Category Archives: Japanese photography

Interview: Eikoh Hosoe’s Butterfly Dream

The exhibition, Eikoh Hosoe: Theatre of Memory has just closed at the Japanese Cultural Institute in Cologne. I did an interview with Hosoe during the opening weekend and a video extract has been posted on photographie.com. Update: Just a few minutes after posting this, I found out that Kazuo Ohno has just passed away at [...]
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A bad father… and a Japanese giveaway

I have just realised that eyecurious turned 1… about 3 weeks ago. I have never been good at remembering birthdays (thank you Facebook for stepping in to fill that breach), but to forget your own offspring’s birthday is a little unforgiveable. I thought I would use this momentous occasion to ask you readers if there [...]
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Review: Mao Ishikawa, Life in Philly

There is a famous saying in Japan, “The nail that sticks out is hammered down.” If there is any truth to that over-used trope, Mao Ishikawa cannot have had an easy life. Born in 1953 in Okinawa, she was one of the very few female photographers of her generation who attempted to make a career [...]
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The art of the caption

Choosing words to go with photographs is a big issue for us photobloggers. Some of us avoid them, others use them with caution, and some, like me, can’t seem to hold them back. Choosing the right balance between words and images is a very tricky thing and this tightrope walk often makes me think about [...]
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Guest ‘curator’ on Bite! magazine

A few months ago, Diederik Meijer asked me to guest ‘curate’ (staying true to my post on curating, I have to use those quote marks since this is more editing than curating… but I digress) a week of Japanese photography over on Bite! magazine. It has taken far longer than I thought it would to [...]
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March Madness: 1 month, 2 exhibitions

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

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, [...]
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Review: Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s

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 [...]
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Shomei Tomatsu, As Salaam Alaykum

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 [...]
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Interview: Hiroh Kikai, A man in the cosmos

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 [...]
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