Le Bal’s latest exhibition, Foto/Gráfica: Une nouvelle histoire des livres de photographie latino-américains (A New History of Latin-American Photobooks) opened last week. The show is based on a selection of 40 books taken from Horacio Fernandez’s recently published book on books, The Latin-American Photobook (Aperture, 2011). This is not Le Bal’s first photobook exhibition—they presented Japanese Photobooks Now in the summer of 2011—but it is the first time that they have devoted their entire space to an exhibition of books. Following this show they will be hosting the 5th International Fotobook Festival, which is traditionally held in Kassel, so it seems that photobooks are becoming one of the major areas of focus of their programme.

According to Martin Parr, Latin-American photobooks “are the best kept secret in the history of photography”… one of the many secrets that are being steadily revealed by Parr and/or Aperture through The Photobook: A History series, Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s and a forthcoming book on Chinese photobooks that Parr is doing with WassinkLundgren chez Aperture. The ‘books on books’ phenomenon is gaining so much traction that Andreas Schmidt, a pleasingly disruptive photobook maker, is already looking forward to the book on books on books which surely can’t be too far away. As for Parr’s quote, I am willing to take his word for it, knowing absolutely nothing about Latin-Amercian photobooks (with a few Mexican exceptions) and having had very few opportunities to see any.

© Pascal Martinez

I was particularly interested to see how Le Bal would take on this subject. Although there appears to be a growing trend for exhibiting books, the ones I have seen so far have generally been disappointing. Books are not an easy thing to exhibit, in fact they are exhibition-resistant in my view. Most people’s preferred position for reading or looking at books is sitting down and they are generally consumed by one person at a time, things that are difficult to replicate in an exhibition context. Exhibitions do not encourage visitors to touch the works on display, making it difficult to display more than one spread, something which is painfully reductive unless multiple copies of each book displayed can be tracked down. I think the key in exhibiting books is in overcoming these obstacles by recreating the immersive experience of a book in a way that goes beyond the experience of going into a very good bookstore.

In addition to the basic difficulties of exhibiting books, Le Bal’s space is far from huge whereas Latin America is on the large side and presumably has produced a decent number of interesting photobooks over the years. This poses the additional challenge of avoiding the exhibition equivalent of a ‘best of’ compilation album. To borrow the strapline from a random ‘Best of Latin America’ compilation, this could have been “a lively exhibition filled with hot and spicy Latin American photoboks!” which would probably have given me a severe case of indigestion.

Thankfully the exhibition successfully avoids most of these pitfalls. Rather than structuring the exhibition around individual countries, it is broken up into a series of sections: history and propaganda, urban photography, photographic essays, artist books, literature and photography, and contemporary books. These categories go beyond the traditional bounds of the photobook, expanding its definition to something like ‘books that contain photography,’ which makes the terrain far more diverse and interesting, bringing in books such as the revolutionary propaganda tome, Sartre Visite a Cuba (1960) or Auto-photos (1978) an artist book documenting a performance. There is enough material in each of the sections to whet the appetite, but without requiring you to spend several hours in the exhibition space just to cover all the material on display.

The scénographie of Foto/Gráfica is particularly good, the best I have seen for a photobook exhibition. Firstly, in order to tackle the issue of displaying more than one spread from each book, the organizers have decided to go down the road of sacrifice and cut the books up so that a series of spreads can be displayed (there are clearly enough copies of these books to spare, as book-surgery is not the kind of thing that could be done with an exhibition of rare Japanese photobooks for example). The books are displayed in a variety of different ways, from ‘classic’ glass display cases, to superimposed custom shelving units hanging on the walls. The exhibition also makes good use of prints, which are exhibited alongside the books and are a useful reminder of how different these media are. In the downstairs space, the central wall has been covered with scans of the spreads from a single book with a handful of prints displayed in mounts floating on the surface, a very impressive display. I’m posting a few of the official installation views with this post, as my crappy iPhone shots would not do the exhibition justice. By deconstructing the books in these different ways, it makes the viewer think about the form of the book and its specific qualities.

