, the buy-in rate was solid (just under 28%) and the total sale proceeds covered the total High estimate.
[Quote: DLK COLLECTION]

This prompted me to have a closer look at the results of the Japanese photobooks included in the auction. Kikuji Kawada’s “The Map” became the 5th most expensive book and Araki’s extremely rare edition of  “ABCD” (20 copies) made the 9th place on the list, closely followed by the two ‘Workshop’ portfolios (place 11 and 12) and Yutaka Takanashi’s “Toshi-e” (no. 14).

Here are the results for Japanese photobooks:

KIKUJI KAWADA
Chizu — The Map. Designed by Kohei Sugiura. Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppan-sha, 1965.
$17,975
.

NOBUYOSHI ARAKI
ABCD. New York: PPP Editions, 2003.
$11,684
.

WORKSHOP
Portfolio One. Tokyo: Eikoh Hosoe Portfolio, 1975.
$10,785
.

WORKSHOP
Shashinshu Dai 1 [2] go — Photo-album Volume 1 [and 2]. Tokyo: Workshop, July and October 1974. [With:] Moriyama Daido to 16 Nin no Otokotachi — Daido Moriyama and 16 Men. Workshop, 1976.
$9,886
.

YUTAKA TAKANASHI
Toshi-e — Towards the City. Tokyo: for the author, 1974.
$7,550
(More on Yutaka Takanashi in my next blog post.)
.

SHOMEI TOMATSU
11:02 Nagasaki. Tokyo: Shashindojinsha, 1966.
$7,190
.

MASAHISA FUKASE
Karasu — Ravens. Tokyo: Sokyusha, 1986.
$5,393
(Fukase’s book “Ravens” was recently selected as the best photobook of the last 25 years. See my previous blog post.)
.

SHIGENE KANAMARU (ed.)
Shinko shashin no tsukurikata — The Making of Modern Photography. Tokyo: Genkosha, 1932.
$5,393

The translation of the book title is wrong. The correct translation is
“How to make New Photography“.

Shinkô Shashin is a central term of the Modern photography in Japan. The term Shinkô Shashin (= New Photography) was used the first time in Japan in 1926 for the newly founded photography club “New Photography Society” (Shinkô Shashinkai), but at that time it did not have clear definition. 

Shinkô Shashin got its real meaning in 1930 when Sen’ichi Kimura - publisher of the “Phototimes”, one of the leading photography magazines at that time – founded the photography club “New Photography Research Society” (Shinkô Shashin Kenkyukai). Kimura and his colleagues used the term Shinkô Shashin as a direct translation of the German term New Photography (Neue Fotografie). Since then the term has been associated with the Japanese Avant-garde photography which was highly influenced by photography from Germany, especially by Laszlo Moholy Nagy and Albert Renger-Patzsch.
.

DAIDO MORIYAMA
Shashin yo Sayonara — Bye Bye Photography. Tokyo: Shashin Hyoron-sha, 1972.
$4,314
.

KENJI KANESAKA (editor)
Underground Generation. Tokyo: Novel Shobo, 1968.
$3,595
.

SHOMEI TOMATSU
OO! Shinjuku. Tokyo: Shaken, 1969.
$2,876
.

KISHIN SHINOYAMA
Hareta Hi — A Fine Day. Tokyo: Heibon-sha, 1975.
$1,798
.

SHOMEI TOMATSU
Nihon — Japan. Tokyo: Shaken, 1967.
$1,618
.

SHOMEI TOMATSU
Sengoha — Après Guerre. Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, 1971.
$1,168
.

HIROSHI HAMAYA
Yukiguni — Snow Land. Tokyo: Mainichi Newspapers, 1956.
$899
.

FUMIAKI FUKUDA
Where is ’69 Shinjuku Kaminori Zoku. Tokyo: Daikan Shokan, 1980.
$809
.

SHIGEO GOCHO
Hibi — Day to Day. With Masao Sekiguchi. Tokyo: for the authors, 1971.
$719

Recently I had the pleasure to initiate the first solo exhibition of Shomei Tomatsu in Germany, which is currently on show at Galerie Priska Pasquer.

