Rickshaw Driver, Ginza,Tokyo, 1938. Photograph by Hiroshi Hamaya

Review by Lars Epstein for Japan Exposures.

The photographer Hiroshi Hamaya (1915-1999) was only 16 years old when in 1931, with his then-new Leica camera, he took the oldest of the pictures displayed in the photographic exhibition “Tokyo Stories”, which opened at the Kulturhuset (House of Culture) in Stockholm on March 6th. Hiroshi Hamaya was the youngest and perhaps the first Leica owner in Japan (the Leica appeared in 1929), according to Marc Feustel of Studio Equis in Paris, which has produced an exhibition which provides a composite picture of Tokyo’s development from the pre-World War II period to the super-modern society it is today. In addition to images by Hiroshi Hamaya, documentary photographs by Tadahiko Hayashi (1918-1990) and Shigeichi Nagano (born 1925) are also on display.

Curator Marc Feustel with a photograph by Tadahiko Hayashi in the background.

Hiroshi Hamaya (who received the Swedish Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 1987) strolled around in Tokyo with his camera in the 1930s and took a kind of “westernized” pictures, although he had no contact whatsoever with western photography. He documented a traditional Japan with geishas, rikschaw drivers and fortune-tellers, but also the emerging modernity of the city, and always with nerve and empathy.

Mother and children in a war-devastated area, Tokyo, 1947. Photography by Tadahiko Hayashi.

“Shigeichi Nagano’s photographs, also never shown before in Sweden, depict the emergence of modern Tokyo”

Tadahiko Hayashi’s images, never previously exhibited in Sweden, focus on the period just after the Second World War when Tokyo was in ruins and misery and poverty was widespread in the city. They form a deeply moving document of this period in Tokyo’s development. Shigeichi Nagano’s photographs, also never shown before in Sweden, depict the emergence of modern Tokyo, with students protests and the new emerging management philosophy.

Tokyo, 1995. Photography by Shigeichi Nagano.

The famous Swedish photographer Anders Petersen is a great friend of Japanese photography. He inaugurated the exhibition and expressed his delight that we now in Sweden have the opportunity to see some of the rich Japanese photographic tradition that foreshadowed photography giants such as Daido Moriyama and all his followers. You just have to agree with Anders Petersen. Those who miss this exhibition only have themselves to blame. The exhibition continues until May 2.

Anders Petersen inaugurates Tokyo Stories at Kulturhuset.

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Photography in the streets and public is by now an established genre, yet the world we have created around us and enter with confidence on a daily basis remains a mystery beckoning visual exploration. A photographer’s mission is to peer into the cracks that give entry to another world, a universe that is not usually seen and often times we don’t care to see.

Masahito Agake is one more hunter and watcher who is ready to capture these seams in our reality when they become apparent. While some may dismiss his visions as “nothing new”, once you take your time with the material there is a detectable addition of his own views. Photos from Japan and Taiwan blend into each other, connecting dots of universality that are often glossed over. In his photography he uses digital techniques to add an intriguing textural glow and shimmer to the images, which in my view add an incentive for repeated viewing to the photographs. While this may not be to everyone’s taste, we encourage you to not look just once.

Masahito Agake was born in Tokyo in 1969, and works professionally as an architect. In the early 90s Agake began shooting casually while scuba diving, and after coming across the work of Aleksandr Rodchenko and W. Eugene Smith in 1996, he took up photography more seriously. He had his first exhibition at Tokyo’s Place M gallery in 2003, and since then has exhibited his work in different galleries in Tokyo. Most recently he has been exhibiting his work at Third District Gallery in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.

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Aya Fujioka’s photos are not those which espouse a refinement or a celebration of reality. The term “investigation” is inappropriate when attempting to relate them to any sort of exploration of the World. She is one of the few photographers whose pictures are perhaps best seen as evidence of intimate considerations from within the artist’s immediate physical and emotional presence.