© Pascal Martinez

© Pascal Martinez

© Pascal Martinez

The success of Foto/Gráfica is that it opens itself out beyond Latin American photography to engage with Latin American artistic culture more broadly. By giving politics, literature and other art forms center stage, the exhibition not only provides some much-needed context, but opens up a number of interesting paths of inquiry. Photobook lovers won’t need my encouragement to go and see this, but this is one for those that are not book geeks as well. After Paris, the exhibition is travelling to Ivory Press in Madrid, Aperture in New York and to the Museo del Libro y de la Lengua in Buenos-Aires.

Foto/Gráfica, Une nouvelle histoire des livres de photographie latino-américains, Le Bal, 20 January – 8 April 2012.

Rating: Recommended

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My most recent trip to Japan in October happily coincided with Naoya Hatakeyama’s first retrospective at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Regular readers will know that I am a big fan of his work – and there is quite a lot of it – so I was curious to see how this exhibition, entitled Natural Stories, would be put together. The exhibition has now closed in Tokyo but opens at the Huis Marseille in Amsterdam today until the end of February 2012. To coincide with Natural Stories, Hatakeyama also released his latest book, Ciel Tombé, which I included on my best books of 2011 list, so I thought I would discuss them together here.

I will admit to being a little surprised at the selection of work in Natural Stories. Although there are ten different bodies of work in the exhibition, none of Hatakeyama’s work on Tokyo (Underground, River, Maquettes/Light…) was included. However, in the curator’s text on the exhibition she is quick to explain that this was a conscious decision given that Hatakeyama already had several solo exhibitions in Japan including a 2007 show at the Museum of Modern Art in Kamakura & Hayama which took the city as its theme. With that in mind the exhibition’s focus on the natural landscape makes sense.

The title Natural Stories is an intriguing one. I think it works best in french (Histoires naturelles), which I believe is the language in which the title was originally given. In french ‘histoire’ can mean both history or a story. The title evokes Natural History, stories about nature, and perhaps even a history of nature itself. The essay by the French writer Philippe Forest in the exhibition catalogue explores these notions in detail so I won’t dwell on them any further, but the title evokes the very different considerations that inform Hatakeyama’s photographic approach to the landscape. His landscapes are never ‘just’ landscapes: they are always the reflection or the echo of something else. For instance, although it depicts the limestone mines, the series Lime Hills deals with the transformation of the natural landscape to feed the insatiable growth of the city of Tokyo.

Although it is almost never directly present in this exhibition, the city is never very far away. In the series Ciel Tombé Hatakeyama explored the Parisian catacombs and their underground ‘fallen skies’ (ciel tombé). This series is the subject of Hatakeyama’s latest book, Ciel Tombé (Super Labo, 2011). For this book Hatakeyama has deviated from the standard photobook formula and asked the French author Sylvie Germain to contribute a short story based on his photographs . I won’t go into detail about this book as this post is already overly long, but I will say this: I first saw the work from Ciel Tombé a few years ago at a gallery in Tokyo. Several months later I had the opportunity to read Sylvie Germain’s deliciously strange and unsettling text. I had not seen any of the images since that first viewing, but as I read through the story the images appeared in my mind as if I had only just seen them. For the moment the book only exists in a deluxe edition of 200 which includes a print, a book of Hatakeyama’s photographs and another book containing Sylvie Germain’s text in French, English and Japanese, but there is word of a second edition in the making.

Returning to Natural Stories, for me the final two rooms of the exhibition were the highlight. The first of these rooms (pictured at the top of this post) contained Hatakeyama’s most recent work on his hometown of Rikuzentakata in Iwate prefecture, one of the many towns destroyed in the tsunami of 11 March 2011. Although very little time has passed, Hatakeyama decided to include a series of photographs in the exhibition that he took in the wake of the disaster. Many images have been produced of the aftermath of the tsunami, but most of these fail to connect beyond conveying the scale of the physical destruction. What stands out about Hatakeyama’s images is how matter of fact they feel. He has photographed these landscapes with the same unflinching precision, intelligence and quietness tinged with nostalgia as any other landscape. His photographs strike me as the most natural possible response to the disaster, but they must have been incredibly difficult to make given the deeply personal and tragic nature of the subject. These images are presented on three adjacent walls in the space, while on the fourth a slideshow of images taken between 2008-2010 in his native region is presented in the guise of a framed photograph.

