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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Full Article on Patreon Preliminary Analysis of Nakahira Takuma For a Language to Come (Kitarubeki Kotoba no Tameni) There are several things that I love about Nakahira’s book. The idea that he does not make formal considerations such as vertical vs. horizontal page layout a huge deal. He switched to verticality with […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]