Her first book, comment te dire adieu (for which she received the Visual Arts Photo Award grand prix in 2005) was born from a journey abroad but despite contextually understanding that she was a Japanese woman living and photographing in Europe this earlier body of work is anything but Travel Photography. Though this previous book referenced travel through nearly each and every picture I personally do not know if Fujioka travelled far from home when she created the content for her latest book I Don’t Sleep. It’s possible that many of the pictures were in fact taken directly within her family’s house. The majority seem to have been taken in Japan but yet again these images remain mute as objects expressing an evaluation of her native society.

Fujioka’s line of sight through a her camera often centers on a definite discernible object filling the frame. Her color palette is bolder than that of many of her female contemporaries in Japan. While it looks as though it might be easy to dismiss her pictures as “snapshots”, a second more thoughtful glance reveals an emotional pull which is less familiar than it ought to be.

Spending time with both of her books finds one her pictures truly building upon one another. Each turn of the page adds another reference point along a line which reveals through partialities the culmination of a personal emotional experience. It is about as close as one can get to being in another person’s head.

Rather than generalizations of any set and agreed upon feeling, Aya Fujioka’s photographs are distinctly mysterious, sensual, and unsettling in the way which few photographers are able to successfully create. Her ability to peer out and within each time she gazes through the viewfinder allows the realization of a body of work which is mesmerizing in it’s entirety.

Please also see the coversation between John Sypal and fellow Japan Exposures’ contributor Dan Abe about Fujioka’s I Don’t Sleep photobook.

I Don’t Sleep is available in the Japan Exposures Bookstore.

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I Don't Sleep, by Aya Fujioka. Published by Akaaka, 2009.

Japan Exposures’ contributors John Sypal and Dan Abbe recently had several online chat sessions about Japanese photographer Aya Fujioka and her new book, 私は眠らない, or I Don’t Sleep, published late last year by Akaaka Art Publishing. They were nice enough to send the transcripts over to us, and we present below an edited version of their thoughts about the book.

Dan Abbe: You know, I showed this book to two people – one a photographer, and one not – and they both really enjoyed it. It was interesting to watch their reactions while they flipped through it, like at first they did not know what they were looking at, but by the end they were very much in the book’s grip. I’m interested in the sequencing of the book — I feel like it relates things in a pretty coherent way, from start -> middle -> end.

John Sypal: There are two distinct chapters in it, aren’t there.

DA: At least two, I suppose.

JS: You know, I have always assumed that these pictures are in chronological order. Of course there is no way of knowing, but that was my impression.

DA: That was definitely my impression as well. It seems that way to me. But who knows. However, it’s interesting that we both had that impression. I think everyone who looks at the book feels that way. The sequencing was entirely different.

JS: It is truly convincing, this sense that it is sequential.

DA: Definitely. It produces a very strong effect. There’s a strong current flowing through the book — it’s going in a direction. It could be just as simple as saying that this current equals the direction of time, going forwards in time from one point to another.

JS: Yeah. More than “Place”, the photographs are about “Time”. And photographs in general are fundamentally structured through, with, and in time. Rinko Kawauchi has a book called Cui Cui which deals with the death of a family member in a far more literal — visually literal — way than Fujioka has in this book. But after photos of Kawauchi’s grandfather’s funeral, a few pages later he comes back. It’s like “Hey look! There’s grandpa!”

DA: He was resurrected???

JS: He was — photographically.

DA: Haha.

“It’s not a book about Japan, it’s not really a book about Death with a capital D, it’s not a simple “Girly-Photo” snapshot collection. ”

JS: You just don’t know what is what in the book.

DA: What do you mean?

JS: It’s not a book about Japan, it’s not really a book about Death with a capital D, it’s not a simple “Girly-Photo” snapshot collection. Things are recognizable — for the most part. Maybe I’m getting tripped up on that photo of the hands rising out from behind a table with tangerines on it.

DA: I don’t think that she was really worrying too much about how the audience would receive this, i.e. as “a book about Japan,” etc

I Don't Sleep, by Aya Fujioka. Published by Akaaka, 2009.

