Augenblick , Profile : Ken Kitano

Ken Kitano has some good impressive portraits in his series.

Augenblick, Blog on Photography - Profile : Hiroshi Watanabe on Suo Sarumawashi

Again I am talking of Japanese Photographer Hiroshi Watanabe, is perhaps one of my favorite . Previously i have talked about his project "Ideology in Paradise" done in North Korea and now I will post something of his project "Suo Sarumawashi" . The series of portrait of "Dancing Monkey" are stunning .
Here the statement from the artist :
Sarumawashi, literally "monkey dancing" evolved over a 1000-year history in Japan. Ancient Japanese chronicles refer to it as a form of religious ritual designed to protect the horses of warriors. It later developed into a popular form of festival entertainment, and was performed all over Japan from temples to imperial courts. Today, Sarumawashi is ranked alongside Noh and Kabuki as one of the oldest and most traditional of Japan's performing arts. It features acrobatic stunts and comedic skits performed by highly trained macaque monkeys.
Despite its current popularity, Sarumawashi almost perished in the 1970's. The increasing urbanization of Japan and the rise of the automobile on Japan's crowded city streets threatened Sarumawashi's place in Japanese culture as a popular form of street performance. In 1977 a group of individuals throughout Japan, fearing the total demise of this ancient art form, gathered to effect the revival of Sarumawashi. They founded the Suo Sarumawashi association in present day Hikari City (also known by its ancient name of Suo) in Yamaguchi Prefecture in Western Japan. After a series of setbacks, the Suo Sarumawashi Association finally succeeded in bringing Sarumawashi back to life. Today the association in partnership with the Murasaki Corporation runs two 600 Seat Sarumawashi Theaters, one based in Kumamoto Prefecture and the other in Yamanashi Prefecture near the base of Mt. Fuji. The Suo Sarumawashi performing group also tours frequently throughout Japan.
The reason for Sarumawashi's ongoing popularity lies in the charm and agility of the Japanese macaque monkey. Sarumawashi showcases the natural physical prowess of the Japanese monkey by combining acrobatic stunts with comical skits and dances. The monkey and trainer perform as one unit to create a bond between man and primate

Augenblick, Blog on photography - Auction : Shijuku 1965-97 by Katsumi Watanabe

I like to follow auction , especially on fine art photography, prints and rare books, reason is not because i can effort to buy some of these precious stuff but because is interesting to see how good photography can reset his value with years. Bad photography is often forgotten, used for one or two publication, perhaps fashionable photo editor who were able to make it famous for a couple of years and then out of fashion and not good anymore...
I was looking at this rare book of Japanese Photographer Katsumi Watanabe Shinjuku 1965-97 which has been put it on sale with an opening Bid of 150 dollars, I don't know how ended up (by the time i am scheduling this post the auction is still on ) .
Here a brief description of the book :
The subjects in Watanabe's photographs are the prostitutes, street people, Drag Queens, entertainers and gangsters (Yakuza) that populated Tokyo's notorious Shinjuku district at night. Essentially, Watanabe made his living by selling the photographs to his subjects. He would offer three prints for 200 yen. A modest gentleman, Watanabe had a keen sensitivity to the natural posturing of his subjects which allowed them to uninhibitedly reveal their identities. He saw Shinjuku as a kind of stage and his photographs as documents the performers.

Augenblick, Blog on Photography , Profile : Hiroshi Watanabe

I have been looking at many photojournalistic work from North Korea, it seems media wants to know more about and send photographers hidden as tourist to shoot the most sealed country on earth, the result is often repetitive , same photos of metro station, sad people walking by the big statue of the great leader and some hidden photos done in the many boring museum and site which tourist are obliged to look. Although the difficulties to work in North Korea Japanese Hiroshi Watanabe was able to work deeper and produce a great essay of photos which ended up also in a book titled "Ideology in Paradise" . I like the portraits and the urban situation, the photographer seems he had quality time to shoot and be part of this mysterious country . Click here to see his gallery on this project.

