"Hua standing by the Yangtze River, Chongqing, 2008" © Tomoko Kikuchi

This year, both Arata Dodo and Tomoko Kikuchi received the Ihee Kimura Photography Prize. I wrote about Dodo a few weeks ago for American Photo ¹, and last week I wrote about Kikuchi’s work ². Kikuchi, who lives in China, has spent the past eight years documenting Chinese drag queens.

It’s two years on from March 11, 2011. No one in Tokyo has literally forgotten about the triple disaster, but it’s easy to feel as if it never happened. There are still only three photo projects about the disaster that I think are worth viewing: Rolls Tohoku ¹, Naoya Hateyakama’s “Natural Stories” and Lieko Shiga’s “Rasen Kaigan.”

People around Tokyo may be interested to see Toshiya Watanabe’s exhibit “18 Months,” at Poetic Scape in Naka-Meguro ².

© Masatoshi Naito

Masatoshi Naito’s work “Ba-Ba-Bakuhatsu!” (“Grandma Explosion!”) is featured on Fraction Magazine Japan ¹. This is a good opportunity to see a number of photos from a 1970s book that now sells for a few hundred dollars ².

I’m happy to see that Totem Pole Photo Gallery is using Tumblr ¹.

Jin Ohashi’s Surrendered Myself to the Chair of Life (Akaaka, 2012) ¹ seems like it could be “one of the most talked-about photobooks of the year,” whatever that might mean. Ohashi staged and photographed an orgy, and the work was published in a huge, 6-kilogram book.

In this interview with a porn magazine (Japanese, and NSFW for the ads surrounding the interview) ², Ohashi talks about his motivation for spending, as he says, “enough money to buy a small house in Tokyo” on the production of his book. It pretty much boils down to “Well, I had an image of a bunch of people having sex at once, so, I made this book.”

To be just a little bleak, this is about what I expected to hear. Am I wrong to hope for more, though?

I wrote an article for American Photo about Wataru Yamamoto’s work ¹. It’s a little less esoteric than the text I posted a few days ago, which is reproduced in the book itself ².

© Wataru Yamamoto

In Raymond Roussel’s 1914 novel “Locus Solus,” readers are introduced to a series of impossibly complex machines, all of which serve no discernible purpose; one, for example, is a road-paving machine which creates the mosaic of a soldier out of human teeth. These machines are the result of a playful technique that Roussel applied to his native French. In this game, a phrase like “demoiselle à prétendant” (“a girl with suitors”) becomes “demoiselle à rêitre en dents” (“paver with soldier, of teeth”). The task Roussel set himself was to cover the distance between these two phrases, and the result in this case was the tooth-placing device which (because of other plays on words) was powered by minute changes (predictable ten days ahead of time) in the direction and intensity of the breeze.

In short, Roussel was performing an experiment with language, and in the most basic sense, Wataru Yamamoto’s photography is also experimental: he sets up certain conditions for his photographs, and sees them through to the end of the work. Still, these experimental systems—one generating text, the other images—are idiosyncratic, not scientific. Roussel’s linguistic games developed out of an experience with a punning carnival worker, while Wataru holds a long-standing interest in nature, having grown up near an untouched forest.

“Drawing a Line” makes its experimental technique clear to the viewer, and it’s a strange time for such a work to appear. Many of Wataru’s Japanese contemporaries are more inclined to chase after fleeting moments of beauty, using a highly personal, intentionally vague style. This aesthetic has dominated Japanese photography in recent years, but it now seems to have exhausted itself, out of its depth in the Japan of 2012. The challenge for the next generation of Japanese photographers (Wataru’s generation) is not so much to found a new aesthetic program—as if this would be a step forward—but to find a way beyond aesthetically-driven photography altogether. Roussel is now commonly seen as an important precursor of significant literary developments, and we could take Wataru’s untimely appearance as a good omen.

Drawing a Line ¹ is the second book published by MCV MCV. It includes text in English and Japanese. Available online through PH ².

Design by In Residence (USA)
Edition of 500
48 pages
Black & white offset, printed in Singapore
Thread sewn binding
303 x 231mm

© Wataru Yamamoto

© Wataru Yamamoto

© Wataru Yamamoto

© Wataru Yamamoto

© Wataru Yamamoto

© Wataru Yamamoto

© Wataru Yamamoto

I’m happy to announce the second MCV MCV book: Wataru Yamamoto’s Drawing a Line. There is more information about the book on the MCV MCV site ¹, and it can be purchased directly from PH ².

© Dodo Arata

I wrote a short article (with many images) ¹about Dodo Arata’s Ihee Kimura Photography Prize-winning photobook Taigan ² for American Photo.

© Mao Ishikawa

I’m not sure if I’m going to do capsule review “roundups” anymore, we’ll have to see. The main reason of publishing this kind of thing is to serve as a personal archive, so that I can look back later and see what I saw, as it were. I’ve taken plenty of notes on shows before but it’s more practical to have them in a digital form, where I can actually see them.

Mao Ishikawa’s show at Yokohama Civic Art Gallery Azamino ¹ is excellent, free, and up until the 24th, if you’re around. The highlight of the exhibition is the collection of original prints from her earliest series, “Hot Days in Okinawa.” The story is that Ishikawa started working at a bar frequented by American servicemen precisely in order to photograph the customers. There’s not enough time here to talk about the complex relationship between America and Okinawa, but in any case there is a real honesty, or directness, about these early photographs. Ishikawa interacts directly with her subjects, you can tell she’s just taking snapshots of her friends, and although she also knows that they’ll be historically significant, she doesn’t worry about that too much. She’s a great photographer of sex. Along with the vintage prints there was also a video slideshow, set to funky songs from the 1970s, which I imagine would have been playing around the time that these photos were actually taken. This also helps to keep things light. I’m very happy that the above photo was on the gallery site because it was one of my favorites: it’s a standard “1970s pose” (a group of people all laying in a bed, smoking) but with American soldiers and Japanese hostesses.

The second floor of the gallery is showing an exhibit of 19th-century photographs from America, including a small negative exposed by Matthew Brady of Abraham Lincoln, Civil War photographs and a print by old Fox Talbot. It goes well with Ishikawa’s exhibit, as a view of “America.”