Category Archives: Japanese photography

Yasutaka Kojima

I met Yasutaka Kojima at Photoquai in Paris last year. I don’t know that much about him apart from the fact that he studied with Masato Seto, a former assistant of Daido Moriyama’s and a terrific photographer in his own right. Kojima is based in New York, where I think he is still completing his [...]
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Tokyo highlights

eyecurious has made a slow start to blogging in 2010. However, this was due to a great, albeit far too short trip to Tokyo. I was in Japan preparing two exhibitions that will open in Stockholm, Sweden and in Cologne, Germany in March of this year (more on these in the coming weeks) and laying [...]
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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 [...]
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bookshop M

One of the discoveries that I made at Paris Photo this year was the Japanese bookseller, bookshop M, situated right at the entrance of the fair. There is so much work to see on the walls that I sometimes find it difficult to find the time to spend with all of the books that are on [...]
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Yamashita Tsuneo

Yamashita Tsuneo‘s website has some great work that shows just how far you can go with simplicity. (via mcvmcv)
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No such thing as a free house?

With his Zero Yen House series Kyohei Sakaguchi has been studying the ‘vernacular architecture’ of self-built homeless shelters in Japan’s three largest cities (Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya) for almost 10 years. He uses photographs, descriptions, architectural drawings and video to explore these structures from the perspective of architecture and sustainable development. Sakaguchi has made some [...]
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Akira Rachi and Hirofumi Katayama

It seems to be Taro Nasu Gallery week on eyecurious this week. Following on from the seemingly excellent Ryuji Miyamoto show, they are now going to be showing work by Akira Rachi and Hirofumi Katayama. This show could be called ‘In Between’ as both of these two young photographers focus on interstitial spaces. Katayama seeks [...]
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Ryuji Miyamoto: the grass, the bugs

Ryuji Miyamoto has just had an exhibition of new work at Taro Nasu Gallery in Tokyo’s equivalent of the meat-packing district, Higashi-kanda. These new photograms are quite a departure from his earlier work on the destruction of architecture. Miyamoto had already begun experimenting with photographic techniques for his previous series Pinhole, for which he built [...]
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Mao Ishikawa

At the Arles photo festival over the summer, I was introduced to Mao Ishikawa’s work by Mark Pearson. Mao Ishikawa grew up on the islands of Okinawa, which meant a childhood where the US military was a major and unavoidable presence. Speaking about her relationship with the American military, she has said, “I have two hearts [...]
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Bishin Jumonji

Bishin Jumonji has updated his website with work from his series Faces and some of his terrific headless portraits from the early 1970s which featured in MoMA’s seminal New Japanese Photography show. When I met Jumonji in Kamakura earlier this year he showed me some examples of his latest work, but in black-and-white. These cubist [...]
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