Books : Bye Bye Polaroid by Daido Moriyama

There is a lot of talk about polaroids, perhaps it will be back with a new managment, what we know is that many good photographers have proved the magic of working with this instant film. To give a good example is one of the many books produced by Daido Moriyama which title the sad end of this beautiful media , Bye , Bye Polaroid:
As the title “bye-bye polaroid” suggests, Polaroid has stopped the manufacturing of instant film. The decision comes into force this summer following the growing strength of the digital market and the subsequent decrease in demand for instant film. Moriyama has photographed the city of Tokyo to pay homage to polaroid, a medium he has used unrelentingly for many years. In a style that hasn’t changed for 40 years, he roams the streets, smoking out the sights and smells of the city. Alleyways, advertisement boards, posters, commercial displays, and pedestrians… The Moriyama world you have seen in monochrome, can here be seen in color.
aka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, 2008. 112 pp., 105 illustrations, 9½x7¼".

Books : Mont Sainte Victoire by Risaku Suzuki

Is not an easy book to look at it but is worth to be mentioned as perhaps an interesting photo project : Mont Sainte Victorie by Japanese Photographer RIsaku Suzuki
Here an introduction note from the publisher :
"Featured in over fifty paintings by Cézanne, the Mont Sainte Victoire in Southern France is familiar even to those who have never been there. A century later, photographer Risaku Suzuki has followed in the great artist's footsteps, using a quite different medium to depict the landscape on the way. In Suzuki's photographs there is a feeling of movement and progression, giving the journey a pace that ought to be at odds with a series of static images. Sometimes it is as if the camera has legs and a mind of its own as it strays from the path to take in just one more inconspicuous part of the environment ? and all the while the audience is beckoned to come along too. Using limited depth of field, Suzuki focuses the lens on a tree, a piece of rock, unexceptional segments of a remarkable climb upwards.
Risaku Suzuki is one of Japan's most prominent young photographers. His work has been widely published in Japan, and exhibited in Asia, Europe and the United States. His photographs were included in "The History of Japanese Photography" exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He is a past winner of the Kimura Ihee Award. This beautifully produced, oversized monograph is limited to 1,000 casebound copies. Essay by Hideki Maeda." (Nazraeli)

Books : Tokyo Nobody by Masataka Nakano

The book "Tokyo Nobody" is a photo essay on different urban landscape of Japanese Metropole with the total absence of people. Interesting project by Masataka Nakano. As a big lover of Japan i would advice to have a look at the book (and perhaps buy it...)

Book : Tokyo by Takashi Homma

Another interesting book from a Japanese Photographer : Tokyo by Takashi Homma

here the note from the publisher:

Since the advent of photography, certain cities have become inextricably intertwined with their depiction by great photographers: Eugène Atget in turn-of-the-century Paris; Berenice Abbott in 1930s New York; Ed Ruscha in late-60s Los Angeles. While Daido Moriyama documented the disaffection and dissipation of postwar Tokyo, Takashi Homma picks up the baton with a contemporary portrait of the modern-day metropolis that is both cinematic and complex. For over a decade, Homma has turned the neutral gaze of his lens toward Tokyo’s suburban environs and urban center. As in all of his work, Homma’s vision of Tokyo navigates a finely nuanced line between sterility and sentimentality, detachment and lusciousness, presenting a sleek, contemporary vision of a postmodern megalopolis populated by a new generation of video-game aficionados and fashionistas. While Homma has published extensively inside his native Japan, this is his first volume published for an international audience. Takashi Homma: Tokyo compiles selections from each of the artist’s six previously published titles on the city, including Tokyo Suburbia, his seminal work now considered a contemporary classic.Photographs by Takashi Homma. Text by Ferdinand Brueggemann.
Aperture, New York, 2008. 256 pp., 125 color illustrations, 7x10".

Books : Small Planet by Naoki Honjo

Another book from Japanese Photographer Naoki Honjo : Small Planet
Here a note from Publisher :
Containers, urban buildings, freeways, Tokyo Station, parks, people: all are transformed in the photographs of this young Japanese photographer from the real to the fictional, like some cheaply made, yet exquisite, diorama. A total of 68 full-colour images are reproduced here, taken from high places with a special tele photo lens a little out of focus, in order to recreate a surreal pin-hole camera effect.

