Hardcore followers of this blog will know that I’ve been talking about Emi Fukuyama’s work for a good while now. This month she’s got a lot going on: the biggest news is that she’s published her first book, “The Moon, Following Me,” with Tosei-sha. There’s not too much information about it online yet (you can see the cover on her website) but I’m sure if you email either Emi, or Kurt from Japan Exposures, you can find a way to buy it.

Along with the book, Emi has a show up at Tosei-sha for all of December. The content of the show more or less corresponds to the book, which is a summary of a three year series that Emi’s been exhibiting periodically at Totem Pole Photo Gallery.

© Setsuko Hayashida

Finally, Emi and Setsuko Hayashida are showing back-to-back exhibits at Totem Pole Gallery to coincide with the publication of their respective books – Hayashida just published “Looking for the Forest.” Hayashida’s exhibit is up from December 7-12, Emi’s is from December 14-19.

At 7:00pm on December 10th, there will be a talk show with Emi Fukuyama, Setsuko Hayashida, Kotaro Iizawa (preeminent Japanese photography critic) and Kunihiro Takahashi (head honcho of Tosei-sha and general badass). The talk show promises to be interesting, I will definitely be there, and you can attend as well, just by sending an email to the nice people at Totem Pole – info at tppg dot jp.

OK, my translation of Yuko Tada’s series “山遊鹿々人々図” is fanciful, but it’s not too far off. In order, the characters in Japanese mean “mountain, play, deer, deer, person, person, image.” I like seeing the words “Deer” and “Deer” next to each other in English.

Anyway, I found Tada’s work through Osaka’s Third Gallery Aya. These photos were taken at Nara, a city in the vicinity of Kyoto famous for massive temples and friendly deer. Nara is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Japan, so even just searching in English you can find more than 20,000 photos tagged “nara” and “deer” on Flickr. Still, even working with a subject that could be easily dismissed as a cliche, I thought that Tada found something worth looking at. You can tell from her website that she’s aligning herself with the “kawaii girl photo” aesthetic, hardly a movement renowned for its artistic integrity, but whatever, if the work is good it’s good.

© Yuko Tada

© Yuko Tada

© Yuko Tada

© Michael Schmelling

“Atlanta” is a book about the Atlanta hip-hop scene by Michael Schmelling. It looks really, really good, you can see a lot of material on the website linked above or at this It’s 30 bucks.

• It’s almost comically late to post this now, but the contents of Tsuchida Hiromi’s Zokushin (at this point in my life, a tome of photographic scripture) are up at the JCII Camera Museum until Sunday the 31st. Even if you can’t see the exhibit for one reason or another, I recommend reading John’s insightful post about Tsuchida’s talk.
• Compared to, say, novels, photobooks actually lend themselves pretty well to online display. Claxton Projects is a blog from London which posts very well-taken spreads of photobooks. The content has a wide range, it’s definitely worth a look.
• series of photos from Dubai which revels in its own boringness. I feel like this is worth a look for a few minutes, but in the end it might be like art photography cotton candy.

is a first year Graphic Design graduate student at Tokyo Zokei (Plastic Arts) University. His photos kind of remind me of Ed Panar in that he has an eye for the mundane, and I can feel that he took them while he was walking around. I don’t have very much context for these photos, which come from his Tumblr, but I assume that these are basically throwaway snapshots. After all all he’s a graphic design student, right?

I just moved apartments which is one good reason for a delay in posts. You can find me hanging out around Araiyakushimae station these days, the 下町 (“lower city,” ie older, not yet developed, etc) of Tokyo’s west side!!

It’s been a little while since I posted about a book – I think the last one was probably Aya Fujioka’s “I Don’t Sleep,” which was more than six months ago. Today let’s look at a new book from Tosei-sha, Yuko Masuda’s “Vertical Direction.”

© Yuko Masuda

It seems unlikely that “Vertical Direction” will win any special prizes, but I want to hold it up as an example of the kind of well-above-average photography which you can find in Tokyo. (I say, “in Tokyo,” because so much of the photography culture in Japan is concentrated here.) Masuda’s work is similar to that of another Tosei-sha photographer, Tsuneo Yamashita, who also takes “quick” 35mm black and white photographs in island, or rural, settings. Both photographers take frequent trips from Tokyo to shoot. Yamashita has been going to Okinawa for 10 years, and Masuda has been traveling to Southeast Asia for about the same amount of time.

© Yuko Masuda

Shooting a photo like this—a shirtless child in an unidentified Southeast Asian country—could open her up to criticism along the lines of, “you’re exploiting these people.” In this case, that seems overly harsh. The goal of these photos is not to say to the audience, “bear witness to the plight of ____!” In her statement she affirms, “I have no particular interest in people.” Could we propose a kind of theorem whereby the more willingly the photographer gives themselves over to humanism, the less critical goodwill they deserve?

