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.

I’ve written a few things for other websites in the past couple of weeks. Here’s a quick rundown:

• Interview with Kazuyoshi Usui for American Photo: I really think Usui’s book “Showa88” was my favorite of last year, and we did a fun interview in which he not only explained the concept of his work, but also told me why he looks up to John Waters as a master of “good bad taste.” If you only have time to read one of these pieces, make it this one.
• Review of Naoyuki Hata’s exhibition “Pelletron new no.4” at Guardian Garden for Tokyo Art Beat: Hata’s work reminded me of a Jorge Luis Borges story, “La escritura del dios” or “The Writing of the God.”
• Interview with ERIC for American Photo: ERIC’s new book “LOOK AT THIS PEOPLE” is a look at the people living in China’s Yunnan region. There are more photos like this taken in the middle of a regional mud festival. Pretty entertaining.

I recently found some photographs that I really liked. They can’t be seen online yet, but I will be talking about them more in the future. The concept of the series is, what if Japan’s Showa period had never ended, and continued up until the present day? For background: Japan uses the Western style year system (2011) as well as the imperial system (Heisei 23). The title of the work was “Showa 88,” because Showa was the period before Heisei, but this is really not important, Wikipedia has more info if you are interested. The point is that, at the gallery talk, someone asked the photographer: “well, you’re calling this work Showa 88, but 2011 doesn’t translate to Showa 88. This year would actually be Showa 86, and you have a photo of the earthquake damage in your book, so wouldn’t people know that you took it this year.”

To which I dimly thought, but did not formulate in time to say: “What a short-sighted comment, as if there will not be plenty of areas that still look like that in 2013, or 2023…”