Shomei Tomatsu at Galerie Priska Pasquer Cologne
Exhibition: March 13 – April 17, 2010

Tomatsu’s photographs are examining, in an absolutely personal and unique vision, the changes in the Japanese society since the 1950s. They provide a candid look at the aftereffects of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the influence of American military and popular culture, and the impact of the post-1960s economic boom in Japan. The exhibition will show a selection of works from late 1950s to the early 1970s.

A self-taught photographer, Shomei Tomatsu went freelance in 1956. In the years that followed, he took part in the pioneering “Eyes of Ten” exhibitions and in 1959 he was one of the co-founders of photographic agency VIVO, which is seen as the ‘epicentre’ of Japanese post-war photography. Other VIVO members included Ikko Narahara and Eikoh Hosoe, both of whom were the subject of individual exhibitions by Galerie Priska Pasquer (Eikoh Hosoe in 2002, Ikko Narahara in 2009/2010).

Shomei Tomatsu’s imagery is noted for its varied and complex nature. His style ranges from works leaning towards classical street photography, symbolically charged objects, abstract (urban) views to dynamic, expressive compositions. Depending on the subject matter, the artist constantly expanded his visual grammar,  creating pictures that walk a tightrope between the concrete and the abstract and between fascination and repulsion, while remaining timeless.

A central theme in Tomatsu’s photographic work is the effects of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here, he portrays survivors and documents objects from the Atom Bomb Museum. Among the works featured in the exhibition is “Bottle Melted and Deformed by Atomic Bomb Heat, Radiation, and Fire, Nagasaki, 1961”. This photo, which calls to mind a melted body part, is described by Leon Rubinfien as “possibly the single strongest image of his career” (Shomei Tomatsu:  Skin of a Nation, p. 27).

Another theme that has been explored by Tomatsu for more than a decade is the influence of the US occupying forces and of American culture on Japanese society. The “Chewing Gum and Chocolate” series, which was taken near the US military bases, thrives on the ambivalent experience of the Americans as overbearing victors who also brought a new culture to Japan.

However, Tomatsu’s photography deals not only with the unfamiliar but also with the familiar, such as the tension relating to rural traditions and Japan’s journey to urban modernity since the 1950s. In “Flood and Japanese” (1959), Tomatsu demonstrated the effects of floods, in “Protest” the student demonstrations in Tokyo, and in “The Pencil of the Sun” the dwindling popular culture in Okinawa, the group of islands in the south of Japan.

Brief Biography
Born in Aichi, Nagoya in 1930. 1954-56 Photographer at the Iawanami Shashin Bunko publishing house together with Nagano Shigeichi. Participated in the “Eyes of Ten” exhibitions, 1957-59. In 1959, founded photographic agency VIVO together with Kikuji Kawada, Akira Sato, Akira Tanno, Ikko Narahara and Eikoh Hosoe. In the same year, he began to take photographs at the US military bases all over Japan and also the effects of a typhoon that destroyed his mother’s house. Commissioned to work on a book about the dropping of the atom bomb on Nagasaki, together with Domon Ken. 1972-1976 lived in Okinawa. 1974 Founded the “Workshop Photography School”, Tokyo, together with Nobuyoshi Araki, Masahisa Fukase, Eikoh Hosoe, Daido Moriyama and Noriaki Yokosuka. 1995 Awarded the Purple Ribbon Medal by the Japanese government.

Selected exhibitions
1974 New Japanese Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York
1979 Japan: A Self-Portrait., International Center of Photography, New York
1984 Shomei Tomatsu: Japan 1952-1981, Forum Stadtpark, Graz
1985 Black Sun: The Eyes of Four, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford
1992 Sakura + Plastics, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
1996 Traces: 50 years of Tomatsu’s works, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo
2000 How You Look at It: Photographs of the Twentieth Century, Sprengel Museum Hannover
2004 Interface. Shomei Tomatsu, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto
2006 Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
2006 Aichi Mandala: Early Works of Tomatsu Shomei, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya
2007 Tokyo Mandala, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo

