Review: Mao Ishikawa, Life in Philly

There is a famous saying in Japan, "The nail that sticks out is hammered down." If there is any truth to that over-used trope, Mao Ishikawa cannot have had an easy life. Born in 1953 in Okinawa, she was one of the very few female photographers of her generation who attempted to make a career in a totally male-dominated world. As Okinawa became the most important location for US military bases in Japan, Ishikawa would have grown up surrounded by US soldiers. It is through her relationship with them that her series, Life in Philly, came about.

In his essay on Ishikawa, Shomei Tomatsu writes that she "lives on the polar opposite of the illusion of objectivity." I think what Tomatsu is getting at is the personal commitment that is evident in Ishikawa's photographs. Her images aren't seeking to document some detached, objective truth about the world around her, instead they are Ishikawa's way of committing herself to the world that she has decided to photograph. This commitment led to Ishikawa becoming one of the Kin-Town women (the women that "befriend" soldiers at the US military base in Kin-Town, Okinawa) that she had decided to photograph.

Her involvement in this world eventually led Ishikawa to leave her six-year old daughter with her parents to visit Myron Carr, a US soldier that she met in Okinawa in 1975, in his hometown of Philadelphia. The book brings together a group of 132 of the pictures that Ishikawa took when staying with Carr in Philadelphia over 2 months in 1986. These pictures show the black neighbourhood where Ishikawa spent her time in Philly: corners, stoops, alleys, strip-clubs and the inside of her friends' homes. Many of Ishikawa's subjects are clearly aware of the camera; these aren't images snatched surreptitiously, they create a sense of involvement in the world that they portray.

The most extraordinary thing about these pictures is just how natural they feel. Everything seems to suggest that these are the photographs of an insider, someone who knows these neighbourhoods, and it is hard to believe that they were taken by a Japanese woman who, I presume, had never been to America before. The people that she photographed in the streets of Philly don't appear guarded, indeed they often play up to the camera and on occasion, seem to have totally forgot about the photographer's presence. Ishikawa clearly managed to attain a level of intimacy with her subjects that is difficult to reach. Only the odd image reminds us of Ishikawa's origins with an image that is reminiscent of Tomatsu or Moriyama.

The central section of the book focuses on sex, between Myron Carr's twin brother Byron and his girlfriend. These images are perhaps the most surprisingly natural of all. There is nothing glamourized, romanticized or exaggerated here: this is sex at it's most raw, funny and honest, a brief moment of pleasure that ends up with the couple zoning out in front of the TV drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette.

This large-format book presents the pictures in full-bleed that is typical of Japanese 'street photography' and which really contributes to their impact and to drawing you into the pictures. There are a few 'mosaic' spreads (like the one above) in the book mixing vertical and horizontal images, which I'm not sure about: they feel a bit like an attempt to squeeze too many pictures in. I'm also not a big fan of the fonts and the text layout, but the printing and photo-layout don't disappoint and, as this is the first time that this truly unique series has been published, this is one that is definitely worth tracking down.

Mao Ishikawa, Life in Philly, Tokyo: Gallery Out of Place, 64 pages, 25.5 x 36 cm, edition of 1,000, duotone B/W offset, staple-bound. You can order copies here.

Rating: Recommended

Review: Stefan Heyne, The Noise

Stefan Heyne's The Noise is aptly named. His images give the impression of being situated between two states, like the static between radio stations. Their subjects, a window, the keel of a boat, a doorway, a phone, are still recognizable but are reduced to the most basic forms emerging from the surrounding darkness. Heyne uses blur to create these abstractions of simple objects in such a way that there is little that is obviously 'photographic' about these images. The essays in the book refer to Gerhard Richter's photorealistic paintings and Heyne's images feel like a similar exploration of the boundary between painting and photography.

The Noise is a collection of controlled experiments at the edge of photography. These are not happy accidents or ultra-loose snapshots, but very deliberate images made which question the nature of photography and of our perception. In some ways this feels like anti-photography, rejecting the sharpness and the detail that is is often equated with photographic perfection in favour of out-of-focus hard-to-read images. Even though Heyne may be deep into uncharted territory, these images are still fundamentally about photography, even though it is a corner of it that few of us spend much time in.

Other adventurous types have wandered into this remote area before, Hiroshi Sugimoto's double-infinity series comes to mind, but Heyne's images feel more purposeful. Less 'let's see what happens' than complex visual conundrums. The images all seem to be emerging from pitch-blackness, as if they were shot from the window of a deep-sea submarine, just short glimpses of a passing object that is already drifting back into the silence and the darkness. And yet, despite all of this I found that the austerity of these images made it difficult to penetrate into this world.

