Hey Microcord, thanks for the comment.

Suzuki – I can’t even find his photos from 3/11 anymore, too much stuff was posted in the interim and I don’t remember them as really being worth tracking down. I didn’t use “atmospheric” as praise, just that they seemed to focus on the air, or really nothing in particular. I guess the word makes us think different things, even though we both missed out on art school.

Nachtwey and Nahr – they suffer from the same thing. I’ve written a rant about this which I am letting simmer for now, before editing and refining it. So this reply may not come out clearly. Basically, the trap is turning the disaster into an object of aesthetic pleasure.

To speak a little bit in bad faith, they can’t avoid it. They’re too technically skilled as photographers to do anything else! But it’s not that technically skilled photographers cannot create meaningful images here – these photographers had to fall back on their technical skill because they no other meaningful context or interest through which to approach these events. I think that the photographically unskilled ROLLS photographers have created better images than the professionals because they have a reason to be in evacuation centers beyond generating informational content. I think for everyone’s sake I should stop here.

Yes, I saw Arimoto’s show. What did you think of it?

…and today we wake up to this terrible news:

http://www.voanews.com/english/news/africa/Award-Winning-War-Photographer-Killed-in-Libya-120318944.html

I feel differently about this.

Thanks for the amiable comeback, Dan.

I’m feeling slightly sick, after the deaths of Hetherington and Hondros. Though I’d known of Hetherington and seen some of his work, there’s a extra twist with Hondros: I don’t remember ever having heard of him. Now that I see some of his work, I see that it’s fine. So some ho-hum photographers of nothing much (and here I do not mean photographers of the fascinating “infraordinary”) are feted; while fine photographers of work that needs to be shown and seen go unremarked until they’re shot dead. To me, there’s something very wrong here.

Let’s forget Suzuki. Which for me at least is very easy to do.

Let’s instead look at Nachtwey’s series. It starts with panoramas. Both by contrast and by resemblance, they bring to my mind such earlier photographs as the panoramas of post-bomb Hiroshima. (And this even before I read the text.) Perhaps this is partly because they’re B/W. I’m not struck in any other way by their formal properties though. Later there’s “An abyss of destroyed houses in Kesennuma on March 15, 2011” and I suppose if we’re very pernickety we may question if it really is an abyss, or we may say that the word is religulous — but it’s likely that the precise wording of the caption was fixed by somebody other than Nachtwey, so enough. There’s a man visible there, and yes, his positioning could have been advised by some writer of an introductory photography textbook. Ditto for the next one, “A man assesses the damage on a mountain of debris in Kesennuma on March 15, 2011”. (And how do we know he’s assessing the damage? Maybe he’s just thinking “Aw, shit.” But Nachtwey was presumably there with somebody who spoke Japanese, and perhaps they spoke, and perhaps the man had said that he was assessing the damage; let’s not rush to be too cynical here.) Next, corpses. Always problematic, of course. I suspect that even when viewed larger, they’re not obviously identifiable. I don’t find this exploitative.

Let’s not do a blow by blow, but accept that yes, we have car-on-roof, car-on-car, house-in-flood, and the other expected scenes. Well, that’s the way it was. And we have some scenes with pairs and threes of people that are flawlessly composed. Should I censure Nachtwey for standing and pointing and clicking the latter when he could instead either not have bothered to move or have moved so that a background head could have sprouted out of the chest of a foreground body, or similar? I think not. Nor should he be pushed to be Klein or Peress or (gah!) Gilden.

The photographs seem fine to me. Yes, they give me a certain aesthetic pleasure. Why should they not? What’s wrong with aesthetic pleasure? Anyway, for me at least the aesthetic pleasure is inseparable from the scene; I’d like to say that it adds power or poignancy but “poignancy” brings to mind sentimentality and all sorts of other baggage that I don’t particularly want here. So forget the poignancy, let’s settle for power.

Are we perhaps a little afraid of power these days? Certainly as I sleepily flick through the latest photobook offerings in Kinokuniya and so forth, I don’t see much of it. Well, there’s powerful color, from some people. But mostly, it’s blank and bland: bored-looking person, boring-looking building, bored-looking person in front of boring-looking building, pond, red car, whatever, [zzzz].

Me, I’m very glad that Nachtwey went up there and took the photographs that he did. They’re not the kind of photographs that children could have been expected to take, and people should be able to see places such as this as photographed by somebody such as Nachtwey.

