JAPAN

Mari Katayama Synthesis

There is a small number of essential photobooks that explore the concept of artistic process/practice and performance. Most recently, I have found myself thumbing through Joseph Beuys: Coyote, by Caroline Tisdall (Schirmer/Mosel, 1976), which features photographs of Beuys’ legendary 1974 performance, I Like America and America Likes Me. The performance, arguably Beuys’ most well-known, next to How to […]

Hajime Kimura’s “Family of Lies” and “Tebajima”

Photography has always had a complicated relationship with memory. It promises to hold on to moments, but it also shows how unreliable memory really is. This tension runs through two recent photobooks by one of the most interesting Japanese photographers working today. Family of Lies (Three Books, 2024) and Tebajima (Kawazu Kikaku, 2024), by Hajime […]

Mary Had a Little Lamb & The Bonin Islanders Shinichiro Nagasawa

The Bonin Islanders, 2021, Shinichiro Nagasawa, Akaaka Art Publishers   The Bonin Islands, or Ogasawara Islands, are a very particular, scarcely populated set of thirty islands southeast of mainland Japan. The population consists of around 2,500 inhabitants, comprising an exceptionally interesting demographic.  Historically referred to as Bunin Jima, or uninhabited, the islands were visited by […]

Avo Tavitian & Daido Moriyama | Los Angeles x Shinjuku

Daido Moriyama   I feel bad saying this, and you will have to read on to find more positive suggestions about this book, but I think Moriyama has become quite a pastiche of his earlier glory. I understand how he arrives at that conclusion, and frankly, most people will likely be inclined to argue with […]

José Bértolo Moraesu St.

Japan is a country that pulls many artists into its clutches like a cultural tractor beam. For reasons unknown, Japan has dominated the imaginations of travellers, writers, artists, and historians to a degree that borders, for many, on obsession. I have never been to Japan, but I can admit being caught in the clutches of […]

Patrick Tsai – Photographic Memories

It is an interesting moment for the medium of the photobook. The boom dust is beginning to settle as inflation makes the market less navigable. The price of producing photobooks is ont he rise and coincides with a shrinking market size. This is based on a broader conversation with publishers and artists over the past […]

Mikael Gregorsky – Sun

  Observational photography. Intrepid photography. Itinerant Photography. How does one deal with and parse out the general economy of images when abroad, away from home? What is home for a photographer who has moved from place to place over the 21st Century? There is an argument regarding the intrepid photographer, one that covers the ground, […]

Kentaro Kumon – Smoke and Steam

  With Japanese photography, I have had to change how I look at it from the surface level toward something much more intricate in my understanding of how Japanese artists approach the camera. When I first started looking into the national camera of Japan, the obvious references were already a known quantity to me. Classic […]

Fumitsugu Takedo – Ambience Decay

  I feel slightly guilty posting this as I know by the time you read it, that it will be improbable you will find a copy as there are only 50 copies in the edition. Hopefully, it will inspire the publisher Photobook Daydream Editions to consider publishing more, as Fumitsugu Takedo’s Ambience Decay is one […]

Ilias Georgiadis – Forecast Origini Edizioni

  I’m listening to Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume Two (Expanded Version), though I should be listening to the original score for Ilias’s book Forecast (Origini Edizioni, 2023, Second Edition). I apologize to Daphne Kotsiani, Y. Fotiadis, D. Joss, and I. Dimitriadis, who have added an audio piece of sculpted piano interludes that one […]

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Revealing Women’s Role in Japanese Photography

Mikkiko Hara   by José Bértolo   There is no doubt that Japanese photography is fashionable right now. But what do we mean when we say, “Japanese photography is fashionable right now”? Which Japanese photography are we referring to? What vision of Japanese photography do we have?   For a long time in the West, […]

Akihiko Okamura – The Memories of Others

  As I found with Whatever You Say, Say Nothing by Gilles Peress (Steidl), The Troubles and their representation are incredibly difficult to write about from the point of view of an outsider. It is a very touchy subject. Even posting about it on social media platforms (as I also found out) will have opposing […]

Smoke – Umihara Chikara

  I am confident that most of us are stringing life together one moment at a time without a significant game plan or goal to outline our actions’ progression. Nothing is holding the seams of it all together, and for that, I am partially thankful and partially disappointed. Life is a never-ending chain of circumstances […]

Yasuhiro Ishimoto – Lines and Bodies

  The gift of Japanese photography is that it feels like a never-ending field of exploration. It is a wide field of study, and if one invests in the material created in Japan from around 1958 forward, the returns are plentiful. Having put off embracing the canon of Japanese photography for most of my career […]