JS: It’s a good example of how her images are straightforward but feel like they’re coming around a bend of some sort.

DA: It’s certainly very complicated, but I don’t think that’s because she wanted to make a “complicated book.”

JS: Right, and I am glad about that. It isn’t a book about Japan. Or the Japanese. It’s about her immediate surroundings at a particular time. Literal and Emotional. It’s this sideways kind of take — a slight slant. Not in a formal sense but rather in aligning reality with herself. ずれ (zure) in Japanese works better to describe it.

DA: I like the word “straightforward”.

JS: It’s sometimes a crutch when describing photos — but here it works.

DA: I guess what I’m getting at is that she is trying to take “straightforward” photos of a situation that is definitely not “straightforward” — even though, at the same time, it kind of is, in that it can be condensed down to one sentence – a relative is dying.

JS: I think the challenge is that it’s hard to express how closely this must feel like. That is, how it must feel to be able to see out from inside someone else’s head. The pictures are structured and filtered through her own reasonings — of course this is true for any photographer but Fujioka pulls it off unassumingly. I don’t feel like there’s any real lesson to be learned, or any broad preachy emotive expression about the Human Condition.

“Fujioka is trying to take “straightforward” photos of a situation that is definitely not “straightforward”, even though it can be condensed down to one sentence – a relative is dying.”

DA: I agree. It seems like a very honest attempt to communicate her experience during this time.

JS: Death does make many subtle appearances — the mourning Kimono, the Funeral Photograph, the tangerine carcasses on the beach.

DA: You never actually see her mother’s face — there’s one shot where she’s facing the camera but she’s got this heavy face mask on.

JS: How important is it to know that it is her mother?

DA: Hmm…

JS: I didn’t find any contextual information in the book.

DA: There isn’t any, although maybe if you spent a lot of time with the book you could put it together. I’m not sure. It could be vitally important, or not at all. It definitely affects the way I look at the book, but I think it would still be possible to get something from it otherwise. Sorry, that’s not a very good answer — but I liked your question.

By the way, there are a number of photos with “mistakes”.

JS: Light leaks?

I Don't Sleep, by Aya Fujioka. Published by Akaaka, 2009.

DA: Yeah. I wonder how (or why) they were produced.

JS: There’s certainly a Toy Camera boom… but again I think that her work is different. Lazy viewers might dismiss her work as “snapshots” or “Hiromix” (or Japanese Girly Photos, etc) which is done at the expense of missing out on a wonderful and challenging collection of photographs.

DA: Yeah, I mean many of the photos are certainly unplanned. But the editing of the book makes it entirely different from a “snapshot book”, just in the way those books approach experience.

JS: I’m a big fan of true snapshots (although I hate the term). I have a Japanese book called “Childlens” on my shelf – - it was a disposable camera project where kids of ages 2 to 5 were given cameras with which they made photographs which were both mind blowing and humbling (to me as a photographer) at the same time.

DA: I saw a copy of Araki’s “Sentimental Journey” today (selling for $3000), I wonder if that might be closer to this in spirit. I wouldn’t really know, not having seen more than 10 of the photos, but just as an example of something that’s more closely connected to what’s happening to the photographer.

JS: With Fujioka — I mean, you have a name on the cover and a few lines at the end of her words — but I don’t feel all that close to “her”.

DA: For me it feels almost uncomfortably close.

JS: Experiencing Fujioka’s work is to me akin to trying to remember a dream in those moments right after you wake up. But that sounds like a super lame tag line. Her work is beyond such gimmicks.

I Don't Sleep, by Aya Fujioka. Published by Akaaka, 2009.

DA: I dunno, it doesn’t seem quite that vague to me. Images might be hard to process directly as “information” but as I said before, there is a strong current going through the book, whether that’s a kind of narrative, or her feelings, or whatever.

