One reason so much critical writing — especially that produced by academics — is so stilted and impenetrable is that its authors simply haven’t been writing often enough, and therefore haven’t learned to hear and modulate the sound of their own written expression. […] As a side effect of this, students come to believe that such strained language is expected of them, and mimic it dutifully, exacerbating the already considerable problems I and others face in teaching them to express their ideas clearly. […] I think we still need — today no less than in 1979, and indeed even more so — to also swell the ranks of writers capable of articulating the crucial issues in photography in an accessible, non-jargonized, engaging and unpedantic language, in order to bring them before an intelligent general audience.

A.D. Coleman, from a talk given in 1999 [link to PDF]

Ken Schles has written two posts over on A.D. Coleman’s blog entitled “Infinite Stupidity.” Schles’ point is that there is a lack of “intelligent conversation” about photography on the internet, and he is correct, although that is hardly a new situation. The only problem with saying this directly on the internet is that you’re unlikely to change anyone’s opinion. An online audience probably needs to be pushed, not led.

We can all agree that the internet needs writing about photography in an “accessible, non-jargonized, engaging and unpedantic language.” It’s easy enough to talk that talk, but let’s not forget the gauntlet that Daniel Blight laid down for us: “the middle-ground you and A.D. Coleman want to occupy doesn’t exist.” Who’s going to create it?

The amount of work that remains trapped in Japan is the primary motivation for writing this blog. Lack of internet usage is one reason that photographs don’t leave the country, but what about when someone makes a nice website, uses readable English, but doesn’t promote it to foreign audiences? This is the case with spacecadet.jp, a very good Tinyvices clone for Japan. It’s being updated with some regularlity, but seems to have no recognition outside of Japan—and maybe not even that much inside, either. This post is only saying: visit spacecadet.jp, bookmark it, and come back again later.

A couple of big articles I wrote for American Photo went up over the past week.

The first was a feature on Tokyo’s gallery scene. It focuses in particular on Totem Pole Photo Gallery, which is a place that really helped me decide to move to Tokyo in the first place. This article is pretty gung-ho about Tokyo’s photography galleries, and I’ll have a little more to say about that stance here.

The second was an interview with Patrick Tsai, who is in a very practical way the reason that I was able to stay in Japan longer than just a couple of tourist visas. For almost a year now, Patrick has been writing a blog, Talking Barnacles, which has turned into a fairly incredible project. I posted about it a long time ago, but haven’t since; the nature of writing a blog is that things disappear quickly. Sometimes that’s good, but this is case where it’s unhelpful. I guess I can’t post every week about Talking Barnacles, just to say, “hey, did you know that Pat’s still writing this really good blog?” Maybe I should though.

At the same time that Yuhki Touyama’s exhibit is up at 35 Minutes, her photos will also be displayed halfway around the world in America. I have no idea if anyone in Indiana reads this blog, but her work will be part of a show of four female Japanese photographers up from February 3 to March 31 at Bloomington’s Pictura Gallery.

The four photographers are Yuhki Touyama, Tomoe Murakami, Ai Takahashi and Yuki Tawada. It will be worth a look if you’re around.

I’m excited to announce a show coming up at 35 Minutes: Yu Ukai and Yuhki Touyama’s first collaboration, just called “Exhibit #1.” Touyama and Ukai are two excellent young photographers, and if all goes well they will be holding monthly, experimental exhibits at 35 Minutes. There is an opening party on Friday, February 3rd, more information is below.

スタジオ３５分のお知らせします。若手の頭山ゆう紀さんと鵜飼悠さんが出発のコラボレーション写真展をやってます。二人はとてもいい写真家で僕はわくわくします。詳しい情報は下記です：

鵜飼悠 頭山ゆう紀 展 1
Yu Ukai Yuhki Touyama #1

2012年2月3日(金)〜5日(日)
金曜日18時〜21時
土・日曜日12時〜19時

Fri February 3 – Sun February 5
Fri 6-9pm
Sat, Sun 12-7pm

Nakano-ku Kamitakada 5-47-8
東京都中野区上高田5-47-8

After a long post-earthquake hiatus, it seems like regular service has resumed at the Japan Exposures blog. They’re back with a gallery of Shintaro Sato’s new work on Tokyo Sky Tree. I’m hoping that this is not just a flash in the pan!

