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.

Naohiro Utagawa’s work was part of the Space Cadet show a few weeks ago. ¹ I’d seen his snapshots before, but he’d completely changed his approach this time. The work is still in its early stages—it doesn’t even have a title yet!

All images by Naohiro Utagawa

A spread from Yuhki Touyama's book "Line13"

Andrew and I have been working for a while on PH, a website about Japanese photography. ¹ PH is meant to help facilitate interaction between Japanese photographers and foreign audiences, so for the moment we are distributing photography books which would be otherwise difficult to acquire, either for reasons of sheer unavailability anywhere else online, or cost. The site is still being updated frequently, both in terms of content and structure, so please do check back every so often. (We also have a Twitter account ² and mailing list ³, which we don’t plan to email often.)

So far we are already featuring a number of old Street Level Japan favorites, including Aya Fujioka’s “I Don’t Sleep,” ⁴ Kazuyoshi Usui’s “Showa88” ⁵ and Hiroshi Takizawa’s “A Rock of the Moon.” ⁶

The one thing I’ll crow about is the shipping mechanism for the site, which automatically calculates your shipping cost based on the total weight of your order (including the weight of the box required to ship the books you’ve chosen) and your country of residence, giving you either 2 or 3 possible shipping methods to choose from.

If you have any questions or comments about the site, don’t hesitate to ask.

It seems like my faith in online writing erodes a little bit more each day. Here are a few recent links that broke through the endless content-waves, though.

n+1, “Please RT.” ¹ n+1 on writing in the time of Twitter. Quote: “You won’t sound contemporary and for real unless it sounds like you’re writing off the top of your head. Thus: ‘In The Jargon of Authenticity, Adorno went bonkers with rage, and took off after Heidegger and the existentialists with a buzz saw…'”

Joanna Scott on Vivian Maier in The Nation. ² Sharp writing.

The latest “Behind the Notes” column for American Photo. ³ This 14-year-old photographer writes more eloquently about Tumblr than you. It fills me with so much pride that she’s from Berkeley.

Francis Hodgson on PhotoEspaña in Financial Times. ⁴ Includes an enjoyable skewering of curator language.

Meet the “other” Dan Abbe, “Ranger Dan” Abbe. ⁵

© Miti Ruangkritya

Miti Ruangkritya is a young Thai photographer with some interesting projects on his website. I was particularly drawn to “Thai Politics,” ¹ a three-part series (as he says) “regarding the ongoing political tension in Thailand.” Perhaps it’s the general lack of politically-motivated photography in Japan, but it was refreshing to see these photos taking the pulse of people through their t-shirts. As a point of reference from Japan, the late and very great Yasuhiro Ishimoto did a similar project in the late 90s, shooting the backs of pedestrians in Shibuya. This work was published as a book, “Shibuya, Shibuya,” ² which I can recommend very highly.

© Miti Ruangkritya

© Miti Ruangkritya

Almost as soon as I arrived in Japan, my overall estimation of Daido Moriyama took a plunge. ¹ I’d come with nothing but admiration, but the quality of the work he was releasing seemed average at best, while at the same time Daido paraphernalia ² was flooding the market. Above all, I doubted that he had anything new (and relevant) to show us early millenials.

Moriyama’s latest show at Taka Ishii Gallery, “Color,” had me going back on all that. This exhibit (and really, one particular wall of the gallery) not only shows why Moriyama should be taken seriously as a contemporary photographer, but also provides a way to understand his previous work. I wrote a review at Tokyo Art Beat ³ which more or less expresses why I responded so well to the show. There may be no saving “Nagisa” ⁴ for me—and I can’t even recommend the book version of “Color” because of the way it’s printed—but I’m definitely interested in what Daido is doing again, after a 3 year break. Of course he may disappoint again, but even so, this exhibit was an important one.

A: That’s already been covered by [Western concept-based art movement].

Me: I don’t think he’s aware of [Western concept-based art movement].

B: Well, that’s kind of his problem.

Yes, it is. How naive is too naive?

Yumiko Utsu

The Space Cadet ¹ opening was last night, and it was a pleasant surprise to see lots of people showing up on a rainy night to look at photographs. I don’t have anything comprehensive to say about the show right now, but after being kind of apprehensive ² about the whole thing in my last post, I do want to say that it is worth seeing if you can. It’s only up until this Friday, and the location ³ is objectively inconvenient (although I can ride my bike there). Still it’s a chance to see what Tokyo’s young photographers are trying.

Her: Why is Rinko Kawauchi so popular here?

Me: Well, it seems like Japanese people are attracted to small moments of quiet beauty…

Her: Still?

These are notes for a more detailed post, which outline how I’m thinking about Japanese photography at the moment.

1. Most Western photography audiences are primarily aware of Japanese photography through Provoke, and other groundbreaking photography publications (such as Kikuchi Kawada’s “Map”) of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

2. I’ve heard it said that Japanese photography is difficult to understand. I think this has to do with a broader idea of how Japan has perhaps, for Westerners, assumed the image of the most inaccessibly foreign place in the world.

3. Japanese photography audiences do not look at Provoke even 10% as much as Westerners. To put it plainly, Provoke is just not part of the conversation here.

4. Provoke came out of a political moment (1968, obvs) in which the student-led protest movement seemed capable of striking a blow against the government. This is important. (This movement was put down by the army at Sanrizuka, where students were trying to prevent the forcible construction of Narita airport on the land of farmers who had lived there for generations.)

5. Provoke had Takuma Nakahira producing both as a photographer and as a theorist. I’m only just now starting to try to dig in to his texts, so I won’t try to tell you exactly what they were about. He wrote quite a lot though, and was looking to critical theory of the time to inform his writing.

6. Over the last 10 years (15? 20? I can’t say for sure), Japan has developed a style of what I might call an unconscious photography. This really just means, shooting casually observed moments of everyday beauty. Araki is the patron saint of this type of photography, except that he’s taken it to a point where it’s gone way beyond anything aesthetic, and is doing a sort of cosmic dance with his own personality. (Can explain more later but I do mean this as a compliment.) Hiromix might represent the beginning of this kind of photography as a popular trend, and we shouldn’t forget that Araki bestowed his personal blessing upon her.

7. Forgetting Araki, the most perfectly crystallized example of this unconscious photography is Rinko Kawauchi, who, when at her best (Utatane and Illuminance), seems blessed with the ability to find staggering beauty in anything.

8. There is no political movement in present-day Japan. There is no meaningful context out of which photographs are being produced. There is no Nakahira-like photographer/theorist figure, not even close.

9. Kawauchi’s success abroad is a positive sign for younger Japanese photographers, because there is no need to grasp a particularly Japanese context in her work. This helps everyone: Kawauchi’s photos are providing hands-on training in how to view Japanese photography that’s not taken by men born before 1950.

10. 3/11 is a very, very different story. Precious few photographers have grasped this.