Frauke Eigen, Shoku

Frauke Eigen is currently showing her series Shoku at London's Atlas Gallery. The series is "inspired by recent visits to Japan" and this comes through in both the subject matter and the approach. These black-and-white images are taken right up close to their subject bringing texture and form to the fore. These are arguably distinguishing features of Japanese photography. In general, Western art presents a framed scene where the totality of the subject is displayed, whereas in Japanese art the subject of a piece may be a small detail (please forgive this gross generalisation). This focus on texture and detail has led to some of the great series of Japanese photography, Kikuji Kawada's Chizu (The Map) and Shomei Tomatsu's Nagasaki 11:02, which I posted about on the anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombings.

On first viewing I really liked Shoku. The images, although very different, fit together well to form a coherent series. I particularly like the 'portraits', if they can be called that. The way these are tightly cropped, leaving out the eyes, draw the eye to things that we often don't see, the roundness of a cheek or the slope of an upper lip. The lines of a face or a naked breast combine well with the geometry of a window pane or paving stone (some of these images reminded me of Yasuhiro Ishimoto's New-Bauhaus-influenced early work). But despite all of this, there is a certain orientalist, exoticist quality to the work that makes me a little uneasy. I have seen a couple of interesting posts recently on this issue that I recommend reading. Maybe it is the shots of the fabric of a kimono or of cherry blossoms in bloom, but sometimes the Japaneseness of these images is laid on a little too thick for me. The gallery's spiel doesn't help, but that is to be expected, "a gentle rhythm leads the viewer from one print to the next, always balanced, always serene, an aesthetic of simplicity akin to Zen." I think this bothered me because many of the images manage to take inspiration from a Japanese aesthetic while taking it into what feels like a new direction.

Apparently the prints are on super-matt paper which is laminated with a rice starch. I would like to see the prints themselves as  with subtle work like this, the print is often a crucial part of the work.

Marion Poussier

Marion Poussier has just been awarded the Joy of Giving Something's first artist award (they throw in $15,000 with the award which is nice). I've written about JGS before and I'm glad to be reminded of their great virtual exhibition space. Poussier is a young French photographer, who already has a few interesting series under her belt. JGS are showing work from two of these, One Summer and The Free Movement of Desire. I preferred the latter, which focuses on Israel, Lebanon and Iran. As the title of the series suggests, these images show how love and desire exist in the context of the Middle East. I found it refreshing to see a photographic portrayal of this region where war is not the central focus and where passion and even joy are brought to the fore. Some of these images even have a certain sense of insouciance and normalcy. Poussier's website is a little underdeveloped but you can see more of her work there.

Update (28 April 2010): Poussier just sent me a link to her new website which is much better than the old one!

Yasutaka Kojima

I met Yasutaka Kojima at Photoquai in Paris last year. I don't know that much about him apart from the fact that he studied with Masato Seto, a former assistant of Daido Moriyama's and a terrific photographer in his own right. Kojima is based in New York, where I think he is still completing his studies. He is still experimenting with different styles, and I would say that he has yet to find a consistent vision of his own, but there are some nice images on his site.

Pierre Faure, Burning Fields

I met Pierre Faure wandering around the labyrinth of Paris Photo last November and have since been meaning to post about a series of work in progress that he showed me at the time. The series, entitled Burning Fields, is a study of the limits of light in urban areas. Faure drives to the edge of towns or cities until the light begins to dwindle sufficiently. This is a complicated and time-consuming process as the pictures look nothing like what the naked eye would see (on close inspection of some of these images you can see stars piercing through the orange hue of the sky). I found this idea of photographing the frontiers of light fascinating: a reinterpretation of the concept of 'city limits'. The images have a certain ominous quality that is compounded by the title of the series which resonates with the expression 'burnt field' used to refer to the landscapes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki following the atomic bombings. These could be images of the sun rising too close to Earth or of a massive fire engulfing a city. Faure has also published an excellent photobook on Japan from a series of images taken during his residency at the Villa Kujoyama. Hopefully Burning Fields will make it into book form before too long.

Guido Castagnoli

Guido Castagnoli's images of small Japanese towns focus on familiar territory: there is other similar work floating around (Takashi Homma's work on suburban Tokyo stands out from the crowd), but the originality of Castagnoli's images is the light. These scenes of empty parking lots, amusement parks and all-but-abandoned main streets, tend to be shot in colder, more bleached-out tones. Castagnoli's images have a sun-drenched warmth that I haven't seen elsewhere. If provincial Japan was in 1970s California...