Selected publications
- Shomei Tomatsu, Ken Domon, et al: Hiroshima-Nagasaki Document. Tokyo 1961
- 11:02 Nagasaki. Tokyo 1966
- Nippon. Tokyo 1967
- Salaam Aleikum. Tokyo 1968
- Okinawa, Okinawa, Okinawa. Tokyo 1969
- Oh! Shinjuku. Tokyo 1969
- Après-Guerre. Tokyo 1971
- I Am a King. Tokyo 1972
- The Pencil of the Sun. Tokyo 1972
- Kingdom of Mud. Tokyo 1978
- Ruinous Garden. Tokyo 1987
- Sakura, Sakura, Sakura. Osaka 1990
- Tomatsu Shomei 1951-60. Tokyo 2000
- Shomei Tomatsu. Skin of the Nation. San Francisco 2004

photos © Shomei Tomatsu

It’s a little bit late, but for Tokyoites and current visitors to Tokyo not too late:  This weekend the first photography art fair is held in Japan: TOKYO PHOTO 2009. The fair is not that big – not to say quite small with 18 galleries participating, including four galleries from the USA. But some of the leading Japanese galleries have a booth like Tomio Koyama Gallery, Zeit-Photo Salon, MEM or Taro Nasu.

TOKYO PHOTO 2009 endeavors to be the foremost art fair of photography in Japan. The venue is located in the heart of international business and culture in Tokyo. To be held from September 4 to 6, Tokyo Photo 2009 will provide visitors with a unique opportunity to see and buy a wide range of photographic works from vintage prints to cutting-edge digitally enhanced images.

It would be great, if this first photography fair would be successful and would be repeated in the upcoming years. Until now we have two major photography fairs, Paris Photo in Europe and the AIPAD Photography Show New York in the USA. I think, a successful third fair in Asia would be an important tool to promote photography in Japan and nearby countries like China or Korea whose photography scenes are growing, but in which the market for photography still needs development. But of course, for this galleries from others Asian countries need to be included in future photography fairs…

THE PROVOKE ERA – Postwar Japanese Photography

I would love to see this show which opens on September 12 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The show is curated by Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography at the SFMOMA. Sandra did already the two fabulous traveling exhibitions which introduced leading Japanese photographers to the West: Daido Moriyama in 1999 and Shomei Tomatsu in 2006.

The tumultuous period following defeat in World War II proved fertile ground for a generation of Japanese photographers who responded to societal upheaval by creating a new visual language dubbed “Are, Bure, Boke” — rough, blurred, and out of focus. After the war, Japan experienced a complete overhaul of its national identity, catapulting itself from empire to democracy. Named for the magazine Provoke, which sought to break the rules of traditional photography, this exhibition traces how Japanese photographers responded to their country’s shifting social and political atmosphere. Though American audiences may be less familiar with photographers like Masahisa Fukase, Eikoh Hosoe, Daido Moriyama, and Shomei Tomatsu, SFMOMA has been actively acquiring the work of these internationally recognized artists since the 1970s. The photographs, magazines, and artist books in the show all come from the SFMOMA collection, considered one of the preeminent holdings of Japanese photography in the United States.
[Quote: SFMOMA]

PHOTOGRAPHY NOW – China, Japan, Korea

A second exhibition at the SFMOMA which will be worth a visit (also Sept. 12 – Dec. 20, 2009)

Drawn entirely from SFMOMA’s collection, Photography Now showcases pictures by 30 contemporary artists working in China, Japan, and Korea. Documentary work from China depicts a shifting culture, in particular rapid urbanization and the effects of industrialization on the countryside. Inspired by the work of Robert Frank, Luo Dan journeyed from Shanghai to Tibet, making pictures that explore how dramatic economic changes are affecting people throughout China. In Japan, Rinko Kawauchi makes lyrical pictures that focus on the poetic details of daily life, and Yasumasa Morimura examines the nature of cultural identity through appropriation. Bohnchang Koo’s minimal photographs of ordinary architectural elements recall traditional Korean landscape paintings and reflect an emerging Korean identity that references that country’s complicated history.
[Quote: SFMOMA]

John Szarkowski, a curator who almost single-handedly elevated photography’s status in the last half-century to that of a fine art, making his case in seminal writings and landmark exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, died in on Saturday in Pittsfield, Mass. He was 81.
[Quote: New York Times Obituary]

American Photography

As the New York Times points out John Szarkowski “was first to confer importance on the work of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand” and two of his books, “‘The Photographer’s Eye,’ (1964) and ‘Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures From the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art’ (1973), remain syllabus staples in art history programs.” Szarkowski also introduced the work by William Eggleston in the now legendary exhibition “William Egglestons Guide” (1976). This exhibition “was widely considered the worst of the year in photography.”