The final room contains the companion series Blast and A Bird. Both series have been exhibited and published in the past, but for this exhibition Hatakeyama also chose to present Blast as a stop-motion video projected on a huge wall in the space. These photographs have a potent mix of beauty and brutal force which is heightened even further when animated in this way. It is an overwhelming end to the exhibition and one which resonates long after you leave the space.

Related posts:

1. Review: Naoya Hatakeyama @ Rencontres d’Arles
2. Review: From Back Home (book and exhibition)
3. Some more fuel on the photo-book fire

As a blogger I get sent several press releases a day for upcoming exhibitions, from the weird to the wonderful and everything in between. Although 95% of it doesn’t hold my interest, once in a while something stands out. The press release for the upcoming exhibition at Gallery 138 in New York of photographs and videos by Clark Winter entitled The Wonder of it All stopped me dead in my tracks.

I knew nothing about Clark Winter, but discovered that he is a global investment advisor, a TV pundit, an art world mover and shaker (he serves on the Committee on Photography at the Museum of Modern Art), as well as a photographer and an “artist”. The release tells us that “in his photographs and videos (…) patterns appear, information is collected, everything is experienced; nothing is explained (…) Something’s coming, and you don’t know what it is.” It would seem that Winter leaves the explaining to his day job and let’s the invisible hand of chance govern his artistic endeavours. From the visuals I got my hands on, his photographs seem to be as random as the above press statement: snapshots taken in hotel lobbies, airports and assorted ‘exotic’ locations. Winter travels a lot and rubs shoulders with the powerful and famous, but is also capable of photographing the totally banal… a toaster, some flowers, a field. All of this is then thrown together in 3×3 grids where the mundane rubs shoulders with the “extraordinary things he has seen while travelling as a global financial advisor” and where the former comes out comfortably on top. In one self-portrait, Winter appears with electrodes attached to his head, suggesting his deep connection to these many complex layers of our planet, or perhaps simply to suggest the powerful brain that lies within it.

Of course I haven’t seen and won’t be able to see The Wonder of it All and this may simply be a case of overblown PR, but to me this feels incredibly misguided. Could there be a worse time to put together an exhibition that reveals “the private world of high finance” by giving us “access to things that are unavailable to ordinary travlers (sic)”? The idea that a man who certainly has a deeper understanding than most of global economics, finance and the powers that be and is clearly very successful in his field, could somehow translate this into a visual form with a series of off-the-cuff photographs, strikes me as a little overambitious, if not downright pretentious.

Clinton and Ali at Davos

The exhibition is part of a series exploring the relationship between art and finance, something that is extremely pertinent at this moment in time. There is a lot that is wrong with both worlds and an exploration of how they influence and affect each other could make an interesting exhibition. But surely this is something that requires more than the contents of a powerful man’s iPhone camera roll. I don’t write blogposts that frequently and writing a critique of this exhibition may have been unnecessary, a waste of your and my time. However, I can’t help feeling that in a way this exhibition is insulting to people who are actually devoting themselves to making art. The idea that it is this easy suggests that the relationship between art and finance is a lot more twisted than I thought.

If anyone does actually manage to see The Wonder of it All I would be fascinated to hear your thoughts. However, I am concerned that for someone who cites Picasso and Piero della Francesca as influences, it may be difficult to live up to such lofty expectations.

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Keizo Kitajima, Photo Express Tokyo

Le Bal‘s Japanese summer season continues this week with the opening of the exhibition Tokyo-e, which brings together work by Yutaka Takanashi and Keizo Kitajima with a series by an almost complete unknown photographer, Yukichi Watabe, a photojournalist who worked in Tokyo. The three groups of work on show are very different, related only through their strong connection to the Japanese capital. Although this selection seems a little arbitrary (as is almost inevitably the case with city-based shows), Tokyo-e is a rare opportunity to see an exhibition that goes beyond the ever-popular Moriyama, Araki or anything-from-Provoke choices. Tokyo-e only opens officially tomorrow, but here’s a little sneak preview to whet the appetite.

