bookshop M

One of the discoveries that I made at Paris Photo this year was the Japanese bookseller, bookshop M, situated right at the entrance of the fair. There is so much work to see on the walls that I sometimes find it difficult to find the time to spend with all of the books that are on show (and in the case of Schaden, to wade through the crowd of people parked in front of his booth).

But bookshop M's minimalist stand did catch my attention. They have an interesting model, as they are actually an offshoot of the design studio, MATCH and company (the Japanese do like to muck around with capitalisation), which is run by the extremely talented art directing brothers, Satoshi and Hikari Machiguchi. Their father, Tadashi, was a renowned designer in the 'golden age' of Japanese photo-books (1960s and 1970s), and so they fell into the cauldron of photo-books from an early age, growing up surrounded by design but also by inks, papers and printing techniques. Their design work really stands out in an increasingly crowded photo-book world. Despite their education, their designs do not feel like 'retro' throwbacks to the 1970s, but instead they manage to be contemporary and, most importantly, extremely well-suited to their subject.

If you want proof you will have to get onto the internet, as bookshop M is an online-only venture: another interesting aspect of their model. The website is very well put together (the best I've seen in this field), with short slideshows showing the inside of all of the books that they sell. Also they have gone the extra mile and translated the site into (very approximate) English, which makes the whole experience even better as you are regularly treated to moments of hilarity.

At Paris Photo I picked up Akihide Tamura's Afternoon, a collection of 23 beautifully simple and sparse landscape photographs taken between 1969 and 1989. In a numbered and signed limited edition of 700, this was a bargain for 35 euros ($33 online). An extra bonus is that the book is not officially published until December 9, the first time I have spent two weeks with a book that doesn't really exist yet.

Louis Porter: One Hundred Flowers

One of the nice discoveries I made during Paris Photo was a fellow blogger's foray into publications. Laurence Vecten who blogs at LOZ has just published her first photo-book of Australian photographer Louis Porter's series One hundred flowers. Porter photographed the floral displays that were brought in to beautify Beijing in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics. While his aesthetic is not dissimilar to Martin Parr's, I actually found this work more interesting than Parr's latest Luxury series. His accumulation of high-colour floral detail does a great job of conveying the gargantuan scale on which things get done in China and made me chuckle more than once at the PRC's efforts at government-controlled nature.

The book is printed digitally (and well) in a limited edition of 100 and its design suits the subject and isn't afraid of packing several images to the one page. As Hester Keijser from Mrs Deane pointed out we can't all become mini Jeff Ladds, but it's good to see blogging leading to other projects like this one. You can see more spreads from the book and even get your very own copy here.

The Aftermath Project

I recently received a copy of War is Only Half the Story, Volume II, a publication by The Aftermath Project run by the photographer Sara Terry. The Aftermath Project is a non-profit organization that aims to tell "the other half of the story of conflict" through photographs of post-conflict situations. This latest publication includes work by the winner (Kathryn Cook) and finalists (Natela Grigalashvili, Tinka Dietz, Pep Bonet and Christine Fenzl) of their 2008 grant.

A lot has been written (some on this blog) about the desperate state of photo-journalism as both newspapers and magazines continue their steep decline. A number of reports from the recent Visa pour l'image festival in Perpignan stopped just short of saying that photo-journalism is a dying profession. The situation is bad in many ways—photographers have fewer and fewer outlets for in-depth stories—but I think that it is precisely because it is so dire that initiatives like the Aftermath Project are sprouting out from within the cracks. Dispatches magazine is another great example of an initiative that produces in-depth and in-context stories.

Aftermath is focused on post-conflict situations: a subject which is rarely considered to be newsworthy and may not have the immediate photographic gratification of the extremes of conflict. But if initiatives like these can survive, and even thrive, we won't be burying photo-journalism quite yet.

The book is on sale here. The Aftermath Project also holds a yearly grant competition open to working photographers worldwide covering the aftermath of conflict. The next deadline for applications is 2 November 2009.

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.

Koji Onaka

Koji Onaka and his camera have been wandering around Japan—and sometimes further afield—for many years. In his 2007 book, Dragonfly, he writes:

"People often say to me, 'You're lucky that all you have to do is to go to places you like whenever you feel like it and when you're done taking photos as you stroll around, you can spend the rest of your time sitting back and drinking.' I agree with them 100 percent. I myself wonder how I can make a living from taking such useless photos as mine.

They are not astonishing scenes, nor are they taken with superb timing. They do not convey mistifying sensations or intense impressions. They do not have healing effects, but neither do they push away viewers. They are not difficult to understand, but they do not provide any definite answers. Much less are they stories or documentaries."

I think there is something very Japanese about Onaka's description of his photography. He does not feel the need to have a project, he isn't searching for the extraordinary, and I think he is sincere in his reductive description of his process. His words do not sell his images, quite the contrary. But the naturalness of his photographs is a quality that is very hard to achieve. I think this incredibly unselfconscious description could be considered an artist statement.

There is a lot of great work on his website, but unfortunately the scans of his colour images are less than perfect. I would suggest trying to get your hands on Dragonfly 2002-2007 (Tokyo: Tosei-Sha 2007) and its earlier companion volume Grasshopper 2001-2005 (Tokyo: Tosei-sha, 2006) to get a sense of his unique use of colour. For those of you who will be in Paris in the next few months, his work will also be included in a forthcoming group show at the Maison de la Culture du Japon (Japan Foundation) from October 2009 to January 2010.