New Japanese Photography

John Szarkowski left definitely his mark in the field of American photography, but not only there. In 1974 John Szarkowski organized together with Shôji Yamagishi (editor of Camera Mainichi magazine) the exhibition “New Japanese Photography”. The exhibition introduced 15 photographers, amongst them the grand masters of Japanese photography: Ken Domon, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Shomei Tomatsu, Kikuji Kawada, Masatoshi Naitoh, Tetsuya Ichimura, Hiromi Tsuchida, Masahisa Fukase, Ikko, Eikoh Hosoe, Daido Moriyama, Ryoji Akiyama, Ken Ohara, Shigeru Tamura and Bishin Jumonji.
It was the first major exhibition about contemporary Japanese photography outside Japan ever.

Immediate Experience

Besides the excellent selection of artists and photographs the cataloge to the exhibiton with two short essays by John Szarkowski and Yôji Yamagishi laid the groundwork for the reception of Japanese photography of the 1960s and 1970s.

In his essay John Szarkowski formulated within one paragraph the foundation for all later interpretations of this epoch of Japanese photography:

The quality most central to recent Japanese photography is its concern for the description of immediate experience: most of these picture impress us not as a comment on experience, or as a reconstruction of it into something more stable and lasting, but as an apparent surrogate for experience itself, put down with a surely intentional lack of reflection.
[Quote: John Szarkowski]

And Yôji Yamagishi described a major difference of the Japanese photographic practice of that time:

Contemporary Japanese photographers have values which seems distinct from those of the photographers of the West. They are, for example, not particularly interested in the quality of the finished print. [...] Japanese photographers have only a limited opportunity to present their original prints to the public. (Nor do they have the opportunity to sell their pictures to public or private collections.) [...] Japanese photographers usually complete a project in book form, joining in series a number of photographs related by a common subject, theme, or idea. The full value or impact of such work cannot be understood if individual pictures are isolated from the series for exhibitions on the walls of a museum. To do this deprives the photographs of their intended relationship to those which preceded or followed them in the series. In addition, the photographs were originally made to be reproduced in print form, in books and magazines, and not to be displayed a part of an exhibition. It is therefore almost impossible to present a precise and objective picture of the complexities of Japanese photography in an exhibition format.
[Quote: Shôji Yamagishi]

Neither Mirror nor Window

Both essays and especially the two quoted paragraphs are asking for to be commented and evaluated from todays perspective. I just would like to note that Szarkowski and Yamagishi opened for the first time the window to another continent of photography and they established the fact that the Japanese visual artists developed a unique way of describing the world with the medium photography. A photography which was neither interested in being a mirror (“”mirrors”-pictures that mean to describe the photographer’s own sensibility”) nor a window (“”windows”-realist photos of fact, including the facts of photography seen as a system. In short, the romantic vs. the realist”),The explanation in brackets is a quote from Robert Hughe’s review on John Szarkowski’s exhibition “Mirrors and Windows” for Time Magazine (1978) but which was direct, radikal, unfiltered emotional and at times raw and dirty.