Keizo Kitajima, Koza

Kitajima gets the lion’s share of the exhibition space with the entire downstairs floor including work spanning 15 years of his career, from his 1970s series in Tokyo and Okinawa to his work from the 1980s taken in New York, Eastern Europe, Berlin, Seoul and Beijing. The most striking feature of the Kitajima room has to be the Photo Express Tokyo grid, a band of photographs covering an entire wall. The installation is a nod to the 1970s Camp gallery where Kitajima covered the walls, floor and ceiling of this tiny Shinjuku space with his prints. In conjunction with this show, Le Bal and Steidl are releasing a facsimile of the full set of 12 Photo Express Tokyo booklets that Kitajima made in 1979 at the rate of one issue per week throughout the 12-week run of the exhibition.

Keizo Kitajima, Colour Works

Although Kitajima’s work features most prominently, I found the upstairs room to be the more successful half of the show. The combination of Takanashi’s Machi, a series of opulent, colour-drenched shopfronts and interiors from Tokyo’s Shitamachi district, with a clever installation of Watabe’s small ‘film noir’ vignettes creates the sense of wandering through the streets of a city from the past. The Watabe criminal investigation series is a wonderful anomaly. Shot in 1958, these photographs document a criminal investigation by the Tokyo police of a horrific murder by a suspected serial killer. In a radical departure from the straightforward ‘objective’ documentation that was so prevalent at the time, Watabe’s photographs could be a set of film stills given how heavily they seem to be influenced by film noir, an effect which is compounded by the charismatic lead investigator, a kind of Japanese Humphrey Bogart figure. While they are different in every aspect, the installation of the two series ties them together nicely: the size of the Takanashi prints almost make it possible to walk into these city spaces, which have now all but faded away, while the labyrinthine installation of Watabe’s small prints, which visitors look down on from above, echoes the detective’s experience of searching for clues.

Yutaka Takanashi's Machi and Watabe Yukichi's criminal investigation series

With an artist talk by Kitajima tomorrow (Friday 20 May) evening, one by Takanashi on Sunday (22 May), a film programme and a bunch of other events to come, Tokyo-e comes complete with some terrific bonus features and is definitely worth the visit.

Tokyo-e (Yutaka Takanashi, Keizo Kitajima & Yukichi Watabe), Le Bal
20 May – 21 August 2011

Rating: Recommended

Related posts:

1. Tokyo highlights
2. A Japanese season starts in Paris
3. Book of the Week #4: Michael Wolf, Tokyo Compression

Opening night at Japanese Photobooks Now

Last night was the opening of Japanese Photobooks Now, the first in a summer series of events on Japanese photography and film at Le Bal, which, as regular readers will know, should be right up my street. I’ve written about Le Bal before on eyecurious and since their first show Anonymes last autumn they have maintained a consistently interesting and diverse programme. For the next couple of weeks, the upstairs space has been taken over by Ivan Vartanian, a Tokyo-based New Yorker and the author of Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and 1970s and Setting Sun amongst others. For Japanese Photobooks Now Vartanian has put together a selection of around 80 photobooks which provide an overview of contemporary Japanese photobook publishing. Opportunities to pick up Japanese photobooks outside of Japan are pretty limited and so this is a rare chance not only to see some of the best current books but also to get a broader overview of the contemporary Japanese photo scene and the current trends in photobook publishing. The show is up until 8 May, but if you hurry Vartanian is in Paris until the end of the week and you just might be able to convince him to give you a private tour. With a Kitajima/Takanashi/Watabe exhibition, a month of Japanese film, two books and several events to come (full programme on Le Bal’s website), this promises to be a good summer.