A few weeks ago I wrote a post responding to A.D. Coleman’s talk “Dinosaur Bones.” At the time, I sent it over to Coleman to see what he would think of it; I figured that he probably wasn’t going to get too many responses that engaged him, and that he might like to read what I wrote. As it turns out, he enjoyed the post, and proposed that we continue to talk about the issues brought up in “Dinosaur Bones” through a kind of loose online correspondence. I agreed, and Coleman’s first article “Letters to a Young Critic (1)” went up online a couple of days ago.

I do have a small reservation about being cast as the “young critic.” I don’t want to be treated merely as a foil for A.D. Coleman’s eminent brilliance, though I do trust that Coleman is not approaching the dialogue in that way. (The subject line of my original email to Coleman did include the words “young critic,” so I probably brought it upon myself!) A quick look back at the history of “young” correspondents does not bode particularly well: as of today, there is no Wikipedia entry for Franz Kappus, Rilke’s “Young Poet.” Jean Beaufret, the addressee of Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” has a pretty nice one though. Perhaps the greatest danger is that by “young” you will read “immature,” which has its own Kantian implications that are really not important to discuss here. You understand what I am saying.

Coleman has started out the exchange by talking concretely about the way that critics make a living. He’s shared some figures of the income he’s made over his career: roughly $20,000 in 1995 and roughly $7,000 in 2011. (I’m assuming that there is a more or less even decline between those years.) He also calculates the amount of money he’s made from the donation box on his blog, divides it by the number of posts, and comes up with a figure of $7 per post. Ouch! Of course, this is not a helpful way to examine blogging, because the form is not just limited to what Coleman says he posts online, namely “lengthy, deliberated essays, written to the same standards as the work I’ve published in print.” Blog posts can be written in 10 minutes or less, and it’s often those posts that get the most attention—for better or worse.

What’s the value of a blog post? I wouldn’t look at it strictly in terms of money. A friend of mine in San Francisco had a video Tumblr whose tagline read: “New media existentialism. Fake it until you make it.” She’s now the online video editor at The Atlantic. Is each post she made on that blog worth a fraction of her new salary? Probably not, but that activity has value as a whole, in the same way that this blog is the resume that got me a job at American Photo.

This may appear to have an only tangential relation to the problem of making a living as a photo critic, though I think it helps set the stage of online media, where bloggers can be called up directly to the big leagues without any seasoning. Still, as Daniel Campbell Blight noted in the comments of the last post, this discussion is “too general.” That’s probably true! There are a lot of concepts being tossed around here—photo criticism, photo theory, bloggers, online writing, offline writing—but I’m happy to sift through the mess and see what comes out of it.

If you haven’t seen it already, Ken Iseki’s blog “my new notebook” is becoming one of the best resources for information about Japanese photography culture online. Iseki-san started off writing exclusively in Japanese, but lately has posted all in English. I think there’s a great lack of information about photography in Japanese, so I kind of hope that he continues to write in both languages, although I know that can be pretty difficult.

久しぶりに日本語で書きますが、井関ケンさんのブログ「my new notebook」は本当に成長されています。井関さんは優しく日本の写真文化を紹介する。実は、日本で「写真についてブログ」というサイトはあまりない気がしますよね。だからこのブログはとても重要だと思います。井関さんは以前日本語しか書かなかったけど、最近は英語ばかり。井関さん、是非日本語を使ってください！

A very smart photo editor at the New Yorker paired up Haruto Hoshi to take Jake Adelstein’s photos to go along with a longer piece about Adelstein’s crime reporting in Tokyo. I’m very curious to know how this came about, and I’ll be sure to ask Hoshi when I visit his show, which is currently up at Shinjuku’s Third District Gallery until the 22nd of this month.

[This was posted to LPV Magazine a few days ago, with a whole bunch of images to illustrate some of the books I’m talking about.]