Exhibition : Daikichi Amano

Daikichi Amano has presented for the first time in Europe (in Rome) his show "Human Nature". The work follow and develop the well knows Erotic photography of Japan. I found interesting some of his work although he has a strong influence from the "Post Production" idea. The exhibition was held at Mondo Bizzarro Gallery in Rome.

here some notes from the show:

Daikichi Amano likes to describe himself as the “modern day reincarnation of Katsuhika Hokusai”. This is not an empty boast. Amano is one of the most exciting new visual artists working in Japan today.

Amano’s regular appearances in UK magazine Bizarre (the leading magazine of alternative culture), who have featured his photographs and work prominently in every issue for the past two years, have won him a worldwide cult following, with many fans in Europe, USA, Latin America and Australia.
Amano’s photographs are drawn from his own private fantasies. Fantasies that are animistic, animalistic and atavistic in nature, but all-too-human in execution, evoking primal fears and desires. In Amano’s world, the human body is worshipped and admired for its awesome beauty but also deformed and fused with nature – with wood, blood, bones, scales and feathers – transforming it into an erotic grotesque. But these frightful dioramas are also cut through with the blackest humour. His images also draw from traditional Japanese iconography and mythology.

Books : Asakusa Portraits by Hiroh Kikai

One of the best portrait book done recently, Hiroh Kikai explore the popular district of Asakusa (famous also for the many temples) by portraying people using a simple style.
Here a note from the book:
The Asakusa quarter of Tokyo was once home to the city’s historic pleasure palaces, and today embraces a stubbornly independent popular culture that encompasses traditional comedy theater and houses of erotic entertainment. Asakusa attracts outcasts from Japan’s modern consumer society and is also the home of the famous Senso-ji temple, which attracts floods of tourists from around the country. Over the past two decades, Hiroh Kikai has created an extensive and unforgettable series of street portraits from the enormous flow of people passing through
the district. Posed against the bare walls of the Senso-ji temple, these strong, severe, lonely studies radiate a shared sense of hard-won, idiosyncratic individuality. The photographs are accompanied by Kikai’s own pithy, sometimes humorous descriptions of his subjects. Taken together, Kikai’s Asakusa portraits amount to a classic meditation upon the timeless complexities of the human condition.

Profile : Asako Narahashi

Japanese Photographer Asako Narahashi has exhibited in many galleries, his project "Half awake and half asleep" turned out to be a successful project. A book has been printed out from it
Here a note from Yossi Milo Galleries which has shown the project last August 2008 :
Asako Narahashi's series half awake and half asleep in the water is a collection of C-Prints of various coastal sites in Japan. Since beginning the project in 2001, the artist has photographed over fifty locations with a Nikonos 35mm waterproof film camera. Narahashi floats chest deep in the ocean while facing back towards the shore, her camera held half-submerged in the water. By watching the waves without using the viewfinder, the artist times her pictures according to the swells of the ocean tide.
From this vantage point, waves washing against the lens of the camera create unexpected relationships between water, land and sky. With the water in the extreme foreground, the ocean dominates the view and distorts the customary perspectives of bridges, airplanes, buildings and mountains. The images are suspended in moments of uncertainty, leaving conflicting sensations of calm and growing apprehension unresolved.Asako Narahashi was born in 1959 in Tokyo, Japan. She began experimenting with photography in the mid-1980s. Work from this series is included in the current exhibition Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan at the International Center of Photography, New York. Her photographs are held in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Asako Narahashi currently lives and works in Tokyo.

Books : Degree Zero - Yokohama by Takuma Nakahira

Interesting book on Yokohama by Takuma Nakahira : Degree Zero. The book has been release upon the retrospective at the Yokohama Museum of Art in 2003.
Here some words from Takuma Nakahira:
"I believe that photography is neither creation nor memory, but documents. The act of shooting a photograph is not something abstract. It is always concrete. No manipulation to make simple things complicated through conceptualization. Only the real I encountered through the medium of the camera is here in my photographs."