Ivan Vartanian

Related posts:

1. Review: Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s
2. Mariko Takeuchi on contemporary Japanese photography
3. A bad father… and a Japanese giveaway

Anthony Hernandez, Vermont ave. & Wishire blvd, 1979

Paris must have one of the highest densities of museums exhibiting photography of any major city. So it could be considered surprising that a new venue, Le Bal, has just opened behind the Place de Clichy, slightly off the beaten track for the Paris art crowd. The space gets its name from the fact that it is a reconverted ballroom; it’s not huge, but a comfortable size to be able to bring together an interesting mix of work. I think it’s a bit of a shame that no original features were kept from the old ballroom as this was a place with a lot of history, but I guess the white cube is used for a reason. The most interesting thing for me about Le Bal is its slightly unusual mission statement. The venue is devoted to the “image-document”, which includes photography, film, video and new media, rather than exclusively to photography or to the sprawling continent of ‘contemporary art’. Another interesting characteristic is that Le Bal will not be putting on any retrospective exhibitions, which given the Jeu de Paume‘s recent programming of blockbuster retrospectives, is something to be thankful for. Le Bal is a welcome addition to the Paris photography scene, closer to London’s Photographers Gallery or to Amsterdam’s FOAM rather than the more old school venues that Paris has to offer, such as the MEP.

Le Bal’s first exhibition, Anonymes, L’Amérique sans nom: photographie et cinéma does a good job of putting the venue’s mission statement into practice. Interestingly their first show deals with American, rather than European, photography and film, which suggests that they may be taking a global approach to exhibition programming. I’ve just interviewed the director, Diane Dufour, for the next issue of FOAM magazine and their programming for the first year will span from Japanese protest photographs of the 60s and 70s to a history of Latin American photobooks. Anonymes includes work by Walker Evans, Chauncey Hare, Standish Lawder, Lewis Baltz, Anthony Hernandez, Sharon Lockhart, Jeff Wall, Bruce Gilden, Doug Rickard, Arianna Arcara and Luca Santese. One of the strengths of this exhibition can be seen in the list of participating artists, which goes from the biggest names (Walker Evans, Jeff Wall) to the photographers’ photographers (Lewis Baltz) to the relatively unknown (Rickard’s Street View work or Arcara and Santese’s archive of found photographs). I found this really refreshing considering how many major (or ‘same old’) name exhibitions are being put on of late, not providing too many opportunities for new discoveries.

Extract from Standish Lawder's film 'Necrology'

Despite the diversity of the work on show, Anonymes retains a strong sense of coherence and focus on its subject. Group shows can sometimes be too sprawling or thematically too loose or chaotic, but in this case the exhibition strikes the right balance between the micro and macro view to flesh out its overriding theme. The exhibition also benefits from the combination of film and photography. All three films on show are very photographic (Gilden’s is simply a slideshow with a soundtrack and voiceover) and Lawder and Lockhart’s in particular seem to be extensions of photography, ‘slightly moving’ rather than ‘still’ photographs.

Aside from the delight of seeing Lewis Baltz’s Industrial Parks prints for the first time, two groups of work really stood out for me. The first was Anthony Hernandez’s black and white images of Waiting, Sitting, Fishing and Some Automobiles from the late 1970s. Hernandez has recently been going through a bit of a revival, including a show co-curated by Jeff Wall in Vancouver last year. These images present a very different view of Los Angeles to some of his more famous contemporaries (e.g. Stephen Shore). Hernandez chooses to show those short moments of rest that punctuate the city’s almost perpetual sense of movement. Shooting bus-stops in the city where the car reigns supreme is evidence of his desire to show a forgotten or invisible side of LA. Although these are large format images, the work sill retains the feel of street photography, of moments captured on the fly.

For me the highlight of the show has to be Arcara & Santese‘s Detroit: a self-portrait archive of found photographs from the 1980s and 90s. These appear to be taken from police archives, with mugshots interspersed with crime scene photographs or photographs providing evidence of wounds from beatings or assaults. The prints have not exactly been kept in archival conditions and the shifting emulsions and crackling surfaces resonate hauntingly with the downfall of the city of Detroit in recent years. With the odd scrawled sentence or recovered letter, this archive echoes the brutal reality of the lives of the citizens of a city that has gone over the cliff-edge.