Joel Pulliam on Ikko Narahara

Ikko Narahara – Where Time has Vanished by Joel Pulliam It has been on my mind for a while to write about something that I am provisionally calling “New Orientalism.” It is the phenomenon of highly regarded photographers dropping into Tokyo for a few weeks or months, taking pictures, and then publishing a book. I […]

Yoshi Yubai – Asakusa

I recently came across Yoshi Yubai’s work. I was fortunate enough to nab a copy of his last book, Radiation Inspiration (2023), published by La Generale Minerale (screenprinted by Ben Sanair), which I purchased through Le Plac’Art Photo in Paris. The screen printing by Sanair in that book is phenomenal. The book has an introduction […]

Toshio Shibata – Day For Night

  The work of Toshio Shibata is not easy to categorize by genre. The overriding and extended principle featured in the work is that of a type of industrial architectural photography. This is, in turn, echoed by a nod to ecological considerations of the landscape. The photographs feel monumental and isolated. People do not enter […]

Coca-Cola and the Implied Apathy of Tomatsu Shomei’s Photographs

Full Article with More Images on Patreon   It is essential to understand the biography of Tomatsu to understand what the emotion of rage or anger may be prevalent in his work. As a pubescent teen during the atomic bombing of Japan and the subsequent end of the Second World War, Tomatsu recalls the occupation […]

Ishiuchi Miyako Club & Courts Yokosuka Yokohama

Full Article on Patreon   So, the dig at post-industrial decay has put a giant bee in my bonnet. But what should I expect about the unspoken class issues that revolve and permeate through and in photography these days? I mean, if you have a New York-London-based photographer stat in your bio and are in […]

Gui Marcondes – I Know I Exist Because You Imagine Me (Maquette Mix)

From Gui Marcondes I Know I Exist Because You Imagine Me   …By having our monthly meetings, the artist, who may work a day job or run a family, is encouraged to return to work to provide progress notes. There is no strike against them if they cannot bring something new every month as we […]

Mikiko Hara – Small Myths

  Full Article With More Images On Patreon   Throughout the work, Hara photographs portraits. Some of these images are culled from her familiar everyday journeys, with images of people on the street or in trains elegantly abetting the images of her family. Though far from a family book in the traditional sense, the text […]

Tomatsu Shomei <11:02> Nagasaki An Overview

  Full Article on Patreon   …11:02 Nagasaki contains elements of documentary practice mixed with an emotional and highly subjective style of photography. In essence, the book is caught, like Kawada’s Chizu, between two schools of thought regarding photography. On the one hand, there is a legacy of photography that considers politics and a (at […]

Taka Mayumi Koisuru Toriko

  Full Article on Patreon   In Prisoner In Love, the flow is at once calm and exciting. It is similar to allowing one’s body to be carried downstream in a river safely with a bump on the body’s backside every once in a while to remind them of the rocks beneath the surface. Metaphors […]

Toyohiko Yasui One Thousand Millimeter 1973

Full Article and Full Sequence of Book on Patreon   The desire found in that book functions incredibly obliquely. Images of women do not, even when on a bed and nude, represent sex or an objectifying element; they are reduced to the same void as everything else and feel like a piece of the vortex. […]

Nobuyoshi Araki The Banquet (Shokuji)

  Full Article on Patreon   “The Banquet is a different affair built around the same context of mourning. Instead of pictures of himself or his deceased wife, Araki presents a catalog of their last meals together. The images are shot with a close-up ring flash and a short lens to give a microphotographic feel […]

Seiichi Furuya FIRST TRIP TO BOLOGNA 1978 / LAST TRIP TO VENICE 1985

Christine Gössler exists in my mind, or rather the photographs of her, as the eternal notion of elegy in the photographic medium. Whereas she does not haunt my own memories, I feel the burden and the weight of her portraits through the images shot and books made by her husband Seiichi Furuya. When I suggest […]

Maki: (A) Japan Somewhere

    Maki’s images in Japan Somewhere (Zen Foto Gallery), produced over a fourteen-year period feel anxious and compressed. Though specific to one country, the Frenchman’s images feel anything but declarative. They feel ambulatory, intrepid,  and often chaotic as if shot in a constant state of momentum and high velocity. The frames are heavily compressed […]