Article : Matsushige Yoshito

Yoshito Matsushige was the only person/photographer who took photos of his native Hiroshima soon after the first atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. Here an extract of the story from Japan Focus :
Inscribing Hiroshima: The Photography of Matsushige Yoshito
There are dozens of brilliant war photographers, but there is only one Yoshito Matsushige.
For many years, Matsushige, 92, worked for a major metro daily called Chugoku Shimbun. He may not have been the greatest war photographer ever but he is unique: he took the only photographs in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, the day the first atomic bomb was detonated over the city, killing 150,000 people.
Photos of war are very much with us today, with fierce debates over whether we are seeing too much of one kind (Americans getting mutilated or strung up on bridges) and not enough of another (civilians dying in Fallujah and other cities). On Aug. 6, 1945, Matsushige wandered around Hiroshima for 10 hours, carrying one of the few cameras that survived the atomic bombing and two rolls of film with twenty-four possible exposures. This was no ordinary photo opportunity. He lined up one gripping shot after another but he could only push the shutter seven times.
When he was done he returned to his home and developed the pictures in the most primitive way, since every dark room in the city, including his own, had been destroyed. Under a star-filled sky, with the landscape around him littered with collapsed homes and the center of Hiroshima still smoldering in the distance, he washed his film in a radiated creek and hung it out to dry on the burned branch of a tree.
Five of the seven images came out, and they are all the world will ever know of what Hiroshima looked like on that day. Only Matsushige knows what the 17 photos he didn't take would have looked like.

Exhibition : Yasuhiro Ogawa , Slowly Down the River

I went to see an exhibition which opened yesterday at the Konica gallery in Shinjuku (Tokyo) , a work done by Japanese photographer Yasuhiro Ogawa on the Three Gorge Dam area . A reportage on the municipality of Chongqing done in different times. The exhibition also introduce the book "Slowly down the river".Yasuhiro Ogawa is a photographer of Collective Sha-Do , an interesting project between european and japanese photographers working in Japan. I will talk more about Sha-Do in the future as I am preparing a conversation which will introduce the idea and concept of the collective.
Here a note from the photographer on the Three Gorge Dam Project :
I wandered from place to place, being a passenger on the slow boats which run along the river. During the journeys I saw thousands of faces; faces reflecting the situation of the people, who are in the midst of a strong transitional current in this country." A photo story on modern day China, focusing the construction of the Three Gorges Dam.

Profile : Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto is one of the most important photographer in Japan, his photography range from landscape to still life using high technical skills, he works with an 8x10inc camera and he has exhibited in the best galleries.
here a note from wikipedia
Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. In 1970, Sugimoto studied politics and sociology at St. Paul’s University in Tokyo. Later, he retrained as an artist and received his BFA in Fine Arts at the Art Center College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA, two years later in 1972. Afterward, Sugimoto settled in New York City. Sugimoto has spoken of his work as an expression of ‘time exposed’, or photographs serving as a time capsule for a series of events in time. His work also focuses on transience of life, and the conflict between life and death.
Sugimoto is also deeply influenced by the writings and works of Marcel Duchamp, as well as the Dadaist and Surrealist movements as a whole. He has also expressed a great deal of interest in late 20th century modern architecture.
His use of an 8×10 large-format camera and extremely long exposures have garnered Sugimoto a reputation as a photographer of the highest technical ability. He is equally acclaimed for the conceptual and philosophical aspects of his work.
Sugimoto began his work with "Dioramas" in 1976, a series in which he photographed displays in natural history museums. The cultural assumption that cameras always show us reality tricks many viewers into assuming the animals in the photos are real until they examine the pictures carefully. His series "Portraits", begun in 1999, is based on a similar idea. In that series, Sugimoto photographs wax figures of Henry VIII and his wives. These wax figures are based on portraits from the 1500s and when taking the picture Sugimoto attempts to recreate the lighting that would have been used by the painter.