Kanako Sasaki was born in Sendai, Japan. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Ithaca College in New York in 2001, and in 2004 received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She also studied for two years at the Royal College of Art in London.
Since 2001 Sasaki has been exhibiting her work both in her native Japan and abroad and has held an increasing number of solo exhibitions where she shows installations mingling photography and video, in Budapest, Tokyo, New York, amongst others. Her work is focused on older women, in homage to her grandmother who died quite recently. By meeting such people all over the world, she is searching for a universal memory of a bygone time, in order not to lose her own memory. For her, her work is a “celebration of the capacity for survival of universal emotions”.
In 2006 she was selected as one of PDN’s #30 Emerging Photographers to Watch, and in 2008 she won a Shiseido Art Egg Award which is given by the cosmetics giant each year to three up-and-coming artists from various artistic fields.
The above photo comes from Sasaki’s “Ukiyo 1 – The World of Groping” series of portraits which she has been working on since 2006.
Sasaki is currently a resident artist at CENTQUATRE as part of a Paris-Tokyo artist cultural exchange program supported by Tokyo Wonder Site Institute of Contemporary Arts and International Cultural Exchange and the City of Paris. During her residency, Sasaki will work with elderly men and women from the district and Japanese who have lived in Paris for a long time, with the objective of revisiting their memories within the installation. In order to do this, she plans to visit these people’s flats, take photographs and conduct interviews, probing their memory and their connection with private and public space.
Tsukasa Yokozawa was born in Nagoya, Japan in 1971 and is currently based in New York City. He graduated from the Tokyo College of Photography in Yokohama in 1996, where he also taught from 2000 to 2007. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo and Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. His series “Spilt Milk” features photographs of cities in Japan taken from a great distance. In 2007, he received an arts fellowship from the Japanese government to continue that series in the United States, leading to the creation of the series “Parallel Lives”, made in New York. He is now participating in a group show at Danziger Projects in New York. Yokozawa’s work is in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami. The above work dates from 2006.
The latest iteration of Daido Moriyama’s “Record”, number 13, arrived here at Japan Exposures a few weeks ago and upon diving into it’s black and white goodness, it was immediately apparent that there was something not quite the same with this issue. Could it be the number 13 working its unlucky magic? For starters, unlike previous issues and indeed 90% of Moriyama’s ouevre, the printing wasn’t full bleed, ie. there were actual white borders on the edges of the page. The design also didn’t exclusively feature the customary one photo per page layout of the other issues but had several spreads of smaller individual photos. But perhaps the most tell-tale sign that something different was afoot were the photos themselves, or more specifically, the texture — there was a noticeable lack of grain to the images. Unsettling indeed.
Returning to the cover we so hurriedly skipped past, we have the familiar Moriyama leitmotif of the reflected storefront window self-portrait. And herein lies the rub: Upon closer inspection, the camera obscuring Moriyama’s face seems a whole lot bigger than the Ricoh and Olympus point and shoots he normally carries — indeed, it’s big enough that Moriyama can be seen carrying using both of his hands to hold it. Wait a minute. That isn’t an old-school Polaroid Land camera he’s holding there, now is it? A flip to the afterword later, we get our confirmation:
The black-and-white shots featured in this issue were taken with FUJIFILM INSTANT B&W FP-400B film, using a POLAROID LAND CAMERA MODEL 180 that was given to me by a former student.
The 180 model is a Polaroid camera produced between 1965-1969 and accepts sub-4×5 in. size 100/660-Series Land Pack Films. Of course, Polaroid pack film is no longer with us, but it was long unknown outside of Japan that there is a substitute made by Fujifilm, in even greater variety (and arguably, quality) than the original Polaroid material. It is still readily available and offers may creative possibilities. How else otherwise would Moriyama have been able to impose his hallmark contrast and tonal range onto the photographs?
Instant B/W Film FP-400B SuperThe Fujifilm instant pack films are the peel-apart type, which means you have control over the development time and with careful balancing of exposure and development there are endless creative possibilities. On top of that, these black and white instant films carry the suffix “Speedy” or “Super Speedy” which refers to the rapid development times which are around 15 to 30 seconds. Surely, anything longer would inhibit the creative process by slowing down the photographer. Now all you need to be careful about is to let their surface dry before stacking them together in your pocket.
