Author Archives: eyecurious

Review: Stefan Heyne, The Noise

By eyecurious | Published: 9 March 2010
Stefan Heyne’s The Noise is aptly named. His images give the impression of being situated between two states, like the static between radio stations. Their subjects, a window, the keel of a boat, a doorway, a phone, are still recognizable but are reduced to the most basic forms emerging from the surrounding darkness. Heyne uses [...]
Posted in Book reviews, European photography, Photo-books | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

March Madness: 1 month, 2 exhibitions

By eyecurious | Published: 1 March 2010
Blogging has been slow this month since I am curating two exhibitions opening in March. The first of these, Tokyo Stories, with work by Hiroshi Hamaya, Tadahiko Hayashi and Shigeichi Nagano, opens at Stockholm’s Kulturhuset on 6 March. I’ll be giving a talk from 1-3pm that day on Japanese photography and photographing Tokyo, so for [...]
Posted in Events, Japanese photography, eyecurious News | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Plastic, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways

By eyecurious | Published: 27 February 2010
Megumi Tomomitsu is fond of the plastic bag. She has even compiled a pretty exhaustive list of reasons why. For someone (and somehow I think I am not alone here) who stores hundreds of the things for absolutely no discernable reason, this interests me. Thinking about it, I probably own more plastic bags than photobooks, [...]
Posted in Asian photography, Japanese photography, On a lighter note | Tagged | Leave a comment

Review: Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s

By eyecurious | Published: 24 February 2010
Ivan Vartanian and Ryuichi Kaneko’s Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s belongs to a new breed of photobook: the book on books. Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s two-volume history of the photobook is probably the best known of these, but there are other interesting examples. Jeff Ladd’s Errata Editions is taking this one step [...]
Posted in Asian photography, Book reviews, Collecting, Japanese photography, Photo-books | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Plagiarism in photography

By eyecurious | Published: 18 February 2010
There is a bit of a fuss going on at Conscientious and PDN over photographs that look very similar. I am less interested in debating how similar two images are and whether we can consider there to be plagiarism (although if you have a few hundred hours to waste, I imagine that you could devote [...]
Posted in Existentialist photo-ramblings, Tangents | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Shomei Tomatsu, As Salaam Alaykum

By eyecurious | Published: 15 February 2010
For any Tokyoites out there, Gallery 21 will be showing a selection of works from a lesser-known series of Shomei Tomatsu’s work next month. Although he has never been to Europe or the United States, Tomatsu has done his share of wandering around Asia and in the 1960s he made a trip to Afghanistan, which [...]
Posted in Japanese photography | Tagged | Leave a comment

Moment of sublime strangeness: Medvedev on photography

By eyecurious | Published: 12 February 2010
A little Friday fun for you: the Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, on a 7-minute rant on the nature of photography. I love the way this is all delivered straight to camera, as if he really wants every last Russian to know his thoughts on the subject. Would love to know who wrote this speech for [...]
Posted in Existentialist photo-ramblings, On a lighter note, Tangents | Tagged | 4 Comments

Giacomo Brunelli

By eyecurious | Published: 12 February 2010
Giacomo Brunelli is currently showing his work The Animals at London’s Photofusion gallery (until March 26th). Brunelli’s images have a ferocity that is absent in a lot of wildlife photography. The images are not shot from a human perspective but from that of the animals themselves, which contributes to the immersiveness and energy of the [...]
Posted in European photography, One to watch | Tagged | 1 Comment

Interview: Hiroh Kikai, A man in the cosmos

By eyecurious | Published: 10 February 2010
I first met Hiroh Kikai in 2007 after discovering his portraits taken over several decades in Askausa, Tokyo, in his stunning book Persona. A collection of these photographs entitled Asakusa Portraits has since been published by Steidl. On a trip to Japan in May 2008, I managed to sit down with Kikai for an interview [...]
Posted in Interviews, Japanese photography | Tagged | 3 Comments

iPhoneography

By eyecurious | Published: 8 February 2010
iPhone’s have been on my mind recently as E just had hers brazenly stolen straight out of her hand on the metro last week. I may be just a bit behind the curve writing about the iPhone when Apple have just launched their new revolutionary (and badly named) iPad, but I recently received an email [...]
Posted in Existentialist photo-ramblings | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

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