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 […]

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 […]

Five Photobooks from 2023

For the complete list, please consult the Nearest Podcast in the following weeks, where I will MC over a much longer list of the great books published this year. For this list, I wanted to keep the books down to five that I feel will define the artist’s career or are crucial to the medium. […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

Daido Moriyama Photographs Rebellion, Deconstructs Himself

Photographer Daido Moriyama reflects on the rebellious youth culture of late 1960s Japan, a period when he and his colleagues were working on the avant-garde photography magazine Provoke (1968–69). He discusses his attempt to deconstruct the medium in his series Shashin yo sayonara (Farewell Photography) (1972), though it ultimately deconstructed him.

‘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.

ASX Interviews Alex Daniels of Reflex Gallery @ Unseen

“So over the last 17 years we’ve got more and more involved with Japanese art and culture. In general, we are in love with both the country and the art and design there. Everything is made with so much care and a concerned eye for detail and originality”. Alex Daniels Reflex Gallery Unseen Interview For […]

Forever Lost in Transit: Piotr Zbierski @ Unseen

“For me photography is an intimate medium. It helps expressing myself but after all, it allows me to be closer to life and people, to look straight into their eyes.” By Karin Bareman, ASX, September 2015 The sun blazing into the frame, the boy lying on the blanket in the grass, the girl showering after […]