Category / Photographer

by Ferdinand Brueggemann

Naoki Honjo “Small Planet”

Jean Snow pointed me in his blog to the recent publication by Naoki Honjo “Small Planet” (Tokyo 2006).

Naoki Honjo: Small planet (book cover)

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]

Naoki Honjo: Small Planet

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.

Naoki Honjo: Small Planet

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…

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Recommended books:
Naoki Honjo: Small Planet
Marc Raeder: Scanscape

by Ferdinand Brueggemann

Asako Narahashi “half awake and half asleep in the water”

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.

Asako Narahashi: Bentenjima, from the series: ‘half awake and half asleep in the water’, 2001

 

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.

Asako Narahashi: Zeze, from the series: ‘half awake and half asleep in the water’, 2005

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]

Momochi, from the series: ‘half awake and half asleep in the water’, 2003

 

Not in the water, but the water´s edge. The resulting photographs were of a sort that I couldn’t tell wether they were not wanting to go over to the other side (= other world), but standing on this side (= this world) and peeping over a the other side, or looking over at this side from the other side.
[Quote: Asako Narahashi]

 

Asako Narahashi: Ueno, from the series: ‘half awake and half asleep in the water’, 2003

By the way, besides being published in group exhibition catalogues some images from “half awake and half asleep in the water” are included in Narahashi´s book “Funiculi Funicula. Photographs 1998-2003”, Tokyo 2003, and the series is very well printed in the exhibition catalogue “Imagine”, Tama City Cultural Center 2003.

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Recommended books:
Asako Narahashi: Funiculi Funicula. Photographs 1998-2003
Michiko Kasahara: Kiss in the Dark: Contemporary Japanese Photography

by Ferdinand Brueggemann

Moriyama – Shinjuku – Araki

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.

Moriyama - Shinjuku - Araki (exhibiton poster)

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.
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by Ferdinand Brueggemann

Miyako Ishiuchi at Venice Biennale and at Third Gallery Aya, Osaka

Miyako Ishiuchi: Mother, 2002

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.
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by Ferdinand Brueggemann

Kikuji Kawada “Car Maniac”

Kikuji Kawada: Insect on Window, Tokyo 1997 - from: Car Maniac

The current exhibition of Kikuji Kawada’s works from the 1950s/60s I just wrote about reminded me of his more recent works I hold in high esteem: the series “Car Maniac”. I have seen these works for the first time at the Internationale Phototage Herten (Germany) in 1999.
The series was also included in Kawada’s solo exhibition “Theatrum Mundi” at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in 2003 and Kawada published it in his extremely beautiful (and today rare book) “The Globe Theater” in 1998.

Kikuji Kawada: The Flow of Cars, Paris 1997 - from: Car Maniac

I found the images from “Car Maniac” in the web at Nikon Web Gallery with an explanation by the artist:
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by Ferdinand Brueggemann

Tomoko Sawada at MAK, Vienna

Tomoko Sawada - from: Costume

Tomoko Sawada “Desire to Mimic”, at MAK, Vienna, until Feb. 6, 2005

This year was very successful for Tomoko Sawada. She just had her second exhibition at Zabriskie Gallery, New York, she received the prestigious Kimura Ihee Award in Tokyo and the International Center of Photography Infinity Award in the category of Young Photographer. Now she has her first solo show at a museum.
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by Ferdinand Brueggemann

Yurie Nagashima at Scai the Bathhouse and Nadiff, Tokyo

Yurie Nagashima - from: Candy Horror

Over ten years ago when Yurie Nagashima won at age 20 the Urban Art#2 Award (1993) she became almost overnight the first “girly photographer” (onna no ko shashinka) in Japan. She and Hiromix who entered the scene in 1995 became role models for many young Japanese women and inspired them to become a photographer too. Since then the number of female photographers in photography schools increased considerably to around 50%. Both, Yurie Nagashima and Hiromix, talked about themselves and their lives through their pictures, but IMHO Nagashima was and is much more personal in her work not only depicting her friends but also the daily life of her family (including nude photographs of her father and mother).
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by Ferdinand Brueggemann

New on my book table: Ichiro Kikuchi

Ichiro Kikuchi: Memory Holes, Tokyo 2002 (book cover)Ichiro Kikuchi: Memory Holes, Tokyo 2002

Ichiro Kikuchi: Memory Holes, Tokyo 2002

Ichiro Kikuchi: Memory Holes, Tokyo 2002

 

First the design of the book attracted me with it’s hardcover made from pasteboard and a cut out on the cover. The book contains photographs from all over Japan (Hokkaido to Okinawa) taken 1992-2002. Ichiro Kikuchi’s photography is a kind of grainy colour photography with high contrasts and dark shadows which concentrates on unusual views of ordinary, common land/cityscapes.

Ichiro Kikuchi: Memory Holes, Tokyo 2002

Ichiro Kikuchi: Memory Holes, Tokyo 2002

 

I have never heard of the photographer and a short search with google did not help much.
Born 1973, he graduated in photography at the Osaka University of Arts and participated in the “People in the street” project (ningen no machi project). 1995 participation at “New Photographers on stage”, Konica Plaza gallery, Tokyo. 1997 exhibition “Personal Space” at Nikon Salon, Tokyo and Osaka. He is listed in the Database of the Guardian Garden Gallery a leading institution to promote young photographers in Japan.

Ichiro Kikuchi: Memory Holes, Tokyo 2002

Ichiro Kikuchi: Memory Holes, Tokyo 2002

 

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Recommended Book:
Ichiro Kikuchi: Memory Holes. Tokyo 2002