Category Archives: Japan

Anton Corbijn on Kohei Yoshiyuki’s ‘The Park’ series 1971–9

“The images are far more erotic than most porno photographs…”   By Anton Corbijn, for Tate, May 2010 I had not been aware of Kohei Yoshiyuki’s work until I saw a review of his series The Park about two years ago, which was accompanied by a photograph that caught my eye immediately. The infrared grittiness […]

Araki’s Chiro, Yoko, Death and the Baring of a Soul

  In Sentimental Journey and later in Winter Journey Araki documented both the intimate and the mundane from his honeymoon and his wife’s terminal battle with cancer. By blurring the boundaries between life and art Araki’s work becomes uncomfortably candid, presenting death with a reverence as shocking and graphic as any of his more erotic […]

ISSEI SUDA: “NITIZYOU”

  Issei Suda was born in Tokyo in 1940 and graduated from the Tokyo College of Photography in 1962. He worked as a freelance photographer from 1971 and taught for many years at the Osaka University of Arts. (All rights reserved. @ Issei Suda.)

All Women Fall in Love with Nobuyoshi Araki (And Duchamps is a Swindler) (2014)

‘Chiro’ from Sentimental Journey @ Araki In many ways, “Sentimental Journey 1972-1992” is quintessential Araki. It is a documentary of his marriage life with his wife Aoki Yoko till the day she lost her fight to ovarian cancer in 1990. By Zhuang Wubin, epSITE and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, 2004 Nobuyoshi Araki, or Tensai […]

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Four Decades of Photographing Dioramas

The photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has visited to the Museum four times in the past four decades to shoot his “Dioramas” series, which focuses on habitat displays to explore the distinction between the real and the fictive. What initially surprised Sugimoto about the series was that his photos looked utterly real–as if he were photographing on […]

INTERVIEW: “Just Float. A Conversation with Mayumi Hosokura”

from KAZAN @ Mayumi Hosokura Just float. A conversation with Mayumi Hosokura By Karin Bareman A young woman sniffles and wipes her nose with her hand. The gesture is utterly disarming. It makes her look so young, so vulnerable. But what on earth is she doing out there? Has she injured herself by moving through […]

ROMAIN SLOCOMBE: “CITY OF BROKEN DOLLS”

  “MY WORK’S NOT ONLY ABOUT MY OBSESSION WITH JAPANESE WOMEN, IT’S ABOUT MEDICAL FETISHISM AND MY FASCINATION WITH ACCIDENTS” – ROMAIN SLOCOMBE, 1997   Beautiful Japanese girls are photographed in casts and bandages, victims of unknown traumas in the neon streets and hospital rooms. These are the “broken dolls” of Romain Slocombe’s Tokyo, a […]

Nagano Shigeichi: “Nagano’s Tokyo” (2014)

By Caille Milner, for ASX, May 2014 Why does Tokyo look so unfamiliar in Nagano Shigeichi’s photographs? He used no slights of hand; followed no special methodology. His influences were the usual ones for his generation — William Eugene Smith, Life magazine, celebrated Japanese photojournalists like Kimura Ihei and Fujimoto Shihachi. He didn’t have pretentions […]