© Aya Takada

Japan has more than its fair share of abandoned buildings (called haikyo), and there is an entire culture around photographing them. For the most part, haikyo photography is the domain of truly extreme camera nerdery, but that’s certainly not the fault of the buildings themselves.

In her most recent handmade book, “Tamako,” Aya Takada shows one way that haikyo photography could move away from a simple ode to trespassing. She looks at the texture of abandoned things, in an entirely unsentimental way. The title of the book (“Lake Tama”) gives a hint that Takada is interested in more than just these buildings, and she’s included images of the nature that surrounds them. A small map illustrates the general area, which lies deep on the Seibu line, while the book is wrapped in a cloth that matches Seibu’s own trademark yellow train.

© Aya Takada

“Tamako” seems like it isn’t finished yet, but as a hand-produced edition of 30, it is an excellent book dummy. “Tamako” is available during Paris Photo at KiOSK ¹, a pop-up bookstore outside of Le Bal. If you’re in Paris, you can come by KiOSK on Sunday, November 18 ² at noon for a signing with Daisuke Yokota and Hiroshi Takizawa, while I’m presenting the second MCV MCV title, Wataru Yamamoto’s “Drawing a Line,” at 12:30 on the same day.

© Aya Takada

© Nobuyoshi Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki, “Sentimental Sky” at Rat Hole Gallery

It’s unlikely that this show would convert any non-believers to the Araki camp, but for those of us who are already in his camp, this was a good if not quite transcendent show. Araki recently moved out of the Setagaya apartment that served as the backdrop for so many of his photographs, and the centerpiece of this exhibit was a digital loop of color photographs of the sky taken from this most iconic of Japanese balconies. None of the images were particularly stunning, but the video worked as a whole. A young photographer could never get away with this kind of work, but then again, they’re not Araki. Some black and white photographs taken on the balcony, a few paintings of Yoko and a strange series of sky photos projected onto a nude Kaori rounded out the show.

Alejandro Chaskielberg, “Alejandro Chaskielberg” at 916 Gallery

916 Gallery is an incredible space run by the top dog in Japan’s commercial photography game, Yoshihiko Ueda. I thought that such things didn’t exist in Tokyo: 916 is a massive gallery on the 6th floor of an industrial building way out in Hamamatsucho. Forget Shinjuku, what’s more Blade Runner than shimmering office buildings, industrial warehouses, a useless monorail whizzing overhead? At any rate, the space must be seen to be believed, but if they continue to run out tame exhibitions like this, it will all be for naught.

Sakiko Nomura, Ryudai Takano, Yurie Nagashima, “Missing You” at Hikarie 8/ Cube 1, 2, 3

Hikarie is a new mall in Shibuya with an art space on the 8th floor. This was a three person show of photographers who I suppose could be connected through the genre of “personal photography.” The strongest connection you might find, though, was that you could walk away with a new bedding set courtesy of Nomura bedsheets and a Takano pillow. Each photographer showed representative work: Nomura’s intimate black and white photographs, Nagashima’s atmospheric work from “Swiss,” and Takano’s abstract portraits of male bodies. Mostly forgettable, except for a long vertical strip of paper over Takano’s largest (and most explicit) photo. I thought it had been placed by the gallery to spare passersby the apparently unthinkable trauma of seeing a male organ as they took a break from shopping, but it was actually Takano’s own choice.

Shinya Arimoto, “ariphoto selection vol. 3” at Totem Pole Photo Gallery

Arimoto holds a few exhibitions every year, usually showing his recent street portraits shot in Shinjuku. This time, he was showing work from Tibet, which he’d taken in 2009 on assignment for Playboy. (Arimoto had spent a much longer period of time there before.) There were a couple of nice portraits, especially one of a Tibetan biker, and as always the prints were extremely well-made. Still, something seemed missing: most of the photos were a little too straight-on, leaving little impression. Arimoto once did a show which consisted pretty much of portraits of bugs he’d found in the forest; at the time I thought the work was too strange, but it’s stayed with me. I would be surprised if the same thing happened with this show.

Haruto Hoshi, “St Photo Exhibition 14: Osaka” at 3rd District Gallery

Hoshi remarked wistfully that it would be years before anyone saw the value in his photos, and it does seem ironically true that snapshots of any kind—”street” or not—look freshest when they’ve been pulled out of storage after being forgotten for a few decades. Hoshi’s work is ready to be appreciated now, though, as the heir to the Katsumi Watanabe/Seiji Kurata lineage of “deep” street photography. For the moment, it looks like he’s about to find a new working rhythm, and try shooting some different subjects. He’s built up a significant archive of photos over the last five or six years, and now he’s going to sit back and edit. I hope there isn’t a decades-long wait before it sees the light of day again.

Everywhere around us, a landscape of ravage merged with ocean and sky to present shockingly photogenic scenes. Every modern and postmodern aesthetic, together with memories of the greatest literature, art and cinema, could be found or invoked in what we saw, in the quality of air and light, in the sounds and the silence, and in the emotions we felt or tried to imagine. A photographer could come here, and at the end of a single day’s shooting have enough pictures for the most spectacular photobook – like Robert Polidori or Mitch Epstein’s photographs of New Orleans after Katrina. Yet, what Lieko showed us and talked about demanded another order of engagement. It asked for a constant readjustment and refinement of judgment, in which the power of feeling and recall becomes inseparable from the ethical, the practical and the aesthetic.