I was surprised to see that Heyne's titles give information about their subjects, although at times this is so general that it reveals little. With abstract photography, I often find that my vision oscillates between focusing on the object being photographed and 'accepting' the form and texture of the abstraction. Because of this I found the titles to be distracting as they keep the images anchored to their subjects, instead of allowing them to move into a different realm.

I am not convinced that the photobook is the best space for this work. The book's three essays (were three really necessary?) refer to Heyne's prints on several occasions and I have the feeling that this work may work better the form of individual images at a large scale.

This is intriguing, adventurous and difficult work that is more of a visual and conceptual work-out than a feast.

Stefan Heyne, The Noise: The Exposure of the Uncertain, (Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, Hardback, 267 x 222 mm, 96 pp, 45 colour plates, 2008).

Rating: Worth a look

Review: Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and '70s

Ivan Vartanian and Ryuichi Kaneko's Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and '70s belongs to a new breed of photobook: the book on books. Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's two-volume history of the photobook is probably the best known of these, but there are other interesting examples. Jeff Ladd's Errata Editions is taking this one step further with the 'Books on Books' series which each focus on a single photobook in order to make rare and out-of-print books accessible to us mere mortals.

Volume I of Parr & Badger already contained a chapter on the post-war Japanese photobook with a selection of some of the major books to come out of Japan in the 60s and 70s. Japanese photobooks expands on this territory over 240 pages providing a much broader selection of photobooks, including some relatively unknown ones. Some may be surprised to see a 240-page book with such a narrow focus as this, but this period of photobook production in Japan was so rich that this could have been expanded to twelve volumes and still left a lot of room for discovery.

Much of the interest in Japanese photobooks has been focused on the magazine Provoke and publications relating to it. This is the case with Parr & Badger's selection and essay which focuses heavily on Provoke. The refreshing thing about Japanese photobooks is that it doesn't just present the best-known and respected books of the period and instead includes a selection  ranging from the unavoidable Chizu (The Map) by Kikuji Kawada to a collection of anonymous student photography.

The book contains essays by Kaneko and Vartanian. Kaneko's essay recounts his personal journey with the photobook, a unique one since few people were buying photobooks when he did (to the point where he once ordered a book only to have the publisher turn up at his door to deliver it himself because he thought it would be cheaper than sending it in the mail). Vartanian focuses on drawing out the major characteristics and functions of photobooks and their production. I think this is one of the key strengths of Japanese photobooks and one which I would have liked to see developed even further. This kind of editorial exercise often ends up becoming focused on ranking or selecting the best books, in keeping with our ever-increasing love for the list (something I have somewhat hypocritically complained about before). This book successfully avoids the pitfalls of writing a 'best of' list, choosing instead to present a rounded picture of the many facets of Japanese photobook production of this period and to show how they relate to each other in order to provide the reader with a context for understanding what defines these books and what makes them great.

Japanese photobooks admittedly has an unfair advantage over its competition: it is drawn from the collection of Ryuichi Kaneko, which includes some 20,000 publications making Martin Parr's Japanese photobook collection look like a first-grade stamp collector's in comparison. This headstart isn't wasted and Japanese photobooks certainly uncovers its fair share of undiscovered gems. The forty or so books are presented with an extended essay and a healthy number of 'interior' shots (there is a nice preview of the book available on Vartanian's website) which successfully give a feel for each book's individual characteristics. For the geeks (and amongst photobook collectors that percentage is alarmingly high) there is also a wealth of technical information on the production process for each book (photobook porn if you will): who designed it, how it was printed and who by, where it was bound and, as a bonus, the original retail price just to make you wince when you find out how much these are worth today.

If you can't afford a photobook collection (or even if you can) this is one you really shouldn't miss.

Ryuichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian, Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and '70s, (New York: Aperture, Hardcover with bellyband, 23 x 31cm, 240 pages, ca. 400 four-color and duotone images, 2009).

Rating: Highly recommended

Review: Lewis Koch, Touchless Automatic Wonder

"I like seeing things and I like words. There is something revelatory about the two together, an almost pentecostal feeling of seeing in tongues" Lewis Koch

Lewis Koch's Touchless Automatic Wonder started out as a web-based project quite a few years ago (the site is optimized for Internet Explorer 5, so it shows its age) and has recently made the leap into book form. For more than 20 years, Koch has collected fragments of found text from all over the world with his camera. As someone who obsesses about what font to use every time I open a Word document, I was naturally curious to see Koch's textual world. After a first viewing of the book, I realised that this is a much more difficult project than I had initially thought. Finding bits of quirky or visually interesting text around the world is one thing, but there is a lot more required to go beyond visual gimmickry or typology (in both senses of the word) to create a coherent photographic project that says something about the world in which these fragments of text are found.

