Japanese Photobooks In London

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2012, Jul 20
Japanese Photobooks In London

If you, like the rest of the world, happen to be around London in the next couple of months, you probably ought to check out the Contemporary Japanese Photobooks exhibit at The Photographer’s Gallery. ¹ It looks like it gives an overview of book publishing in Japan, and I heard that there are some weird animal-themed books and other errata there as well.

The exhibit has a Tumblr ², which is noteworthy in that each book has a comment page, and viewers like us are encouraged to submit a topic to the site for discussion. Whether this will actually happen remains to be seen, but the idea is a good one.

The links are already rolling in, including a post from Microcord ³ going over the specifics of some of the books, and a useless review ⁴ of the show. I’ll update if anything else comes in; I’d love to hear what Francis Hodgson ⁵ has to say about it.

http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/contemporary-japanese-photobooks-2

http://contemporaryjapanesephotobooks.tumblr.com/

http://microcord.wordpress.com/2012/07/15/rare-japanese-photobooks-in-london/

http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2012/07/japanese-photobooks

http://francishodgson.com/: Really recommend his writing

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Hello,

I went to this exhibition this weekend and just wanted to say it was pretty good.
I was impressed their diverse collection of Japanese photo books. I’m not sure if it gives an overview of book publishing in Japan, but certainly it must give an overview of our diverse culture, from obsession with cherry blossoms to geeky subculture. It was also interesting to see quite many photographers mentioned the earthquake and the following disaster in their latest publications. I could feel something inside of themselves changed since the disaster..

Posted by microcord / July 27, 2012 at 8:10 am:

Yes, a lot of photobooks do indeed mention it. And some are probably affected by it. For various reasons I’m not very surprised that there don’t seem to be many photobooks about it (outside the numerous A4 collections put out by various newspapers). Still, I’d expect that there’d be rather more than either are on display or that I know of. And I’d be interested to learn of more. With that in mind, I posted http://sn.im/cjp_shaking . It’s one of very few “topics” so far posted to that site; feel free to respond there to it, and, um … I’ll try to find a computer capable of showing the responses, if any. (The requirements seem to be: (i) screen resolution about double that of the [admittedly tiny] computer I’m using now, and (ii) Ghostery and similar disabled.)

Posted by Dan / July 31, 2012 at 9:22 am:

MC, I saw the exchange you had on the PG Tumblr. I feel like it shouldn’t be a surprise that the earthquake has not been felt in books so much yet, I personally don’t feel the need to see an immediate response in book form.

I just saw some of Lieko Shiga’s new work this past weekend in Higashikawa, and she said she will be publishing it in November, to coincide with her exhibit at the Mediateque in Sendai. She’s been living in Natori (Miyagi-ken) for 4 years, working as both the town’s official photographer and making her own personal work. I’m looking forward to seeing the whole series.

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