I am looking forward to seeing Hiroshi Takizawa’s 1 solo exhibit “figure,” which opens this weekend at JIKKA 2, a gallery in Suehirocho. The show will run from 6/27 – 7/12.
Update 7/4: This show is excellent.
I wrote a short article for Tokyo Art Beat 1 about two shows that are currently up around Tokyo: Tazuko Masuyama’s “Until Everything Becomes a Photograph,” which I introduced very briefly here 2, and “The Exposed #7,” a group show of young Japanese photographers. I think it will be obvious that I am at an early stage of dealing with the ideas introduced in this article.
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.
Hiroshi Takizawa's "A Rock of the Moon"
Starting today, the 5th International Photobook Festival will be held in Paris, and Hiroshi Takizawa’s self-published book “A Rock of the Moon” has been shortlisted for the 2012 Dummy Award. I featured this zine earlier on the blog, and copies are still available to purchase through parapera. Takizawa is the only Japanese photographer on the shortlist.
I nominated Kazuyoshi Usui’s “Showa88” for the 2012 Photobook Award. For some more information on Usui’s work, please see this article and interview for American Photo.
Hiroshi Takizawa had one of the more interesting shows in the “honorable mention” category of Canon New Cosmos. He’s now published that work, called “A rock of the moon,” has a self-published zine in an edition of 50. It’s available for 1000 yen (in today’s US dollars, about $13) through parapera.net.
Parapera is a collective of sorts, they distribute many self-published zines through their site. I can’t be sure of what the shipping costs are outside of Japan, but I guess it can’t be too high. I don’t think they’ve done too much international promotion, which is a shame because they are a very good source of publications that would probably be difficult to find outside of Japan.
Here are some spreads of Takizawa’s zine:
