I’ve found myself praising Araki for bringing his own life as close to photography as possible. I don’t think Araki’s photos break too much ground aesthetically, but there’s so much of his life in his photos—maybe even his entire life! Photography is like breathing for him. Just look at how much he’s enjoying himself here:

Araki’s musical equivalent might be Jonathan Richman, who’s not trying to reinvent the wheel, but who expresses himself clearly and naturally when he’s performing. He and Araki both got started around the same time, and are still going strong today.

Here is the full text of a Craigslist job ad posted the other day. The italics are mine:

Adult video actresses needed (Tokyo)

Amature or professional female models/actresses are needed in Tokyo area for contract film work. Foreigners or Japanese are both welcome.

Our production company prides itself on standing out from an existing, saturated market here in Tokyo.

We are influenced highly by the works of Nobuyoshi Araki.

Requirements:

– Be over the legal age of 18.

– A simple resume , (importantly) photo and valid ID are needed. (ID only at initial meeting, resume or photo can be emailed)

– Motivation and interest to be involved in this sort of work.

– Last but not least, there are no requirements apart from wanting to have fun whilst getting paid.
We hope that there is a potential for a long working relationship between both parties involved.

With my platform over at La Pura Vida, I feel like Street Level Japan is probably no longer the right place to really focus on introducing Japanese photographers, which is the main thing that I want to use the internet for. This blog should start to become a bit looser, like back in the day when I was living in SF, couldn’t talk to anyone about photography, and for a while set myself a goal of posting once a day just to see if I could. I don’t think I’ll even have as much time now to post things quickly like I’d want to, but we’ll see. If things are going well this blog will become more like a notebook, i.e. much less serious than the things I’m posting more “publicly” — with the notion that the audience here is still rather intimate.

Yesterday was the opening of Takashi Homma’s ambitiously titled retrospective exhibit “New Documentary,” which is up at the Art Gallery in Tokyo Opera City. (If you’re going to go check it out, it’s really also worth visiting the NTT Communications Space on the 4th floor of Opera City, which shows technology-based art that’s usually very satisfying.) World-renowned blogger/curator extraordinnaire Marc “eyecurious“ Feustel was in Tokyo, and since he’s down with SLJ he let me sneak in with him.

The exhibit is very large: there are six different spaces, showing about eight bodies of work total. I like Homma’s work but don’t know it particularly well, so I recognized a couple of things like “Tokyo and My Daughter” and “Tokyo Suburbia.” The presentation of the photos is generally really good, they’re mounted under borderless glass which highlights the idea of surfaces, something that kind of defines Homma’s work in a way.

The most exciting part of the show for me was a small corridor where Homma had stacked up a bunch of softcover books for people to flip through. This is titled “Reconstruction of 1991-2010,” and it’s all black and white reproductions of his work, sometimes as it’s appeared in magazines or other places. The quality of the books felt very disposable, which was nice. It also led me to believe that you could walk off with one, Felix Gonzalez-Torres style, but that turned out not to be the case.

There was another room with his McDonald’s photos mounted on the floor. This work has been published in a series of zines.

This show certainly gives you a lot to chew on. I’ve never had the chance to see his “classic” Tokyo work in person, so even though it’s not new, it’s nice to be able to think about it clearly. He seems to be taking pictures of almost nothing, but then small things begin to stand out, and you wonder if he really “meant” it that way, or if other people can see it too. The printing quality is very high of course, I guess it goes without saying but the pictures you’re seeing here don’t do the show real justice. On another level, it’s nice to see his work presented all at once, and to observe how certain themes in his work have developed over time. Then there’s also something about the way that he’s chosen to re-present his work, giving it this title, and reproducing everything in the “Reconstruction” book, as if it could all be boiled down to some black and white photocopies. It’s up for a while, so I’ll definitely go back again. Recommended, obviously.

BONUS CRAPPY CELEB SHOT:

My second column for the La Pura Vida blog is up. Yamashita Tsuneo is the featured photographer, but I used his work as a way to discuss Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama, two photographers who I think may, for some people, stand in for the idea of “Japanese photography.”

I was pleased to see this image get some attention on Tumblr, wasn’t sure if it would work online.

Of course I’m hoping to get some comments on these posts, though I’m not holding my breath. I accept that being slightly inflammatory is the best way to get comments.

