Festival La Gacilly Photo

Takeyoshi Tanuma, Metamorphosis of an Empire

Hiromi Tsuchida, New Counting Grains of Sand

In summer 2016 I collaborated with the outdoor photography festival Festival La Gacilly Photo to organize two exhibitions by Takeyoshi Tanuma and Hiromi Tsuchida for the 2016 edition of the festival which included a focus on Japanese photography. 

Takeyoshi Tanuma: Metamorphosis of an Empire
In the years immediately following the war, Takeyoshi Tanuma photographed extensively in the streets of the Japanese capital, recording a Japan in search of its identity with a changing urban population caught between tradition and modernity. 

Takeyoshi Tanuma, Modern dress versus traditional dress at the Sanja Festival, Asakusa, Tokyo, 1955

Takeyoshi Tanuma, Modern dress versus traditional dress at the Sanja Festival, Asakusa, Tokyo, 1955

Takeyoshi Tanuma, Stall on a street corner, Ginza, Tokyo, 1951 

Takeyoshi Tanuma, Stall on a street corner, Ginza, Tokyo, 1951

 

Takeyoshi Tanuma, Installation view, Festival La Gacilly Photo 2016

Takeyoshi Tanuma, Installation view, Festival La Gacilly Photo 2016

Hiromi Tsuchida: New Counting Grains of Sand
With the series Counting Grains of Sand, Hiromi Tsuchida created a visual state of the nation by exploring how the Japanese people interact and function in a crowd, with each person a "grain a sand". Having begun the series in the early 1980s in black-and-white, Tsuchida returned to this theme in the late 1990s with a large-format color documentation of a new kind of crowd that signalled a fragmentation of Japanese society.

Hiromi Tsuchida, Tottori, 2001

Hiromi Tsuchida, Tottori, 2001

Hiromi Tsuchda, Tokyo, 2003

Hiromi Tsuchda, Tokyo, 2003

Hiromi Tsuchida, Installation view, Festival La Gacilly Photo 2016

Hiromi Tsuchida, Installation view, Festival La Gacilly Photo 2016