Yamashita Tsuneo's website has some great work that shows just how far you can go with simplicity.
(via mcvmcv)
Akira Rachi and Hirofumi Katayama
It seems to be Taro Nasu Gallery week on eyecurious this week. Following on from the seemingly excellent Ryuji Miyamoto show, they are now going to be showing work by Akira Rachi and Hirofumi Katayama. This show could be called 'In Between' as both of these two young photographers focus on interstitial spaces. Katayama seeks to find geometric perfection in the city's places of transit that are mostly overlooked: lobbies, entrances, stairways. Rachi's photographs deal with a different kind of space: the space between objects, as if he is trying to capture the physical forces of attraction and repulsion at play.
Review: Voyages @ MCJP
I was contacted a few months ago by the Japan Foundation in Paris to write a short text for their newsletter based on an upcoming exhibition of contemporary Japanese photography. The exhibition, put together by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, has just opened and although I'm not entirely convinced about the theme, voyages, there is some interesting and fresh material here, most of which has probably never been shown in Europe before.
Naoki Ishikawa and Koji Onaka were the only two photographers in the exhibition whose work I already knew. Ishikawa is pretty popular in Japan and his books Polar, New Dimension and Mount Fuji seemed to have pride of place in most bookstores on my last few trips to Tokyo. I had the chance to speak with him briefly at the opening of the exhibition and he explained that he is particularly interested in trying to find a new way of photographing 'icons' like Mount Fuji. When I first came across his work on Fuji-san, it made me realise that I had almost never seen images of the mountain that were taken up close. It is almost always photographed or portrayed at a respectful distance (try doing a Mount Fuji Google Images search), reinforcing its symbolic nature to the point where you have to wonder whether the real mountain actually exists. Ishikawa takes a very different approach, showing the mountain up close, and revealing it as a barren, sometimes dangerous and desolate place.
Koji Onaka was the highlight of the exhibition for me. I have posted about his work before, but this is the first time I have seen his prints. Onaka began shooting in black and white but has since moved on to colour with very interesting results. He was one of Daido Moriyama's students and he shares Moriyama's obsession with dogs. Onaka is more of a wanderer than a traveller and his subject is the old, slightly run-down pockets of the rapidly disappearing 'old' Japan. His colours match these locations, as if they have turned slightly with age. He makes his prints himself in very small formats, and the results are wonderful.
Takeshi Dodo also deserves a mention for his black and white work on the islands of Okinawa. There are a number of images that reminded me of Kazuo Kitai, Issei Suda or Hiromi Tsuchida, in their very 'real', straightforward and unaffected vision of daily life. Dodo is not overly prone to nostalgia and the modern aspects of life on these remote islands rub right up against the more traditional to create an intriguing portrait of a world that is both far removed from and closely connected to the incessant modernisation of the country.
I will put a link to my text (in French) once they upload the newsletter to the MCJP website.
Rating: Recommended
Voyages, Maison de la culture du Japon 14 October 2009 - 23 January 2010
Jean-Louis Tornato
Mrs Deane's post on Eduardo Serafim reminded me that I have been meaning to post on Jean-Louis Tornato's series, Les photographies du sommeil. The series is made up of self-portraits of Tornato sleeping with his partner throughout the course of the night. The images were made using an automatic timer, infra-red film and a flash that is invisible to the naked eye so they would not be woken up by the camera. The grainy, high-contrast results are reminiscent of the Provoke era aesthetic, but are driven by a desire for "scientific observation" of the many emotional and physical chapters of one night's sleep.
The series will be on show at Masato Seto's gallery in Tokyo, Place M, from December 7th to 13th. (Thanks to Seto-san who introduced me to Tornato's work).
Jan Koster, Havana
Jan Koster (1959) is best known for his photographs of the Dutch river landscape. In this new project, Koster has abandoned domestic fluvial bliss for the streets of Havana. Havana has to be one of the most photogenic cities of the world, but thankfully Koster doesn't overdo it on the gorgeousness and the colour. These images feel almost restrained at times giving the impression of a final look at the city before the end of the Castro era. You can see an online book of the work here, hopefully this will come out in print form before too long.
Further reading: Review of Koster's previous project, Dutschscapes, on Conscientious