• Alex Martinez does a feature for La Pura Vida, and it’s awesome of course.
• Dide, a well-done online photo magazine from Iran.
• John went to a private Araki opening and gives a good description of what that experience is like. Araki, by the way, is on fire these days. He put up an exhibit showing the death of his beloved cat, which I half-expected to be terrible, does that really sound like a good idea to anyone? But no, it was genuinely moving. His photos conveyed an honesty about himself, like the cosmic love he felt for this animal was entirely apparent, and in a strange way it said something about the way he looks at people as well. Araki is an interesting guy. (Meanwhile, I thought, Daido Moriyama’s latest book, “Nagisa,” which John reviewed here, could have been the work of a high school student who is just learning how to take pictures while at the same time really digging his girlfriend.)
• Some Hamburger Eyes style black and white work on ithoughtiwasalone. It’s been too long since they posted a gallery like this, although as a lazy blogger I can hardly point fingers.
• Stephen Shore for Urban Outfitters.

Towards the end of 2009, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art put up two exhibits featuring Japanese photography. The main attraction, “The Provoke Era,” was a straightforward survey of Japanese photography, starting from the immediate postwar period (Shomei Tomatsu, Hosoe Eikoh), moving to the more radical late 60’s (Hiromi Tsuchida, Daido Moriyama, the rest of the “Provoke” gang) and ending with a confused collection of photos from the 80’s and 90’s (cult street snapper Katsumi Watanabe sharing space with landscape photographer Toshio Shibata and art star Hiroshi Sugimoto). All of the photographs in this exhibition were black-and-white, and taken by men.

Having showed all the “old masters”—a few Nobuyoshi Araki prints were up there too, of course—the second exhibit, “Photography Now: China, Japan, Korea“ was meant to give some young guns a chance to shine. But a curious thing happened in the Japan space. After already looking at the work of some 30 different men, all the prints by female Japanese photographers were grouped together, in one corner of the room.

Only so much can be read into this, but I think it may reflect a certain attitude about “female Japanese photographers”—namely, that people are interested in talking about them as “female Japanese photographers.” Ferdinand has given a talk on this topic, but I can’t say if it was any good. There was an exhibit at Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts in NYC, looking at a few conceptual female photographers like Tomoko Sawada who are “often highlighting and questioning stereotypes of traditional female roles in Japanese society.” Without having bothered to research this too deeply—I’m not a scholar yet—my guess is that “female Japanese photographers” are being used to fit some sort of Western critical narrative. (And probably not a very interesting one, at that… waiting for the Brechtian critics to emerge)

But, I digress. As always, I come to celebrate! In this post I want to introduce Mari Sugino, a “female Japanese photographer” who has been participating in the semi-legendary Place M seminar in Tokyo for a couple of years now. I first saw her work at an exhibit at Konica Minolta Gallery with a friend, and we were both really impressed by her ability to capture quick portraits of people on the street in Tokyo. When I talked to Sugino-san she told me that she isn’t particularly interested in “making it” in the art world. She’s shooting for herself, although of course it wouldn’t be bad to find some success. So no critical narratives today, just very nicely done photos.

© Mari Sugino

© Mari Sugino

© Mari Sugino

© Mari Sugino

© Mari Sugino

the blog world is still so new! the current stars are skilled at putting on a grand show, like chaplin. who knows, maybe even the more thoughtful ones (keaton, in my image) won’t survive the next wave…

i used a darkroom today. i like black and white film because i think it’s EASY. today i made four contact sheets and four prints. none of the prints are ready to be exhibited, 3 are not centered properly on the paper, but in all of last YEAR, even with my scanner, i made probably no more than 15 prints, which was the whole idea of getting it in the first place. scanning is such pain, everything is guesswork! “how’s the calibration of my monitor, how’s the calibration of the lab’s printer, if i move this curve 5 pixels down does the photo actually look better, and WHY IS IT THAT walgreens almost makes my color film look better anyway…” not to mention the soul-crushing tedium of scanning. the darkroom is simple and rewarding.

FEEL ME FLOW

i also saw araki’s latest show today. it’s called Araki 69, he’s turning 69 years old and he shot it with a 6×9 camera. i would say the photos are like “Araki photos made with a 6×9 camera,” in other words he translated his style accurately to the format. here’s an interesting interview with Araki, it makes me feel a bit ashamed for having so little to say about him WHEN HE’S PUBLISHED 450 BOOKS, if that’s even true. “Kofuku Shashin” sounds interesting, though.

From The Park

You’ve probably seen images from Kohei Yoshiyuki’s The Park series before. Here’s a link to an interview done by Nobuyoshi Araki, published in 1979. The interview is pretty good but I want to draw attention to the way Araki leads it off:

As the genius of photography, I’d like to introduce Yoshiyuki Kohei to our readers.

Modest as ever!

Side note: I walked through Chuo Park, where Yoshiyuki took most of these pictures, the other day. It was a good spot for taking pictures, there were a few stray cats that didn’t mind company, and some people wandering through.