JS: I’m interested in the visual themes that resurface throughout the book. Vegetation, hands, looking through things…

DA: Dirty windows…

JS: Being looked at through things, like the paper door and the woman’s facial mask…

DA: hula hoops, oranges…

JS: …and arms held out. Also the old man’s face is previewed as a sketch on a stool. Across from the photo of the woman face down on a bed.

DA: So many hands!

JS: And on one page, trees have fingers. It’s a photo across from a picture with hands in it. There’s also tile roofs and tatami-mat covered rooms

DA: Right. Well, how much do you want to make of these recurring things?

JS: I think that recurring elements are very important. But I don’t think that she is a collector out there thinking “oh boy here’s some more oranges” and then fires off 8 frames of film. It seems more likely that as she shoots she begins to see patterns emerge. That’s how it should be, anyway. The patterns emerge from looking at prints or whatever way it is that she deals with the physical aspects of her photography.

Aya Fujiya -- from I Don't Sleep

DA: I agree. They strike me as a (maybe unconscious?) way to order her experience, maybe as she was taking the photos or, like you’re suggesting, maybe after it. Everyone is drawn to certain things.

JS: Yeah. By the way, the picture of the square-ish cube-shaped frozen octopus in the round plastic bowl blew me away and to place it across from the photo of the nude woman in a square wooden bath was genius.
Let’s talk about the book’s design — it’s pretty amazing. It’s big, and the pictures are big. The white frame keeps them separate from the reader’s own world. And we shouldn’t neglect the fact of how some of the vertical shots are postioned! This was the first time I had seen a book where “down” was the gutter for two facing pages of pictures. (the photo of the woman with the apple and the observation point ceramic sign).

DA: I agree — it’s a really well done book. The vertical spreads only come at the beginning, no?

JS: Around there.

DA: I was thinking about making some nice color copies of the pages to put up on my wall. The colors are fantastic.

JS: Yeah! Her palette is so different from most other Japanese photographers working in color. It’s richer, but not saturated. She shoots film– and the grain works in her favor. For whatever it’s worth, I know she uses a little Nikon FM2 with a 35 or 50mm lens. I have also met her when she had a Werra over her shoulder. It’s a clever little German camera that has you advance the film by rotating a collar around the lens. How this affects her photographs, I don’t know. I’d like to think that the physical necessities surrounding her camera operation lends itself to the quiet feel of her work. And in the way Fujioka responds emotionally to places and events, she utilizes time to create these pictures which are truly beautiful. Beauty might not be her end goal, but we shouldn’t ignore their aesthetic poignancy in addition to the emotional impact of this fantastic collection of photography.

Please also see our gallery of Aya Fujioka’s work along with an introduction by John Sypal.

Dan Abbe lives in Tokyo and writes a blog about photography called Street Level Japan.

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Ken Kitano, from Flow and Fusion -- Tokyo Dome

Profile by Yu Hidaka for Japan Exposures. Please also see our extended gallery of Kitano’s work.

Note: click on images to see large

The photographs of Ken Kitano are both extremely concrete and highly philosophical at the same time. Kitano, whom the critic and curator Vince Aletti picked as one of current five photographers in the world to watch in the April, 2009 issue of Modern Painters, recently published his second book, Flow and Fusion this winter. This book attracted attention this past Fall at Paris Photo, an international art fair held every November in Paris, where Kitano has continually been a big hit. This warm reception follows upon Kitano’s 2008 appearance at the same fair, where “Flow and Fusion” was short-listed for the Paris Photo BMW Prize. His “one day” series was similarly nominated and showed during the 2009 fair.

In the series “Flow and Fusion,” Kitano captured the cityscape of Tokyo by means of a slow shutter speed during the 1990’s, which was a kind of apocalyptic period of such events such as the bursting of the bubble economy, the Great Hanshin Earthquake, and the terrorist actions of the Aum religious cult . We can read Kitano’s photographs as a trajectory of his deep meditation on our existence as human beings and the world we live in.

“Kitano’s way of fusing such plural existences together into one trace of light is his consistent and unique style.”

