Review: Andrew Phelps, Not Niigata

As soon as I heard the name of Andrew Phelps's latest book I was intrigued. Niigata is not the most obvious prefecture in Japan for a foreign photographer to choose as a photographic subject (Tokyo's magnetic pull certainly doesn't seem to be weakening). I was all the more interested as Niigata is an area of some importance in Japanese photographic history. One of the most important series of the postwar years, Yukiguni (Snow Land), was shot in Niigata by Hiroshi Hamaya. Hamaya was deeply interested in Japanese folklore and he chose Niigata as a photographic destination because of the many folk traditions and rituals that remained intact and revealed a 'traditional' Japanese way of life during a deeply troubled period where American occupation filled the vacuum left by years of militarism.

Phelps's Not Niigata is part of the European Eyes on Japan project that has been running every year since 1999 and which invites photographers who are working in Europe to "record for posterity images of the various prefectures of Japan on the theme of contemporary Japanese people and how they live their lives." This always seemed like an interesting photographic exercise to me, but after seeing some of the results in previous years it became clear how difficult it is. The participating photographers often only have a couple of weeks to photograph a specific region, which isn't a lot of time to try and get your bearings and come to terms with how things work in a country that is pretty radically different to Europe. One of the great strengths of Not Niigata is the fact that this difficulty is acknowledged from the outset. In his short introduction, Phelps writes:

"My way of working is a bit like making a poodle or a swan out of a shrub. Small bits of the mess are snipped away until some sort of form starts to take shape. (...) In the end if all goes well, I end up with something that may slightly resemble a poodle or a swan. But it's definitely neither a poodle or a swan and it's definitely not Niigata."

In some ways this project feels more like it is about the experience of going to a very foreign place for a very short time and trying to document ("for posterity") contemporary life, than it is about Niigata specifically. Phelps is very aware of this delicate position, as is obvious from the title of the book and even in the cover image, where a scene from Niigata is reflected with slight distortions on a pond or canal. This probably isn't the right comparison to make, but it reminded me in some ways of the film Lost in Translation, which isn't really about contemporary Japan, but about the feeling of being lost in a totally alien environment. I found that Phelps made subtle references to his position as a foreign photographer in some of these images, such as in this image of four children peering up at the strange gaijin who is taking their picture.

Phelps also successfully avoids reproducing exotic visual clichés of Japan or the Far East. In one image, he has photographed a tree that could have been silhouetted against the sky to produce an image that conforms to our vision of 'oriental' beauty. Instead Phelps has photographed the whole tree in a straightforward way and in the bottom right of the image he has left in a lamp post with two red spot lights on it.

He doesn't run away from the 'traditional' either: urban scenes that could well have been taken in Tokyo sit alongside images of two women dressed for a rice harvest festival or of an old woman sitting on a tatami mat in a traditional Japanese house. The overall picture that emerges from the picture is nuanced: we are shown old people, presumably in those rural areas that have been almost entirely abandoned by the young generation, and the young who hang out in modern cities that look like they could be anywhere in Japan. Natural beauty rubs up against modern anonymity and a certain sense of dilapidation. This Niigata does not feel like it has a bright future, but more like a place in limbo.

There are some great, understated, but astute images in this book. I found some of the portraits and the images of the more 'traditional' aspects of life in Niigata to be slightly less interesting. Overall I was left with a slight feeling of dissatisfaction, as I think Not Niigata would have been more successful if Phelps had developed more on this sense of displacement and alienation. But then I suppose that wouldn't be sticking to the script of the European Eyes on Japan project. Phelps feels like a very intelligent and thoughtful photographer and I look forward to seeing what his next project will be.

Not Niigata (Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, 36 colour plates, hardcover, limited edition of 888 copies, 2009).