Collection of Arianna Arcara and Luca Santese

Rating: Recommended

Anonymes, l’Amérique Sans Nom, Le Bal
18 September 2010 – 19 December 2010

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I have just written a piece on Michael Wolf’s Paris Street View for edition 22, Peeping, of the excellent Foam Magazine run by the Amsterdam museum of the same name. The museum got as excited as I did about this new series and decided to go the extra mile by putting up an outdoor installation of 24 XXL prints from Paris Street View in Amsterdam’s Zuidas area (on the street where Google has its Dutch office) which is in the process of being redeveloped. I made the trip up for the launch and to find out a bit more about the Amsterdam photo scene.

The Paris Street View installation is very impressive (which this terrible installation view taken with my phone camera does not do justice to at all) and the work takes on an added dimension when displayed in amongst the city, rather than just on the neutral white walls of a gallery or museum. Wolf likened it to a “monument to privacy lost” and these massive figures dotted around this modern urban landscape also create an interesting warped sense of scale, making the buildings in the background look like scale models. It will be interesting to see how people in the area react to the works over time and whether the work can provoke some further debate over these issues. (Update: Michael Wolf just kindly sent me some proper installation views so I have uploaded one of these instead).

I also swung by Foam itself. For a museum that only opened in December 2001 in a small European country, Foam cuts an impressive figure on the European photo scene. The venue is not huge, but they use the space intelligently and a look at their programme schedule shows their ability to combine crowd-pleasing fare with ‘important’ exhibitions.

Ari Marcopoulos

The current programme is a great illustration of this as the ground floor is occupied by Amsterdam-born photographer and filmmaker, Ari Marcopoulos who has photographed street culture for several years on both US coasts. Although much of the photography in this exhibition left me cold, I was more interested in Marcopoulos’s large-scale xerox prints which reveal the influence of Andy Warhol, for whom he was a darkroom printer. But the highlight of It might seem familiar has to be a 10-minute video of Marcopoulos and an accomplice skating down a very steep road in California wearing matching pastel blue suits. This is far more exhilarating and revealing of the culture that Marcopoulos has spent 30 years documenting.

Alexander Rodchenko, The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky

The upper floor is devoted to an exhibition of vintage work by the Russian avant-garde artist, Alexander Rodchenko, which was first held at London’s Hayward Gallery in 2008. This is a very complete look at the photographer’s extraordinarily inventive and experimental career, from his early use of photography in graphic design in the 1920s to his later work on human movement. Every section of this show contains masterpieces, whether it be the early magazine covers, photograms or photomontages, the portraits or the later work on movement. The prints are all vintage and with a significant number coming from private collections this is a pretty unique opportunity to see this many quality Rodchenko’s in one place.

Between Paris Street View, the Rodchenko exhibit and the city of Amsterdam itself, there are more than enough reasons to make a visit.

Related posts:

1. Notes on 2010
2. What’s Next?
3. Michael Wolf: Paris Street View

Exhibition-wise the first week of January is not the best in Tokyo or elsewhere for that matter, but I did manage to stumble across some good things. I only saw one museum show, the Tokyo Metropolitan‘s joint Ihee Kimura and Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition (on until 7 February 2010). This isn’t exactly ground-breaking stuff, but it does provide an interesting new perspective on these two masters of the Leica and illustrates just how different their styles were. Kimura’s photographs will probably be less familiar to non-Japanese readers, but given my focus on Japanese photography they are as familiar to me as HCB’s. Kimura was a furious snapper and often photographed his subjects from many different angles, however his pictures retain a much looser, natural quality than Cartier-Bresson’s. After walking through three rooms of Kimura, the Frenchman’s compositional rigour and prowess is both impressive and a little bit overwhelming. So many of HCB’s images are works of complete virtuosity, but after several rooms worth of such masterpieces I am left craving more open and less controlled pictures. The best part of this show is the final room in which the two photographers’ annotated contact prints are displayed side by side. These provide a fascinating insight into the genesis of some now legendary images, revealing before and after outtakes and proving that while HCB may not resort to any cropping he didn’t always get the image he was looking for in a single exposure.

