eyecurious books etc.

By eyecurious | Published: 24 March 2010

eyecurious_logo_books

I’ve decided to launch an eyecurious offshoot over on tumblr: eyecurious books etc. I have started this little side-project because of the photo-books that are overtaking my small Paris apartment. For a number of reasons, including compulsive buying, getting sent review copies and amazingly generous photographers, I get my hands on a fair number of photobooks. I would love to review them all on eyecurious, but I just don’t have enough words in me for that and so I have decided to start this blog to feature some of the weird and wonderful photobooks that are finding their way into my life.

The plan is to focus on pictures of the books themselves and maybe to set up the odd book swap. The reviews and other photo-related writing will stay right here on eyecurious.

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Mission Impossible

By eyecurious | Published: 23 March 2010

© Aurelien Dumont / The Impossible Collection

An image made by Aurelien Dumont using the Impossible Collection's new PX100 instant film

Please forgive the painfully unoriginal title of this post, but it does seem really appropriate. In a couple of days the aptly-named Impossible Project will begin to sell the first of their instant film packs for Polaroid cameras on their online store. Although there has been a fair amount of buzz out there on this for several months, it never felt entirely certain that they would really be able to save instant film when Polaroid decided to stop making it in 2008. At a time where materials for film photography are becoming painfully scarce, to the point where photographers are stockpiling paper or filling their freezers with film, it feels like a big deal that a company has found a way to actually start making new kinds of instant film. The British Journal of Photography has a feature on the new product launch and a few samples of images made with the new PX100 film.

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Paris in Amsterdam

By eyecurious | Published: 15 March 2010

_MG_7730_9

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.

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Review: Stefan Heyne, The Noise

By eyecurious | Published: 9 March 2010

The NoiseStefan 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 blur to create these abstractions of simple objects in such a way that there is little that is obviously ‘photographic’ about these images. The essays in the book refer to Gerhard Richter’s photorealistic paintings and Heyne’s images feel like a similar exploration of the boundary between painting and photography.

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March Madness: 1 month, 2 exhibitions

By eyecurious | Published: 1 March 2010
Shigeichi Nagano, Workers at 5pm, Marunouchi, Tokyo, 1959

Shigeichi Nagano, Workers at 5pm, Marunouchi, Tokyo, 1959

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 any Swedish or Stockholm-based readers out there, do come along. The show runs from 6 March to 2 May 2010, and you can find out more about it here and here.

Eikoh Hosoe, Ukiyo-e Projections #1-1, 2002

Eikoh Hosoe, Ukiyo-e Projections #1-1, 2002

Then on 20 March, Eikoh Hosoe: Theatre of Memory opens in Cologne at the Japanese Cultural Institute. We are producing a catalogue for this show, which I am very excited about so keep an eye out for more news about that in the next couple of weeks. You can find out more about the exhibition here and here.

In between all of this, I am planning to turn at least a couple of the 20+draft posts that have been staring at me for weeks into published ones.

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Posted in Events, Japanese photography, eyecurious News | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

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

By eyecurious | Published: 27 February 2010
Megumi Tomomitsu

Megumi Tomomitsu

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, than items of clothing, than pretty much anything actually. Thank you Megumi, you have convinced me that I should learn to love my plastic bags, or at least to set them free.

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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

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 further with the ‘Books on Books’ series which each focus on a single photobook in order to make rare and out-of-print books accessible to us mere mortals.

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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 them all to trawling the internet comparing images by fine art photographers and finding striking similarities), but there are some very interesting questions surrounding this issue in the context of photographic ‘art’ and hopefully I will manage to turn my thoughts on the subject into a post soon. In the meantime, here is my latest random online discovery of two images that look pretty similar.

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Shomei Tomatsu, As Salaam Alaykum

By eyecurious | Published: 15 February 2010
Shomei Tomatsu, Kingdom of Mud

Shomei Tomatsu, Kingdom of Mud

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 led to a series entitled Kingdom of Mud. I hope these will be vintage works, but in any case a Tomatsu exhibition is always worth a visit.

Shomei Tomatsu, As Salaam Alaykum, Gallery 21
2-28 March 2010

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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 him.

(via foodforyoureyes)

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Posted in Existentialist photo-ramblings, On a lighter note, Tangents | Tagged | 5 Comments