At the 2010 edition of the Higashikawa Photo Festival, I met a photographer named Iino. We were both getting drunk at the annual barbeque, where everyone gets together and eats a bunch of free food. Iino was a fun guy, and as we talked he showed me a project he was working on, a series of portraits in which he was always shaking hands with his subject. The people in these photographs represented a real cross-section of Japan: there were nerds, punks, disabled people, salarymen, children and foreigners. Some people seemed a little surprised or uncomfortable to be photographed in this way, but the mood was light. With a laugh, he said he wasn’t going to stop until he’d taken a thousand of these portraits–a latter-day, unserious August Sander! He pulled out his cheap SLR, took my picture as we laughed together, and then we talked a little more before wandering on. I want to bring up Iino to introduce my thoughts about 2011 because it seems to me that his project represents a kind of photograph that we’re not seeing so much in Japan anymore. To put it simply, I’m wondering if Japanese photographers are losing interest in people.

The March 11 earthquake and its effects will necessarily loom over any attempt to think about Japan’s 2011. These effects are not going away anytime soon, even if it’s entirely too easy for Tokyoites to forget about what’s happening up North. For their part, photographers have made an effort to show people what’s happening in Tohoku, but I’m not sure that much of the work being produced so far is all that useful to anyone. I think it’s possible that my general disappointment with post-3/11 photographs so far could be linked to a broader turn away from representing people in Japanese photography.

I don’t want to go down the path of “the old days were so much better,” but if you look at photographers like Hiromi Tsuchida and Kazuo Kitai, their primary interest was other people–and I think this was not so much because of something “beautiful” or “interesting” in the people themselves, but because they could produce some kind of effect by showing these people to an audience. Tsuchida’s “Counting Grains of Sand” is an easy example of what I’m talking about. The book examines crowds in 1980s (“bubble”-era) Japan, building up from groups of just a few people to a fairly dramatic conclusion, in which hundreds of faces are packed into the frame. Outside of Hiroh Kikai, it’s hard to think of prominent and contemporary Japanese photographers who are equally interested in people; Kikai himself is probably more respected outside of Japan anyway.

A newer type of photography, represented by Rinko Kawauchi and Masafumi Sanai, favors abstract, object-based explorations. I like this work: I recently found a used copy of Sanai’s “Ikiteru” the other day, and I think it’s very good. But I don’t think this type of photography is well-suited to deal with something like a natural disaster which is affecting hundreds of thousands of people. I haven’t been moved by his recent work, but I really respect Daido Moriyama for saying in this video [skip to the 50 minute mark] that, from the beginning, he decided absolutely to not shoot any earthquake-related photographs, because it wouldn’t make any sense for him personally. What a sensible thing to say! Meanwhile the amateur shooters at ROLLS TOHOKU have been showing up most professionals, for the simple reason that they are able to show us people in a natural way.

Asahi Camera Magazine published a special magazine of post-3/11 photography, and it sums up the weak response. The photographs mostly show objects and houses, to varying degrees of poignancy. I can’t understand why these photographs are all that we’re seeing. I want to know what people are doing!

Hirokawa Taishi’s series of family portraits is the one exception here. His portraits of families living in evacuation centers are the most powerful photographs in this magazine. Perhaps it makes sense that a guy who had thought for years about the ‘craziness’ of nuclear reactors in Japan would come up with a good response.

I am still convinced that the most useful photographs to come out of this disaster will not even be taken for years, because the scale of the destruction is so big. I want to know how relocated families are integrating into their new communities, whether or not people are rebuilding their homes next to the coast, how long people will be living next to rubble. Is photography even the right way to find these things out?

A few months ago, I had a small job shooting some event photos. I got to the place, saw Iino on the other side of the crowd. He was shooting for a newspaper, but I caught up with him later and asked him how the project was going. He said something to the effect of, “after the earthquake, it’s not a good time to be taking those photos, is it?” I told him that, given everything that’s happened, it might actually be the perfect time, but it didn’t look like that was going to change his mind.