Daido Moriyama prints at NADiff Gallery

Aside from this blockbuster show I managed to take in a minuscule Daido Moriyama show at NADiff Gallery (the first time I have seen any of Moriyama’s colour work), Hajime Sawatari’s very hot but a little vacuous Kinky at BLD Gallery, the final days of an exhibition by promising young Chinese photographer Muge at the recently opened Zen Foto, and an exhibition of new work by the ubiquitous Araki which had several images with absolutely no signs of bondage in them!

The highlight in terms of exhibitions turned out not to be a photography show. The French Embassy has relocated to a new building in Tokyo and they have given over Joseph Belmont’s 1957 building over to a group of over 70 Japanese and French artists from all kinds of different disciplines (sculpture, video, graffiti, calligraphy, design, photography, etc.) for a ‘carte blanche’ exhibition of work inspired by the building itself and integrating its contents into the works. The results are predictably hit and miss but they are always interesting and the experience is exhilarating. The proof of No Man’s Land success for me was the audience: this was the busiest exhibition I saw in Tokyo and the visitors came in all ages, shapes and sizes, including a group of a dozen octogenarian grandmothers who were thoroughly enjoying themselves.  This is the kind of open, interactive art initiative that we need more of. The show is on until 31 January 2010, so if you’re in Tokyo do not miss it.

No Man's Land at the former French Embassy

Throw in a meeting with master book designers (and brothers) Satoshi and Hikari Machiguchi of Match and Company, a visit to one of the only remaining analog photo-labs hidden away in a tiny basement where a handful of master printers appear to be making most of the best fine art prints coming out of the Tokyo photo world, a few hours in the unmissable Sokyu-sha bookstore, and a highly entertaining few hours at Gallery Tosei with Dan of Street Level Japan and Kurt of Japan Exposures and you have the recipe for another terrific week in Tokyo. Tosei is first and foremost a publishing house, but they opened a small gallery in their offices about five years ago, the first I’ve been to where you have to take your shoes off to come in. Tosei’s head honcho, Takahashi-san, is a force of nature and his riffs on the state of photography and some of its practitioners are both fascinating and completely hilarious.

Related posts:

1. Review: Tokyo-e @ Le Bal
2. Japan: A Self-Portrait opening in Tokyo
3. Book of the Week #4: Michael Wolf, Tokyo Compression

Naoki Ishikawa

I was contacted a few months ago by the Japan Foundation in Paris to write a short text for their newsletter based on an upcoming exhibition of contemporary Japanese photography. The exhibition, put together by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, has just opened and although I’m not entirely convinced about the theme, voyages, there is some interesting and fresh material here, most of which has probably never been shown in Europe before.

Naoki Ishikawa and Koji Onaka were the only two photographers in the exhibition whose work I already knew. Ishikawa is pretty popular in Japan and his books Polar, New Dimension and Mount Fuji seemed to have pride of place in most bookstores on my last few trips to Tokyo. I had the chance to speak with him briefly at the opening of the exhibition and he explained that he is particularly interested in trying to find a new way of photographing ‘icons’ like Mount Fuji. When I first came across his work on Fuji-san, it made me realise that I had almost never seen images of the mountain that were taken up close. It is almost always photographed or portrayed at a respectful distance (try doing a Mount Fuji Google Images search), reinforcing its symbolic nature to the point where you have to wonder whether the real mountain actually exists. Ishikawa takes a very different approach, showing the mountain up close, and revealing it as a barren, sometimes dangerous and desolate place.

Koji Onaka was the highlight of the exhibition for me. I have posted about his work before, but this is the first time I have seen his prints. Onaka began shooting in black and white but has since moved on to colour with very interesting results. He was one of Daido Moriyama’s students and he shares Moriyama’s obsession with dogs. Onaka is more of a wanderer than a traveller and his subject is the old, slightly run-down pockets of the rapidly disappearing ‘old’ Japan. His colours match these locations, as if they have turned slightly with age. He makes his prints himself in very small formats, and the results are wonderful.