In that sense, “Flow and Fusion” should perhaps be looked at in detail first in order to understand Kitano’s whole photographic vision. In “Flow and Fusion”, the use of long exposures causes people as plural existences on the street to melt into one flow of light. Kitano’s way of fusing such plural existences together into one trace of light is his consistent and unique style, and can be seen through all three series of his photography, “Flow and Fusion”, “our face”, and “one day”.

In responding to the chaotic conditions of society at the young age of 20, “Flow and Fusion” undoubtedly became the starting point for Kitano’s search for who he is, and what the border or contour of a person is, and what divides him or her from others — that is, how a photographer can grasp the identity of each person. He resorted to the seemingly contradictory idea where people’s rigid contours, which as depicted in photographs can be seen as something endorsing identity, are put in danger of disappearing by melding them into one trace of light. In this time of people swinging and living in an unstable social environment, how can a person exist as a solid being with actual feelings for his existence? — that seems to have been a crucial question for Kitano at that time.

Even after the chaotic upheaval period of the 1990’s had apparently passed, Kitano continued to explore the difficulty of seeing our contemporary life clearly with actual feelings. The series “our face” shows the next stage of his search for human conditions in this contemporary world.

Ken Kitano, from our face, 24 guards in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China, 2009

Kitano widens the field of his photographic investigation from the cityscape to the globalized world in this portrait series. He superimposed finely detailed portraits of each subject located in a specific region and situation in the world into one collective portrait photograph, and named it “our face.” The choice of “our face” for the series title represents the conflicting union of the plural idea of “our” and the singular form of “face.” He seems to be waiting for the emergence of a new form of our identity in his photographs that is beyond contradiction. Although such qualities as the fine-grained of his photographs reveals his desire to see things in atomic level as a cold realist, “one day” also presents a hot visionary artist keen to envision the image of our identity in a difficult time, and one eager to believe in the solidity and graveness of our identity.

Kitano has continued to pursue this portrait project as he attempts to superimpose people in different parts of the world, a sort of endless and perhaps impossible journey to capture all of us. This epic idea of photographic research might remind us of that of the great photographer August Sander, who tried to represent the “Citizens of the Twentieth Century”.

Ken Kitano, from one day, Classroom, Kanagawa Kenritsu Soubudai High School

Kitano’s newest series, “one day,” is a landscape series and a work-in-progress that he has been pursuing off-and-on throughout the last decade. In this series he captures, in a single long exposure photograph, a full day in various places, both common, everyday sites like a high school classroom, as well as historical sites in Japan. Here Kitano expands his study of the human condition and further moves us from that territory which we can grasp consciously into a place beyond our consciousness.

Furthermore, he investigates the identity of photography in this process. He transforms the concept of photographic moment to a prolonged and continuing time. He accumulates moments of time and weaves them into a singular landscape. “One day” invites us to read something overlooked and underlying as a vision of our world. The landscapes of “one day” and the people in “our face,” the origins of which can both be traced to “Flow and Fusion,” might be read as a coupled mirror with which to see our life in this world.

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The terms flow and fusion ring ever so true when looking at these images. The flow of time, an hour, a day or even more, fusing in an eternal cosmic moment. The flows and traces of different lives of distinct individuals, unified in what could be the very essence of a human being.

Kitano’s book our face is available in the Japan Exposures bookstore. If you are interested in purchasing a copy of Kitano’s Flow and Fusion, please contact us.

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The democracy of Japan had the defeat and arose. How my parents adopted themselves to the conversion of ideology? The technique of prints that I had learnt at the photography school easily became unnecessary because of the appearance of the digital camera. I think I tasted the same circumstances as my parents a little. The world was made by 0 and 1 when I slipped out of my air-raid shelter of darkroom. If I had Fellini’s eye of love and freedom, could I find pleasure in the society of the lie?

Please also see our current Cover Photo featuring Wada’s Nipporini.