That the kids were given cameras and, surprisingly or otherwise, did good work with them is also welcome. (For me, not so surprisingly. I’ve seen “Born into Brothels”.) I don’t think I’m being condescending here: this isn’t a lower artform, it’s a different one; and the best of it deserves publication on paper too. I don’t think the work of Nachtwey or Nahr — or Pellegrin or Steele-Perkins, which I haven’t seen, but I believe they were also in the area — lessens or undercuts it in any way.

Having expended all those keystrokes on Nachtwey, I’ll spare you my thoughts on Nahr (unless you ask).

I was very impressed by Arimoto’s work. (It was the first time I’d heard of him.) The man has energy, he has a rapport with many of his subjects, the negatives are fine, their printing is superb, it’s “all killer, no filler” — it was twenty times as good as a show a five-minute walk away by a much more famous photographer, or indeed a larger show somewhere else in town by a yet more famous photographer. Their soporific books sell well, his single book (on Tibet) is an obscurity.

I think my initial reaction to Nachtwey’s photos was clouded by having read the text first, along with a cynicism towards photojournalist bros who are self-styled “badasses”/“heroes.” (This comes from personal experience, and stuff like this.) It’s also slightly ridiculous to read about Japanese people giving the photographers food and shelter, as if they weren’t the ones who’d lost their homes! But I digress, really, this train of thought is too cynical. If we think about war photographers for a second, their work is necessary because the stakes are really high there, and I don’t mean just in terms of the risk to their personal safety. The images they produce influence the course of these events. That’s power!

The stakes of post-disaster photography are probably lower, but it would of course be ridiculous to have no technically good images from Tohoku for more reasons than I can count. So someone has to be there, there’s no getting around that. I went through and looked at the TIME shots again in full screen mode, and I appreciate what Nachtwey’s done. There’s great value (not talking economically!) in just recording what happened. It seems like he’s not trying to do too much, just letting the scene speak for itself. I like that in every photo but one, you can see far into the distance. Nahr seems to be chasing after particular stories, which I don’t think yields very good results, but I’m too tired to actually get into that right now.

I’ve updated the post accordingly. I’m not trying to write perfectly here, this is all practice. If someone thinks I’m off base I hope to get called out in the comments. So thanks for doing that and pushing me take another look.

I agree with you about the state of photobooks in Kinokuniya. Have you seen the Shibuya Seiji “Dance” book though? Pretty fresh. Arimoto is cool, Totem Pole is by far the best non commercial gallery in Tokyo.

I don’t know, now and again I hear of self-styled badass photojournalists, but they’re rarely named and I start to wonder if more than a small number really exist. I clicked on the link you provided, to some photos by one Max Hodges, and I see nothing wrong there either. And, I’m sorry to say, nothing gripping. (I then googled for him. His website http://maxhodges.com/ is surely well-intentioned but it does have some elements that strike me as very dubious.)

Yes, I saw “Dance” the other day. Like virtually everything else from that widely lauded publisher, it didn’t do anything for me, sorry. But certainly it’s bigger and splashier than most. I’ll try to take a second look at it some time.

If I seem a grouch, here’s an unsolicited tip. You like Kitai’s Spain book. Perhaps you like his others. Have you seen his old book 新世界物語 (Shinsekai Monogatari)? It’s one to look out for; snap it up cheap while he’s still undiscovered by Parr ‘n’ Badger.

Ha, I feel like more of the grouch on this thread! But let’s not make it a competition.

Fair enough if “Dance” didn’t grab you, but I do think it’s worth another look. He’s not trying to do anything too deep with it, which is nice. I’ve been meaning to check out more of Kitai’s older books, I haven’t even seen 村へ (Mura e) yet. I’ll check it out next time I’m at the Syabi library.

I’m not sure that I’ve seen 村へ either. I have seen his recent book that I think collects a lot of what’s in 村へ, but the book design forces the reproductions to be small. Most of the (“portrait”) pages of 新世界物語 are taken up by a single photo, with some “landscape” photos take up double page spreads. (None of that effete “margins” nonsense here!) There are also essays by Kitai, which I’m too lazy to attempt to read but which I’m reliably assured are excellent. All in all this could be one of Araki’s better old books.

Back to the earthquake. The local bookshops are starting to display photographic supplements from, or anyway named after, weekly magazines (or long-dead monthly ones such as “Asahi Graph”). Most that I looked at were much as I expected; I wasn’t tempted to buy. But the one linked with “Aera” isn’t bad at all; it’s worth the price of 980 yen or whatever.