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Monthly Archives: December 2009
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.
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, [...]
Some things I bought this year
I’ve seen quite a few end of year lists popping up over the last week. There are the best books of 2009 lists, the more eclectic lists of “stuff I liked this year“, the lists of books acquired in 2009 and many more. I think you need to be a breakfast-lunch-and-dinner kind of consumer of [...]
J Wesley Brown
J Wesley Brown is a fan of the night and of the solitary figure. I was less convinced by his portraits, some of which felt a little too staged for my liking, but I enjoyed the atmosphere of his nighttime images of urban or suburban landscapes. They have a strange sense of abandonment and unease, [...]
Review: Andrew Phelps, Not Niigata
As soon as I heard the name of Andrew Phelps’s latest book I was intrigued. Niigata is not the most obvious prefecture in Japan for a foreign photographer to choose as a photographic subject (Tokyo’s magnetic pull certainly doesn’t seem to be weakening). I was all the more interested as Niigata is an area of some [...]
Muge, Go Home
The collector turned art dealer, Mark Pearson, opened his gallery Zen Foto in Tokyo earlier this year. The gallery’s focus is on contemporary Chinese photography and the next exhibition will be a solo show of a young photographer originally from Chongqing who is now living in Chengdu. I am aware that this is a gross [...]
Some more fuel on the photo-book fire
The debate about the future of photo-books is not exactly new, but it’s not dying down either. I’m not sure where this particular strand of the debate started, but in recent days Jörg posted a few provocative thoughts over at Conscientious, which are feeding into a “crowd-sourced” blog post that has been set up by [...]
Posted in Existentialist photo-ramblings, Photo-books Tagged Aperture, Benrido, Hatje Cantz, Kikuji Kawada, Naoya Hatakeyama, Nazraeli, Photo-books, Toluca Editions 9 Comments
Jan Koster, Sine Labe Concepta
Jan Koster’s Sine Labe Concepta (the latin for ‘immaculate conception’) is a new series that sits in between his Dutchscapes and Havana work. Shot in different European cities including Venice, Porto, London, Berlin and Saintes Maries de la Mer, it starts where Dutchscapes ends, the Dutch coast, and ends where the Havana series begins: a [...]
Mount Fuji
Mount Fuji appears to be popping everywhere at the moment: aside from the draw it still has for Japanese artists (Naoki Ishikawa, Ken Kitano, Masao Yamamoto) it also seems to be rippling more and more through the foreign art landscape. The renowned ukiyo-e artist, Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji inspired Jeff Wall’s A Sudden [...]
Joyeux Noël