The Rhine II, 1999 There is something very straightforward about Andreas Gursky’s photographs. It is as though he holds up a peopled landscape or a building or a workplace for our inspection, saying simply, ‘here it is’. The Iron Cage of Boredom By Julian Stallabrass There is something very straightforward about Andreas Gursky’s photographs. […]
‘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 […]
“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 […]
Honesty and reality are the wrong type of word to describe the work of a man with a camera. Labyrinth especially is not photography representing reality, but photography representing photography.
One of the most revered living Japanese photographers, Daido Moriyama’s work is saturated with the melancholic beauty of life at its most ordinary. His photographs epitomize wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic of finding beauty in imperfection. Moriyama focuses in on the lost and the discarded, and finds echoes of living through the breakdown of traditional […]
Daido Moriyama first came to prominence in the mid-1960s with his gritty depictions of Japanese urban life. His intense and intimate approach often incorporates high contrast, graininess, and tilted vantages to convey the fragmentary nature of modern realities. Born in Ikeda, Osaka, Daido Moriyama first trained in graphic design before taking up photography. Moving to […]
“The projection of Western fantasies onto the “Orient” is an essential aspect of the centuries’ old discourse on Orientalism. The West was always projecting images onto the Orient, particularly fantasies and topics considered taboo or unfulfilled in the West.” Issei Suda, a Master of Japanese Photography This interview with Ferdinand Brüggemann was conducted by […]
In the fall of 1990, Keizo Kitajima received a commission from Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper to visit the Soviet Union, the opportunity to spend a year documenting both people and places in what was then a monolithic entity. 15 republics, 11 time zones, and thousands of miles spanning the two—the task was daunting in […]
USSR 1991 In the fall of 1990, Keizo Kitajima received a commission from Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper to visit the Soviet Union, the opportunity to spend a year documenting both people and places in what was then a monolithic entity. 15 republics, 11 time zones, and thousands of miles spanning the two—the task was daunting […]
On December 15th, 2012, Polka Galerie had the honour to host Daido Moriyama for an extraordinary event: The Silkscreen Workshop. During an entire afternoon, the Japanese master, who came to Paris especially for this, helped the workshop participants create a silkscreen. In an atmosphere reminiscent of a factory, the “apprentice-for-a-day” chose one of five […]
Issei Suda (須田 一政, Suda Issei) is a Japanese photographer. Born in Tokyo in 1940, Suda graduated from the Tokyo College of Photography in 1962. ASX CHANNEL: ISSEI SUDA (All rights reserved. Images @ Issei Suda)
By Paul Loomis, for ASX, August 2012 The photographs in “Photo Express: Tokyo” (Steidl, 2012) were taken in Tokyo within a single year by Keizo Kitajima, and looking at them is like leafing through his intricate memories. They are complex and celebratory, hopeless and certain and full of people with signatures of fate on […]