Takeshi Dodo also deserves a mention for his black and white work on the islands of Okinawa. There are a number of images that reminded me of Kazuo Kitai, Issei Suda or Hiromi Tsuchida, in their very ‘real’, straightforward and unaffected vision of daily life. Dodo is not overly prone to nostalgia and the modern aspects of life on these remote islands rub right up against the more traditional to create an intriguing portrait of a world that is both far removed from and closely connected to the incessant modernisation of the country.

Takeshi Dodo

I will put a link to my text (in French) once they upload the newsletter to the MCJP website.

Rating: Recommended

Voyages, Maison de la culture du Japon
14 Octo­ber 2009 – 23 Jan­uary 2010

Related posts:

1. Mount Fuji
2. Koji Onaka
3. Review: Mao Ishikawa, Life in Philly

Skyline, Study 3, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2009

Last night was the opening of the Michael Kenna retrospective at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (National Library).  The show includes 210 prints of work spanning from the early 1980s until today, 100 of which Kenna is donating to the BNF after the exhibition. I was surprised that he has over 30 years of work behind him and curious to see what a large retrospective show such as this one would say about the development of this artist.

The first thing to mention is the printing. It is clear from the way that he signs and editions his prints that Kenna is nothing if not meticulous and his small, square format prints are quite stunning. When he moved to the US in the late 1970s, Kenna became Ruth Bernhard’s assistant and printer, and clearly became very good at his job.

The exhibition is well laid out and the BNF’s production values are always high. The work is grouped into a series of themes, from  ’The Tree’ to ‘The Far East’ with a healthy dose of ‘Melancholy’. The show includes a large amount of work from England and the United States (his native and adopted homes), but also a significant amount of recent work shot all over the world (Dubai, New York, Hong Kong, China, and Kenna’s beloved Japan).

Kenna’s surgically-precise minimalist compositions, which—in his own words—are akin to haiku poems, have remained remarkably consistent over time. He is driven by a desire for pure images where not a single element is left to chance. This compositional rigour is paired with long exposures taken overnight or at dawn or dusk, playing with both texture and light in order to create a very personal dream-like vision of the world.  Kenna is masterful in his control of all of these elements and this has enabled him to develop an incredibly consistent personal vision.

However, despite all of this virtuosity, I ended up feeling frustratingly indifferent. One of the wall texts in the show claims that Kenna privileges suggestion over description, but I think he goes far beyond suggestion. His personal vision is so strong that his landscapes tend to resemble each other, whether they are taken in Bognor Regis (below) or in Hokkaido.

Pier Remains, Bognor Regis, Sussex, England, 1990

Kenna’s idealised vision of the world seems to iron out the details and imperfections which give each landscape its distinctiveness. There are moments when his eye seems to become more daring, even critical (see the above Dubai skyline), but these are few and far between. Kenna has increasingly ventured into cities with his camera with mixed results. Particularly in cities with iconic monuments or architecture, I found that his imagery comes dangerously close to upmarket postcard territory (his Brooklyn Bridge images for a good example of this).

In some ways Kenna’s approach seems to be more painterly than photographic: instead of accepting the camera’s all-seeing-eye that reveals everything which appears in the frame, you get the sense that Kenna uses the camera to recreate his interior vision of the world.

Finally, I think that the size of this exhibition is problematic. It is very difficult to compile 210 photographic haikus without suffocating the space that each one of these needs. Instead of the images combining into some form of symphony, I found that repetition sets in about halfway through.

In one of the final wall texts, reference is made to Barthes statement “All of a sudden, I became indifferent to the fact of not being modern.”  This seems appropriate for Kenna. He is in search of a particular kind of beauty and is not concerned with the now: none of his images seem to have any link to the time in which they were made. If you can accept this about him, this exhibition has a better chance of resonating with you.

Lijiang River, Study 4, Guilin, China, 2006

Michael Kenna
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Site Richelieu. 13 October 2009 – 24 January 2010.

Rating: Worth a look

Related posts:

1. Review: Michael Wolf @ Galerie Particulière