Kosuke Okahara Blue Affair

I do not remember the majority of my dreams. I am told that I often erupt from the fugue state of sleep in panic, screaming, and moaning. The times that I do remember my dreams, something awful is occurring in them. They seem to be hinged on the anxiety associated with flight or fight responses. […]

Eiji Ohashi: Roadside Lights Seasons: Winter

Eiji Ohashi’s Roadside Lights Seasons: Winter is deceptively simple in its approach. The main theme of the book considers a constant in the Japanese landscape through the repeated photographic investigation of its roadside vending machines. Though beautifully photographed, the book details one type of subject matter across the beautiful backdrop of Japan at night. It […]

Elie Monferier Sang Noir

I was convinced that before writing this that I would have a few examples of books about hunting in my mind when I began to type, but I am drawing a blank. I can think of a few things like Les Krims The Deerslayers, I can imagine or conjure up some images of hunting in […]

inri: Symposion About Love 1996-2000

    The emphasis on performance or performing photography seems like a never-ending discussion. I have been looking backwards through the history of photography and can see without much difficulty that its Western beginnings are full of images that exemplify the tradition such as Hippolyte Bayard’s Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man from 1840 forward through […]

Koji Kitagawa: Mapping the Technical in Dreams

Do robots dream of Black Phillip? Do artists dream in data? Does a spectre haunt the algorithm?     In a world in which we are reduced to bytes, blips, glitch and transmission, we begin to consider where the mapping of our reality in images begins. Our photographic lives are now dominated by the urgency […]

Seiichi Furuya & Christine Gössler Face To Face

  “We may consider these types of photographs as a glimpse, a grimace or a greeting between subject and viewer, nothing more”   It is hard to condense seven years of intimacy into the frames of 35mm negatives. You cannot easily graph the moments that pass between two orbiting worlds, the moments of affection, disagreements […]

Mayumi Hosokura’s New Skin

  “This ‘gendering’ includes everything from one’s awareness of their own individual body, to global political and social issues (the feminine pose, the masculine blue colour, the ‘masculinity’ of war)”     Mayumi Hosokura’s New Skin begins with a single quote on its inside cover. It is a quote by Donna Haraway, from her 1988 […]

Kenta Cobayashi: CHROMATIC ANGULAR CACOPHONY

Professional photographers are typically trained to hide the mutability of digital images, covering up their handiwork to make their subjects look perfect, moreso than reality itself. Cobayashi toys with this mutability.   Swirled up buildings, highways and hair all come together in an ecstatic mix of street fashion-shoot, slice-of-life and cityscape. You can trace the […]

Daisuke Morishita:A Raking Trilogy of Indexical Shadows

  “Many photographers will know that moment when they cross the path of the sun beaming down from a fifth story window-some will not even see it, they will feel the change of luminescence on their cheek, their hair will feel warmer as they pace”     The is a debilitating moment for many photographers […]

Guillaume Simoneau: Murder as Legacy

“Guillaume Simoneau is a not a cannibal, but his book Murder (MACK), is an ode to Fukase’s legendary status and particularly his book Karasu/Ravens. Murder is a devotional hymn, or a phantom limb added to the mythology of the Japanese artist”     Inherent or Mythological Propagandas   One of photography’s less considered functions is […]

Martin Stöbich: Beirut / Tokyo 東京 and one picture of Mt. Fuji / Happy in the U.A.E.

“The way a photographer “sees” and commits to an image is through experience. These experiences have very little to do with the camera and are built up over years of living-these experiences and the years that sponsor them are not always the glorious nostalgic highlights that we remember in their honey-dipped form, but are also formed of tragedy, comedy and a resistance to our inside force of direction”.

Masahisa Fukase: Family Enshrined

  “Times change, we orchestrate ourselves to different locations and yet with nostalgia nothing need be lost. It can be found again. We can consider the death of an idea as being flexible to finality, but that is a different conversation”.     We tend to enshrine people and ideas with a certain sense of […]

Interview with Kazuyoshi Usui: Projecting Showa

“These poor cities are nevertheless radiating vivid colours, as if bolstering up daily lives with significant visual appeal. I see their desperation to live, to the point of feeling pains. I find it enormously beautiful.”

‘Daido Tokyo’ at Fondation Cartier (2016)

Moriyama admits that repetition is his way of working, and that his impulse to reproduce his surroundings today is much the same as it was when he got his first camera, in junior high.

Keiichi Tanaami on “Pop Art”

“I have never thought of myself as a pop artist. However, when I was young there was a time when I was influenced by the methodologies and techniques of pop artists, such as Warhol.”