Rating: Recommended

Review: From Back Home (book and exhibition)

"The land between Klarälven River and the chestnut tree at Ekallén is full of little hard memories of sad and lonely times, but there is also a streak of warm confidence that runs all the way up to Älgsjövallen, a place of fairy tales and inquisitive moose." Anders Petersen

From Back Home is a collaboration between two of Sweden's leading photographers, Anders Petersen (b. 1944) and JH Engström (b. 1969), focusing on the Värmland region, one of the most sparsely populated provinces in Sweden. The two photographers have a shared relationship with the land—they both come from this region—as well as a strong personal relationship. Engström worked as Petersen's assistant and the older man is a major influence for him.

The book

From Back Home won the Author Book Award at Arles 2009 and deservedly so. The book is split into two parts, first Petersen's images followed by Engström's. Petersen's section starts with the birth of a child suggesting that this will be a journey of intense discovery. The first few images immediately set a mystical, slightly oppressive, dark and lonely tone.

I find that Petersen's vision has become more concentrated and more potent with time. His signature high-contrast black-and-white imagery crackles with energy as we are taken from birth to death and everything in between (although love seems to have the last word). Petersen's series centres mainly on the people that cross his path, photographs of random encounters mix with those of friends, family and lovers. The series is also punctuated with little details of the surrounding landscape (an empty skatepark surrounded by forest, a tree snapped in half). Petersen has said before that he is seeking to become almost animal-like in his approach, to become a dog when he photographs, and this also comes through clearly in his raw, angular images. Animals also appear intermittently as subjects, reminding us of our mortality and of the fact that we are just another creature that will come and go.

The cover image (above), a photograph by Petersen of his mother, is one of the most haunting portraits I have come across in some time. It is full of dignity, an almost classical image, but there is a certain distance between the photographer and his subject which seems to contain all of the complexity of Petersen's relationship with 'home'.

The second half of the book is devoted to Engström's work. As opposed to Petersen, Engström hasn't adopted and honed a signature style, instead mixing lo-fi, washed out colour images, with cheap flash portraits or high-contrast black and white landscapes. He focuses mainly on life at night, from the drunken fumblings of teenagers in the forest to old couples pressed together at a dance. His photographs seem instinctive (in his introduction he writes "I've returned to something that my body and emotions recognize"), and he succeeds in creating a sense of openness and immediacy. There are also a number of photographs of collages of several polaroids or small prints: a device that seems to be a way for Engström to revisit his memories, heightening the sense of return rather than of discovery.

Unfortunately, I found that his work suffered a little when juxtaposed with Petersen's. The power and refinement of the older photographer's images slightly overpower Engström's looser and more diffuse approach. I also found some of the juxtapositions of images bizarre, with a result that seemed to add up to less than the sum of its parts.

Despite this minor reservation, this is a very successful book and the relationships between these two photographers and this remote region is undeniably powerful and complex. The printing of the book is beautiful and I found that the black-and-white work was particularly well reproduced.

From Back Home (Stockholm: Bokförlaget Max Ström, 320 pages, hardcover, 2009).

Rating: Highly recommended

The exhibition

The From Back Home project has also led to an exhibition, which is currently on show at Galerie VU in Paris. In addition to the prints from the From Back Home series, the exhibition also includes an additional series of vintage works by both photographers.

For Petersen's From Back Home work, it was interesting to see the prints hung in a floor-to-ceiling grid three prints high. The prints are not quite as good as the reproductions in the book and many of them were buckling slightly as they did not seem to have been dry-mounted (I heard Petersen pointing this out to the gallery so this may end up getting fixed), but the full wall of images works well for this work. The vintage work that is shown alongside these is Gröna Lund, a series of images taken at an amusement park in Sweden in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I found it fascinating to see the evolution in Petersen's approach. His photographs have gained a heightened intensity and visceral energy, making his earlier work seem almost restrained. His latest work feels a lot closer to Moriyama's sensibility, darker and more animalistic.