© Yuko Masuda

At their best, Masuda’s photographs show a careful eye for composition, especially with groups of people.

© Yuko Masuda

There’s no real back story here, no “deep meaning,” just someone wanting to take off from their job for a while with a backpack and make some images. (This is again from to Masuda’s text.)

© Yuko Masuda

It’s been a while since I’ve seen such simple work like this—and I mean “simple” in a very positive way. Much more so than the conceptual or overtly “arty” work which I’ve seen a lot of lately, this work makes me want to go out and shoot myself.

Some notes about this book: like most all black and white Tosei books, the printing is really impeccable. One strange point about the book, though, is its garish cover, which offers the book browser no indication at all about what might be inside:

What’s kind of surprising is that, if you slip the cover off, the bare white book underneath is actually really elegantly done:

If you’re interested in purchasing “Vertical Direction,” get in touch with Kurt at the Japan Exposures bookstore. As with most any Japanese photobook, he can do a special order for you.

This is about Yasuhiro Ishimoto:

Now it’s de rigeur to have a trans-national, cosmopolitan life, to be “between identities” and “between countries” and all of that, but there was a time when it wasn’t so hip, when nobody wanted to hear about your “struggle,” they just looked at you suspiciously. And one of the things that’s so interesting about Yasuhiro is the way that his photographs reflect not just the values of whatever country he happens to be in at the moment but also the style. So his American photographs look really American, and his Japanese photographs look really Japanese.

There’s no way to talk about this without being really reductive about different countries and cultures, but this is a really, REALLY hard thing for any artist to do.

A while ago I sent Hayato Wakabayashi a short email to see if he was free to meet up, and he wrote back, “sorry, there’s a typhoon in Kyushu, I have to go shoot!”

Wakabayashi is the most concept-driven photographer I have met in Japan so far: his personal work is the result of a logical system which he has worked over and over until it arrives at a somewhat stable point. His current series, “Vanishing,” was shot in and around volcanoes and typhoons, and he is after some connection between these natural phenomena and the experience of early man. Really though, because he has such strong ideas about his own photographs, I know I am doing him a small disservice by not reproducing (or attempting to clearly explain) his statement for this series, but you can find the original Japanese version here. (I’m thinking of maybe doing some interviews for this blog, a conversation with Wakabayashi would be interesting and maybe then we can dig into his concepts.)

My initial reaction to these photos was that they were too “pretty”; to turn a powerful, and quite possibly hazardous phenomenon into an aesthetically pleasing one might distract the viewer from comprehending what’s going on. But I think enough of Wakabayashi’s own experience is visible to prevent the series from slipping into pure fascination, i.e. “dude isnt nature amazing?” (And it is! But I don’t want or need a photograph to tell me that.) This is especially true of the typhoon photos, where his own struggle to create these images is clear. In his statement, Wakabayashi talks about getting knocked down by waves while shooting, and conceptual as this work may be, being able to refer back to the human being clicking the shutter kept it interesting.

It’s a bit late, but this work is up at Tosei-Sha Gallery until Thursday (9/30) of this week.

© Hayato Wakabayashi

 

© Hayato Wakabayashi

 

© Hayato Wakabayashi

 

© Hayato Wakabayashi

 

© Hayato Wakabayashi

 

© Hayato Wakabayashi

 

Click this link if you like PHOTOS – it’s someone from China husband and wife team Zhang Jungang (张 君刚) and Li Jie (李洁)—thanks to Di of Jia Za Zhi for the tip.

http://zhangjungang.com/27/27.html

You can look at other pages too by using the “上 下” (up down) links at the bottom. This is the freshest portfolio website I’ve found in a while. The wonders of HTML!!

これがめちゃくちゃ爽やかなサイト、でしょう？？

I had a good conversation last week with someone who works at a photo gallery in Tokyo. Her gallery deals with all kinds of work, but personally we are both interested in young photographers. We talked about how the successful galleries which attract a “young” audience are built on a Shibuya-centric model of “cool,” where, you know, everyone is wearing the right pair of Nikes and looks really great. Thankfully the concept of “hipster” doesn’t make sense in Japan—there’s no PBR or Tecate here, after all—but we can identify these galleries by looking at their relationship to fashion. G/P Gallery is probably the most obvious example of this kind of place. My friend said that, at least in G/P’s case, the gallery is set up so that cachet of being a cool person at a cool gallery functions like a decoy to get young people interested in photography.

The uncool point I want to raise is that there are plenty of young people who shoot and look at photographs very seriously. These people don’t need the lure of a chic experience to go to a gallery. But the question for the gallery owner here, though, becomes: “is there any money in those people?” Somewhere behind cool—behind fashion—there is money. I don’t think that G/P is a “bad” gallery for doing this, but I wonder if there is another way to attract a young audience. Can serious trump cool?