Aveek Sen, “The Resistant Photograph: A Day with Lieko Shiga” ¹

This paragraph alone contains more insight about photography after 3/11 than any other entire piece of writing I’ve seen. The rest of the article is also excellent, showing why Shiga’s upcoming Sendai show ² could be an important one.

Aveek Sen’s posts for the Fotomuseum blog ³ are also worth a look.

Somehow $12 and zine do not go hand-in-hand, nor do $12 and Edition of 500, nor do zine and Edition of 500. Fewer, and actual, spreads would have been more convincing. Both reinforce the trivial manner in which zines have been imported to Asia as commercial opportunity rather than as cultural vehicle.ⁱ

ⁱ This generalization will be addressed in reviews to follow. To frame this argument, refer to the stated price for Mok’s ichikawadaimon on Panorama.jp’s webshop (¥3150, current conversion is US$38 v. the $10 for which it was acquired directly from the photographer through her Etsy shop). Or to Zines Mate’s (a Tokyo-based organization responsible for Tokyo Art Book Fair) call for “Asian Zines” along with its outcome and their distribution fees and terms.

From a r-e-v-i-e-w ¹ of  Ye Rin Mok’s “28 Pictures”

This is not a sound argument, to put it mildly, and the author knew it; thus the retreat and promise of more evidence down the line. Ah, but it’s six months later, he hasn’t written again for the site, and it still remains a generalization of, well, continental proportions to claim that “zines have been imported to Asia as commercial opportunity rather than as cultural vehicle.” Even if some opportunists do exist on this continent—the largest of all continents, as it happens—there are, indeed, Asian people who create zines for cultural rather than economic reasons ². In any case, what exactly is a zine anyway, such that it should not be sold for $12 or be published in an edition of 500? More to the point, why would any non-skater make such a zealous attempt to defend its honor in 2012?

I can’t comment on the evil terms that Zine’s Mate proposes because they are not published on their site. Panorama is indeed selling “Ichikawadaimon” for ¥3000. Still, a quick glance at the front page of the site ³ shows that they’re not marking up other books drastically, if at all. The book is no longer available anywhere else, and it’s hardly only Japanese people—excuse me, hardly only Asians!—who sell books (and zines ⁴) above their retail price.

The cover of Sloth In My Head's second zine, ¥300

Zine’s Mate’s own Tokyo Art Book Fair ⁵ happened just a couple of weeks ago, and while there may have been some people looking to make a fast yen, there were also plenty of others selling their publications for cheap (¥300 or less). Sloth In My Head ⁶ is a so-called “endless zine project.” The zines are printed well, in color, at an almost unwieldy size larger than A3. They sell for ¥300. Meanwhile, Ye Rin Mok herself had a new zine on display at the fair, published with Tokyo-based Booklet Press. “Ceramics Class” ⁷ costs ¥650 and is printed in an edition of 100, which hardly seems like the stuff of commercial opportunity.

I stumbled across a review of the “Shutter and Love: Girls are Dancin’ on in Tokyo” show ¹, which was held at INFAS in 1996. This is a well-written article, offering a lot of valuable context about the days of HIROMIX and Yurie Nagashima. There was also a book (edited by Kotaro Iizawa) produced around this show ², which can be had for fairly cheap ³; I need to go get one myself.

I do sometimes wonder what it would have been like to be in mid-90s Tokyo. In my imagination, it’s not at all unlike being in a Fishmans video:

© Lieko Shiga

Lieko Shiga’s ¹ new exhibit, “Rasen Kaigan” ² (螺旋海岸, “spiral coast”) opens at the Sendai Mediatheque on November 7, 2012, and will run until January 14, 2013. It should be worth the trip from Tokyo.

Shiga’s images are always visually striking, but there’s more going on in her photographs than sleight of hand. As this interview shows ³, she cultivates certain relationships (or causes certain situations) to create her work. For the past six years, she’s lived in Miyagi Prefecture, serving as the official town photographer of Natori-shi. This seems like an ideal situation, since it’s put her in the position of interacting directly with the residents of the town as part of her job. From what little I saw of this new work (maybe seven or eight prints) at this summer’s Higashikawa Photo Festival ⁴ I can say it’s turned out well, and I wouldn’t want to miss the chance to see what Shiga can do with an entire museum floor.

"Flowers for my Mom from Harry Beee and Allee." Posted to terrysdiary.com on 9/13/12

Terry Richardson has never been a favorite photographer of mine. Still, it is worth taking a look at his blog ¹ to see the photos that he took around the time of his mother’s death. (Find September 18 and scroll back from there.) The photos are a direct, “unflinching” look at this experience, in the words of my esteemed colleague John at American Photo ². This episode has changed my view of him, if only a little, for all the reasons that John lays out in his article.

The only thing I would add is that the photos reminded me a lot of Nobuyoshi Araki, another photographer who, rightly or wrongly, is sometimes dismissed as a simple pornographer. A couple of years ago, Araki had a show at Rat Hole Gallery in memory of his recently-deceased cat. I went to the gallery thinking that it would be awful, and some part of me was ready to write him off entirely. But the show was genuinely moving, and I haven’t looked at Araki in the same way since. I’m really not sure how dramatically my opinion of Terry Richardson will change, but for a few days at least, he had me thinking of him in terms of Araki.