The text does not always take center stage in Koch's photographs, and instead often acts as an element of intrigue that is there to enrich the photograph. The book jumps from India to the Deep South, from Paris to Mexico, with a big chunk of time spent in Wisconsin and there is a feeling of universality which this nomadic wandering brings to the series. More interestingly, Koch has collected text in very different forms: this is not just a succession of amusing billboards or old peeling posters, but also of dollar bills, broken bottles, TV subtitles, children's sanskrit scrawl on a blackboard, and a peeling stencil in the window of a photo studio that felt like a nod to a certain Walker Evans. Importantly I found a lot of these images to be interesting photographs without whatever textual element they might contain. There are a couple of weak points and I felt that the book would have been benefited from a slightly tighter edit, but overall Koch succeeds in weaving some very disparate elements into a world that feels like his own.

The quote at the beginning of this review is also revelatory of one strong characteristic of this work. Koch's photographs do not contain many people, or no more than a hand, a silhouette or a few shadows. Often the words that appear graffitied on a wall, carved into stone, or plastered across a billboard feel almost like direct pronouncements from some kind of God. ART, MODESTY, THE PROMISE, SEE, STOP. They don't combine into any form of coherent message, Koch is not trying to unlock the codex of life, but instead I think he succeeds in creating a real feeling of (touchless automatic) wonder.

Lewis Koch, Touchless Automatic Wonder: Found Text from the Real World, (Madison: Borderland Books, Hardback, 267 x 222 mm, 112 pp, 80 duotone illustrations, 2009).

Rating: Recommended

Review: Steven B. Smith, The Weather and a Place to Live

I wrote about Steven B Smith's series, The Weather and a Place to Live, in passing recently, but I've now got my hands on a copy of the book, which won the Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography in 2005, and have had the chance to have a more in-depth look.

The series focuses on the "American West", one of the great photographic subjects of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The "American West"... for some reason the name itself sounds epic. Tackling this subject is no small undertaking, particularly given those that have done so in the past. Smith is clearly indebted to the New Topographics, the group of landscape photographers that featured in George Eastman House's seminal 1975 exhibition (Note: the  show has been restaged this year and is currently traveling around the US before coming to Europe. I have just got a copy of the catalogue, so expect a review of this in the coming weeks).

The parallels with the New Topographics are obvious, but Smith's approach feels very much his own. He has focused in on one specific aspect of these landscapes, which is the mechanics of the steadily expanding suburban sprawl. Suburbia is being built at a furious pace and in many of these photographs it feels as if the dust has not yet had the time to settle.

Smith is not photographing a finished landscape, but one that is in rapid flux. This reminded me of Ryuji Miyamoto's concept of "temporary ruins" that he used to refer to the buildings that he photographed around Japan as they were being destroyed, only to be replaced almost instantly by a new structure of some kind (the series Architectural Apocalypse). Toshio Shibata's work on the complex infrastructure of Japan's roads occupies a similar space. His images also deal with a changing landscape, where extraordinary feats of engineering attempt to find some harmonious coexistence with nature.

The thing that I found differentiated Smith's work from these other series, and much of landscape photography in fact, is the emotional range of his images. This kind of work normally operates in a deadly serious register, oscillating between the beautiful and the ordinary, but almost always without emotion. I found that Smith's images treaded slightly different ground: they evoke fear, amazement, even sadness, but also a healthy does of humour at the ridiculousness of these manufactured landscapes.

Ridiculous is a word that kept coming to mind with these images. The ridiculousness of suburbia slowly taking over an area that is almost a universal symbol for wilderness: the American West. The ridiculousness of trying to trim and tame a landscape this wild and this epic in scale. Smith shows all of this with great subtlety and a wry sense of observation: there are few showy images here.

One thing I struggled with a bit in some of this work is the light. Smith sometimes shoots in very bright sunlight, which I imagine is typical weather for many of these locations, and so some of these images are almost bleached out, which I found distracting. Although this spoiled a couple of individual images for me, it does contribute to evoking the atmosphere of the place. And speaking of place, a special mention should go to the title of this series. As readers of eyecurious will know, titles have never been my forte, so I'm always impressed (jealous) when a title can encapsulate as much as this.

In some ways I felt that the first image of the book (below) could have been the last. It has the look and feel of a graveyard and suggests just how quickly the suburban landscapes that are being built here may fall into ruin.

The Weather and a Place to Live: Photographs of the Suburban West (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, 128 pages, 80 duotone plates).

Rating: Recommended