In Engström's case the second series of work on show are unseen 'vintage' (it always strikes me as strange to call something that is only a few years old 'vintage') prints from his Trying to Dance series. Although I'm not sure that the 'vintageness' is so important to his work, this is one of his strongest series in my view and an interesting precursor to From Back Home. Overall I found that this latter work came through better in the exhibition than in the book. The intentionally haphazard framing and hanging of his prints worked well for me and gave the impression of being invited into Engström's living room. I was particularly struck by a group of six highly grainy and contrasty aerial photographs of the Värmland landscape which are hung separately to the rest of the prints, a step back from those moments of intimacy that lends a darker edge to the series.

I would recommend the book over the exhibition, as I think From Back Home is probably better-suited to the book format, but the show is definitely worth a visit.

From Back Home. Anders Petersen and JH Engström. Galerie VU, 11 September - 31 October 2009.

Rating: Recommended

Update: This review has also been published on Lensculture along with a few other photobook reviews that I have been contributing to Jim's excellent webzine.

Review: First Doubt

"Postmodern interjection, intervention, and manipulation practiced by the society at large have made the image evident more as an artifice than a true recital of the outside world. That makes me happy." Allan Chasanoff

This quote gives you an idea of the thread that runs through First Doubt, Optical Confusion in Modern Photography, an exhibition held at the Yale University Arts Gallery from October 2008 until January 2009. I didn't make it to New Haven to see the show, but Joshua Chang sent me a copy of the catalogue for helping out with a Tomatsu image, and it has since become one of my favourite photo-books of 2008.

The exhibition was based on the collection donated to Yale by Chasanoff and it covers some pretty diverse territory: portraits, abstracts, landscapes, street photography, and more, from early twentieth century to the mid-1990s. The work is mainly American (many of the big names are present: Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, André Kertész, William Klein), but there is also a healthy representation of Japanese material (Naoya Hatakeyama, Ryuji Miyamoto, Tomio Sieke, Isami Shiroma, Shomei Tomatsu, and Shikanosuke Yagaki).

One of the classic images of postwar Japanese photography is on show here, Tomatsu's Beer Bottle After the Atomic Explosion. A friend of mine wrote her PhD thesis on the differences between Domon Ken and Shomei Tomatsu's photographs of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. I have to admit that I didn't make it through all 200 pages, but I completely agree with her basic premise. Domon's images of Hiroshima survivors, particularly of skin transplant operations, were so brutally direct, that they become almost impossible to look at. There is no doubt that the horror of the bombings is conveyed, but they leave me no time to digest their meaning. Tomatsu's treatment on the other hand was indirect, using symbolism to evoke the bombings and the horror of their impact. As you are drawn in to the photographs to decipher what is happening, the space that this creates gives more time for the image to settle and to resonate. Tomatsu's Beer Bottle is the perfect example of that, and for me it is infinitely more powerful and permanent than any of the most brutally direct images of the human and physical devastation of the aftermath of Hiroshima.

What ties the images in First Doubt together is Chasanoff's remarkable eye for the optically confusing image. These are not immediately 'legible' photographs, they all require some mental gymnastics before you can figure out what is going on. Despite the diversity of the material, there is a remarkable coherence here that comes from the resonance between the images. This is one of the strongest overviews I have seen of the optical experimentation in twentieth century photography, and for all the analog purists out there, a testament to how much can be done with a camera and some light.

The book design and typesetting is appropriately clean and simple, given the complexity of these images, and it is beautifully printed (in Connecticut!). The texts by Stephen Zucker and Joshua Chang are both good, and I particularly enjoyed Chasanoff's text, which gives an insight into the incredibly inquisitive and provocative mind of the man who put this collection together.

Rating: Highly recommended

First Doubt, Optical Confusion in Modern Photography (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2008, hardcover, 220 pages, 94 colour and mononchrome plates).

Review: Shigeichi Nagano, Hong Kong Reminiscence 1958

I have just started a series of reviews of recent Japanese photobooks for the great online photography magazine, lensculture. The first review is of Shigeichi Nagano's latest, Hong Kong Reminiscence 1958 (Tokyo: Sokyu-sha, 2009). You can read the review here.

Update: It seems like the guys at Japan Exposures picked up on my review. If you want to get a copy of the book (they have signed copies too), their site is a good bet.