An Extraordinary Anthology of Photographic Images

This exhibition belongs definitely to John Szarkowski’s landmark exhibitions and this was already asserted by N. Y. Time’s critic Hilton Kramer:

This is, by any standard, an extraordinary anthology of photographic images. [...]
It is perhaps most extraordinary in the way it addresses itself to the rapid and radical changes that have overtaken Japanese life in this tumultuous period. Pictures such as Ryoji Akiyama’s “TV Frame Left in a Reclamation Area, Tokyo” (1970) and Hiromi Tuschida’s untitled photograph of a country picnic (1969) places us so firmly in the present that we can never again quite think of Japan in terms of the old romantic images.
Even more powerful – but powerful in an oddly esthetic rather than documentary fashion – are Shomei Tomatsu’s pictures of victims suffering various disease and physical disfigurements as the results of the atomic blasts that ended World War II. Yet rivaling these pictures in imaginative grotesquerie are the bizarre, erotic “inventions” of Eikoh Hose entitled “Killed by Roses” (1963), which bring a kind of cinematic freedom to the still medium.
[Quote: Hilton Kramer, New York Times, 1974]

Impact

For the curators (and collectors) of the 1970s and later the exhibition could have served as a guide book into at that time uncharted waters for to produce great shows and/or to start a leading collection of contemporary Japanese photography (of course it would have cost almost nothing to set up such a collection) – but nothing much happened in the two following decades. A reason could be that even though critics like Hilton Kramer found the exhibition extraordinary, he and others missed the focal point and real value of the show: while John Szarkowski and Shôji Yamauchi emphasized the distinction between Japanese and Western photography, Kramer’s final conclusion pointed in the opposite direction.

It will not do, I think, to try to discern a specific Japanese esthetic at work in this exhibition. What, if anything, dominates the eshetic spirit of the show is a sense of dialogue – sometimes harmonious, sometimes no – between Japanese and Western sensibilities.
[Quote: Hilton Kramer, New York Times, 1974]

There were some singular follow ups to “New Japanese Photography” like the exhibition “Japan: A Self-Portrait” organized by Shôji Yamagishi for the International Center of Photography in New York (1979), but just as with the William Eggleston exhibition John Szarkowski was ahead of his time.

I am planning my to publish my lecture in the future, but it will take some time since it will be a part of a larger essay on contemporary Japanese photography. Anyway, below you will find my abstract for the symposium with some images I showed during my talk (in no particular order).

Abstract: Contemporary Japanese Photography and Life Style
Ferdinand Brueggemann, photohistorian, Cologne

Japanese photography underwent some rapid changes during the 1990s. This was a result of external economic and social factors, as well as of developments within the Japanese culture and photography scene.

After the collapse of the so-called “bubble economy” (1989), a phase of recession began that was to last for over a decade. This had a far-reaching influence on the working world and the social structure of Japanese society. For example, it proved impossible to keep one of the main promises made by the Japanese labour market of lifelong employment with a company, and Japanese women began to question their traditionally allocated roles within the hierarchical, male-dominated social structures. As regards the cultural scene, it was primarily contemporary culture, thus to a large degree the photography scene, that was hit by the recession.

Changes were also taking place within the photography scene itself. Whereas the photography of the “Vivo” and “Provoke” era found itself in an area of conflict between Japanese avant-garde culture, the idea of a (frequently critical) documentation of Japanese society and cultural influences from the West, the theoretical field of reference changed in the 1990s.

A new generation of photographers were now active in a new sphere of influence poised between photography as a free artistic medium and the Japanese pop culture. A critical attitude towards society was primarily (although of course not exclusively) abandoned in favour of issues about individual identity and the description of individual lives.

A particularly incisive phenomenon for Japanese photography was the emergence of “girlie photographers”. Almost overnight, the visual medium, which had been dominated by men until the mid 1990s, was discovered by women, and photography advanced to a central medium of self-expression and means of establishing an identity for these young women.

As a result of the economic recession, the financing of free projects became increasingly problematic for photographers in the 1990s. A solution was found in the acceptance of elements of pop culture into photography for example in terms of the form and content of photo books and the medium now began to oscillate even more strongly between free artistic projects and purely commercial assignment work.

Thus photography succeeded in crossing the narrow borders of a comparatively isolated photo scene: photography books by photographers such as Kyoichi Tsuzuki went into high print runs for a primarily young public.
This change and the new developments in photography should be viewed against the background of the “father generation” (Nobuyoshi Araki et al.), using selected examples withphotographers such as Hiromix, Yurie Nagashima, Takashi Homma, Mika Ninagawa, Masafumi Sanai, Kyoichi Tsuzuki and Rinko Kawauchi.