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When offline is becoming the new online, then the street is the new stage where the workings of at least some of Japan’s society are laid bare to be examined by a sharp and scrutinising eye such as Abe’s. Similar to photographers like Haruto Hoshi (featured previously on Japan Exposures), Abe bids a final farewell to the quaint snap of the old masters like Ihei Kimura and meets contemporary Tokyo in the streets of central Tokyo head on. These are not street photos showing amusing juxtapositions featuring people going about their daily lives. Abe’s photos have a delightful unnerving intensity and unrest, full of energy and vibrancy of life, yet despite their visual power they never appear confrontational or provocative for the sake of it. The images are a revelation of how much street photography in the civilised Japanese metropolis still has to offer. Radical, essential and absolutely inspirational.

Please also see our Cover Photo featuring Abe’s work.

UPDATE: a slide show with more photos from the exhibition is available on the Third District Gallery web site. [Click on the top postcard image; thanks to Aya Takada]

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Ivan Vartanian’s survey Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and 1970s shows up twice (Ed Templeton, Richard Gordon), which was both heartening and worrying — let’s hope that it’s not an indication that we need to harken back to those halcyon days to get our photobook fixes.

The other Japanese photography books that made the various lists:

• The Joy of Portraits, by Keizo Kitajima (John Gossage, Lesley A. Martin) — If you’re interested in acquiring this 13-pound, 2-volume set for a reasonable price, please get in touch; or you could content yourself with the catalog from Kitajima’s Tokyo retrospective from last Fall.
• Portraits of Silence, by Hisashi Shimizu (Daniel Espeset) — Glad to see this moving book recognized.
• Cui Cui, by Rinka Kawauchi (Tricia Gabriel) — Mind you this book was published in 2005, but who’s counting
• Kamaitachi, by Eikoh Hosoe (Sara Terry) — a 1969 book, but since this was republished in a trade edition in 2009 we won’t complain.
• Binran, by Masato Seto (Michael Wolf) — technically from 2008.

Like I said, not much love as far as Japanese photography books goes.

Here are my very subjective choices for favorite books published in Japan last year:

Citizens, by Jun Abe (published January 11, 2009) If it weren’t for the “1979 – 1983″ subtitle that very subtly accompanies this work from Jun Abe, there would be very little to belie the fact that these photos are 25 – 30 years old. And aside from that information, there is nothing else by way of context — but who needs it? You only need this book, and the hope that the maligned genre of street photography doesn’t get trampled by privacy pushers and the “right to my own likeness” brigade.

“Magazine Work” set, by Daido Moriyama (September, 2009) Many Daido Moriyama publications in 2009 (by my count there were at least 10 new Moriyama books relased in 2009, which is getting into prolific Araki territory). Of them all, I think that the two volumes of magazine work from the sixties and seventies, Nippon Gekijo and Nani ka e no tabi are particularly worthy additions to the Moriyama canon and essential to understanding his development as an artist. Honorable Moriyama mention for Northern, in some ways the most un-Moriyama book since the 2005 Takuno.

Tokyo Zenritsusengan, by Nobuyoshi Araki (October, 2009) 2009 was a very lean book year by Nobuyoshi Araki’s normal assembly line standards, and this book published toward the end of 2009 told us why — Araki was diagnosed with prostrate cancer in 2008, which understandably limited his creative output. Maybe it’s the backstory working its magic, but this book for me feels more heartfelt and intimate than an Araki book has felt in some time. Bonus points for the slightly unconventional binding.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto “Multi-Exposure” (exhibition catalog, May, 2009) Nothing better than to visit a small, out of the way exhibition at some outlying university campus of one of your favorite photographers and find that they have accompanied said exhibition with a lovingly produced catalog that presents the work in a unique way and features contextual essays about said favorite photographer and said exhibition in English. This catalog of Yasuhiro Ishimoto’s multiple exposure collages produced by Musashino was such a catalog.