It would seem that Bye Bye Polaroid was not the final farewell to Moriyama’s exploitation of instant films we thought it was.
Please see the Japan Exposures Stores for the film of the book — and vice versa.
Mao Ishikawa is an Okinawan photographer who has been documenting her homeland and the contentious presence of the U.S. military there for over 36 years. Her uncompromising photography work looking at the lives of “Kin-Town Women” — that is, those women who “befriend” American marines in the Kin entertainment district that caters to them off-base, including at one point Ishikawa herself — led that other great documenter of the American military in Okinawa Shomei Tomatsu to write:
It’s hardly necessary to point out that as a photographer [Mao Ishikawa] lives at the polar opposite of the illusion of objectivity. Mao’s photography does not give a hoot for photography as a systematic structure. Rather, she views the whole world by becoming a totally committed part of it. She is a photographer, and also a Kin-Town woman. The distance between her and the subject, and her relationship with it, are completely different from that of the run-of-the-mill photographer.
In 1975, while shooting in Koza, another of the entertainment districts in Okinawa, Ishikawa became friends with Myron Carr, an American serviceman from Philadelphia. In 1986 Ishikawa left her young daughter in the care of her mother to visit Carr, who had returned home from Okinawa in 1977. Ishikawa stayed for two months with Myron and his twin brother Byron, and took photos of the two of them and the various other people who lived in the house and around their poor inner-city Philadelphia neighborhood.
At the time, upon returning to Japan and looking over the prints, Ishikawa thought they were nothing special. Fortunately, upon relooking at them 23 years later, Ishikawa now realizes she captured something very special indeed. As she writes in the book’s introduction:
I don’t know how I managed to take photos of all the various scenes, which are all so very natural. In every one of them, everyone is unselfconsciously themselves and they are unabashed by my presence. You don’t get many photos like these. Even I was impressed!
This nearly 25 year old work has just been published for the first time in a book entitled Life in Philly, by Nara gallery OUT of PLACE in collaboration with Zen Foto Gallery of Tokyo, and Japan Exposures is very pleased to be able to offer it to our readership.
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.
John Sypal, born and raised in Nebraska, USA, currently living in Matsudo city (Chiba Pref.). John has been exhibiting his photographs widely in the US and in Japan. His photographs are frequently featured in Japanese photo magazines. He is currently a member of Machikata Sampo Shashin Doumei (Walking Photographers Alliance). John also enjoys meeting people and photographs their cameras for tokyo camera style.
Aya Fujioka was born in Hiroshima, and attended Nihon University’s College of Art. She has been exhibiting her work since 1996, and in 2005 she won the Visual Arts Photo Award given to promising young photographers and judged by Daido Moriyama, Yoshihiko Ueda, and Masato Seto, among others. The prize was awarded for her work entitled Comment te dire adieu, which was then published by Visual Arts.
Her work ç§ã¯çœ らãªã„ (watashi wa nemuranai, or “I Don’t Sleep”), from which this photo was taken, was published as a book in late 2009 by Akaaka Art Publishing. Fujioka currently divides her time between New York City and Japan.
Japan Exposures’ contributors John Sypal and Dan Abbe recently had several online chat sessions about Japanese photographer Aya Fujioka and her new book, ç§ã¯çœ らãªã„, 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. â€
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. ãšã‚Œ (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 “straightforwardâ€, even though it can be condensed down to one sentence – a relative is dying.â€
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.
John Sypal, was born and raised in Nebraska, USA, and currently lives in Matsudo city (Chiba Pref.). John has been exhibiting his photographs widely in the US and in Japan. His photographs are frequently featured in Japanese photo magazines. He is currently a member of Machikata Sampo Shashin Doumei (Walking Photographers Alliance). John also enjoys meeting people and photographs their cameras for tokyo camera style.
Dan Abbe lives in Tokyo and writes a blog about photography called Street Level Japan.
John Sypal, born and raised in Nebraska, USA, currently living in Matsudo city (Chiba Pref.). John has been exhibiting his photographs widely in the US and in Japan. His photographs are frequently featured in Japanese photo magazines. He is currently a member of Machikata Sampo Shashin Doumei (Walking Photographers Alliance). John also enjoys meeting people and photographs their cameras for 
