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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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’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 […]
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.
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.
“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 […]
“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 […]
William Klein was invited to Tokyo in 1961, where he shot for three months and made more than 1,000 pictures.
Mirage swings between the dynamic of a lover’s intimate photographs and those of a lonely stalker. By Owen Campbell, ASX, March 2015 The standard, reflexive way of referring to Mirage (2013), White and Vinegar (2012), and Dazai (2014) would be “three books by the photographer Daido Moriyama, as well as a story by Osamu […]