Tokyo Y-Junctions, by Tadanori Yokoo (published October, 2009) When I came across famed graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo’s book of paintings Y-Junction (2006), which take as their subject the Y-shaped intersections of Tokyo, I found myself fascinated by the serial nature of the work, and how photographic the project felt — helped in part by Yokoo’s desision to pair each intersection painting with a collage of photo studies he had made of the same intersection. So it was curious to see that Yokoo decided to make a separate project of these intersections, but this time consisting only of photographs — surely overkill, no?. But the resulting mix of part “Tokyo Nobody” Masataka Nakano, Becher-like typology, and ephemera-collecting Kyoichi Tsusuki is really a quite wonderful portrait of vernacular Tokyo.

Shomei Tomatsu: Hues and Textures of Nagasaki (exhibition catalog, October, 2009) Unfortunately it seems a very long time since we were treated to a new Shomei Tomatsu book, and so one must content oneself with the Skin of the Nation book of a few years ago, or the omnibus-like catalogs that have accompanied various Tomatsu retrospectives in Japan over the past few years. This catalog from the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum is everything you’d expect from a museum catalog — which basically means it does the job. But no matter. Any chance to catch up with what Japan’s greatest living photographer (IMHO, of course) has been doing in the “noughties” is one worth grabbing, and with over 309 color photos collected, it’s impossible to be disappointed, not the least because it proves that the near 80-year old Tomatsu is still at the top of his game.

Blue Period 1973-1979, by Akiyoshi Taniguchi (April, 2009) There seem to have been a lot of books published last year of work done in the past, but of those I’m not sure there were any that featured photographs taken by an artist when they were in their teens, besides this one. Akiyoshi Taniguchi — who later studied photography under Leo Rubinfien before becoming a Buddhist priest — shows that while he may have been a teenager, the photos he took evidenced a mature outlook and calm reflectiveness that no doubt have served him well in his current career.

Hana Dorobou, by Eikoh Hosoe (November, 2009) This lovely book by one of Japanese photography’s undisputed masters resurrected a project from the mid-60s that even Eikoh Hosoe himself had forgotten about. Hosoe took some dolls hand made by a famous lingerie designer, put them in decidedly un-doll-like situations, creating a book that can be enjoyed by parents and children alike — if the parent is not averse to dealing with the frank questions that surely will result. Beautifully printed too.

Honorable mentions to the following: Gyahtei, by Manabu Yamanaka; Faraway Eyes, by Jiro Nomura; Hong Kong Reminiscence 1958, by Shigeichi Nagano; and Banta, by Osamu James Nakagawa.

What were some of the 2009 books from Japan that Japan Exposures readers enjoyed?

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I first saw Tomoyuki Sakaguchi’s images of suburban Tokyo when I was in my third year of a photography BA and something of a transparency film snob. Everything had to be film, and the only purpose of digital was quick and dirty snapshots. Sakaguchi’s work was the catalyst that suddenly pointed out that fine art photography is not strictly the reserve of film. The appeal of Sakaguchi’s series Home is, for me, how effectively it marries the ‘look’ of digital photography to the content of the series. The strange quality of light and the unnatural saturation and tonality of the greenery have a uniquely digital aesthetic.

This glossy plasticity is at odds with an American photographer whose work provides an interesting counterpoint. Todd Hido’s large format series Homes at Night embodies everything Sakaguchi’s work eschews. Where Homes at Night is dark, subdued and atmospheric, Home is vibrant and saturated. Hido’s images are stuck in the past, whereas Sakaguchi’s are unashamedly modern. We need only look at the cars in Sakaguchi’s images to confirm this. They are brightly coloured, compact, utilitarian. They are also, in a very real sense, the main characters in this odd little nocturnal drama. They occupy each image with surprising presence and vitality, providing a link to the sleeping residents of each home.

Please also see our current Cover Photo by Sakaguchi.

Sakaguchi’s book Home is available in the Japan Exposures bookstore.

Silas Dominey recently graduated from Leeds College of Art’s BA Photography Programme and currently works as a freelance photo assistant. His work can be seen at www.silasdominey.com.

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