Book review: Hamaya, H., Yamamoto, K., Keller, J., Maddox, A., Iizawa, K., Kaneko, R., Reynolds, J. and Berland, D. (2013). Japan's modern divide: The photographs of Hiroshi Hamaya and Kansuke Yamamoto. Los Angeles, California: J. Paul Getty Museum.

Japan's modern divide presents the work of two photographers with differing techniques and objectives - one documentary, the other experimental art - practicing in a period when photographers were struggling to throw off the romantic, painterly style of pictorialism and define a new way forward for photographic practice.  Stuck at the literal edge of the world and reliant on ocean transport, Japan often lagged behind Europe and NA, where photographers had grappled with these issues many years earlier.  This period in Japan represented a brief flowering before the country's military ambitions resulted in persecution and cooptation of the country's arts communities.

The book's presentation is split evenly between Hamaya and Yamamoto, with approximately 100 pages of 50 plates and two essays devoted to each.  The opening essay presents both photographers in historical context.

Exploring Texture 2

The authors of the text warn against shooting patterns, but isn't that exactly what texture is?   Everything has texture, but our experience is relative to size. A piece of glass feels smooth, for example, but under intense magnification is sharp and uneven. The authors of the text note that shooting texture requires getting in close. But how close?

Here are some examples from a recent outing. The image of the leaf is of interest because though it appears to be ribbed, it is in fact quite smooth to the touch.

Book review: Tucker, A., Iizawa, K. and Kinoshita, N. (2003). The history of Japanese photography. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Image from:  http://photographybooksforsale.blogspot.ae/

This volume was produced as part of a 2003 exhibit of 207 images curated by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.  The book runs to just over 400 pages and includes 356 color illustrations.  Text is provided by six authors, beginning with an overview of scholarship in Japanese photography by Tucker, who organized 40 major exhibits as curator at the Houston museum.  She has also authored studies on female photographers, Brassai, and Korean photography. The remaining six essays are from five Japanese scholars, and a sixth from another American curator.

Teenage Wasteland: Portraits of Japanese Youth in Revolt, 1964

Ben Cosgrove  Oct. 19, 2013  

In 1964 in Japan, photographer Michael Rougier produced an intimate, unsettling portrait of a generation hurtling willfully toward oblivion.

31-image gallery at Time-Life online.

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Review: Paper Presentation: Sandra Phillips: How the US Discovered Japanese Photography: Thursday, 17 December 2015

Senior Curator of Photography at SFMoMA Sandra Phillips languidly reads a paper tracing the origins of US interest in Japanese photography.  The paper is weighty with details of names, dates, publications, and exhibits, all important facts in establishing a history but as a part of a presentation can be numbing and obscure the main ideas.  I had to concentrate to remain attentive.

From what I gather, the main actors are Edward Steichen, Ishimoto Yasuhiro, and Steichen’s successor at MoMA, John Szarkowski.  Steichen was introduced to Ishimoto Yasuhiro by Harry Callahan, who had been Ishimoto’s teacher at the Chicago Institute of Design.  Steichen sponsored an exhibit of Ishimoto’s work at MoMA, and later had Ishimoto collect Japanese photographs for Family of Man (1955), as well as assist in its redesign for a Japan tour.

Kuwabara Kineo 桑原 甲子雄, Morinaga Candy Store, Kyobashi, 1937

How simple an image, but how visually intriguing.  A photo of a photo montage of images by Horino Masao.

Kuwabara at Wikipedia.

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Street Portrait Sabkha

Following on from last Friday's workshop, I wanted to take advantage of the momentum established in collecting portraits, as well as get back to the neighborhood of Sabkha.  I found it wasn't at all difficult to approach strangers here.  Everyone was friendly, even the street girls selling their services (who suddenly became self-conscious when I asked to take a picture).  Perhaps the biggest challenge still is to take more than three or four shots per subject.

Following are some of what I consider some of the more successful shots.

Kurokawa Suizan 黒川翠山, untitled, ca 1906

Suizan has a minimal English Wikipedia entry, and no entry at all in Japanese. It seems he has been largely ignored.  This image suggests this is a mistake.

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Contemplative Photography: Chapter 9: Exploring Texture

The authors claim we conceive of texture as largely smooth and rough.  I hadn’t previously considered this, but it seems true.  I did a search for adjectives of texture and found a long list containing many words only loosely related, like angular, dreary, or dull.  Texture, it seems, should describe what something feels like.  Some words that seem relevant are included below.  (Unfortunately, blogger doesn’t allow columned text.)  Most of these could be categorized as varieties of smooth and rough, even adjectives related to the presence or absence of moisture, such as wet and dry.

Book review: Sella, V. and Adams, A. (1999). Summit.

Sella, V. and Adams, A. (1999). Summit. New York: Aperture.

If I collected photobooks, I would buy this.

It features what are perhaps the earliest and certainly most sublime photographs of the upper reaches of our planet ever made.  The images are even more remarkable given they were produced between 1879 and 1909 with heavy camera equipment on glass plate negatives.  Imagine hauling that kind of gear into the Alps, the Himalaya, the Caucasus, Alaska, and the Rwenzori, all locations documented in this collection.

I have read quite a bit in photographic history, but I didn’t run into Sella until finding a reference in The Ghost of Freedom, an introductory history of the Caucasus (quite a good read, for those that might be interested in more about that corner of the world).  Looking at this collection of images, it's difficult to imagine why Sella has been so largely ignored.  Not only was he the first to document many of these environments, but he did so with great technical skill and aesthetic sensitivity.

Fraser, K. (2011). Photography and Japan. London: Reaktion Books.

This volume on Japan is one in a series of short texts exploring various aspects of Photography and ..., such as Literature, Science, Death, Anthropology and Cinema.  Among the country specific titles are Australia, Egypt, Ireland, Italy and USA.  The Japan volume contains no information on its author, Karen M Fraser, apart from her being an Assistant Professor in Dept of Art and Art History at Santa Clara University.  Her university page does not list publications and a search of her name at Google Scholar is empty.  An internet search reveals she is an American scholar with a BA, MA and PhD in Art History, the last at Stanford, and that she teaches a course on the very subject of her book, suggesting it may function as a class text.

At 170 pages and containing a generous 104 images, the actual text is quite short.  Given Fraser’s direct and unaffected writing style, the book is easily and quickly digestible. If you are reading with or near an internet connected device, however, you may find your reading experience greatly lengthened by searches for images from the many photographers introduced within its pages.

Contemplative Photography Chapter 8: The Flash of Perception (Exercise: The Human Camera)

The authors attempt a slightly more detailed definition, beginning with two examples.  In the first we see someone we know and recognize something has changed, but can’t figure out what.  In the second, while looking in a restaurant window at people having their meals, our vision shifts to reflection in the glass.  In the first, we are so occupied with our concepts that we cannot properly see;  in the second, we break through conception so that seeing and mind are aligned.  This can occur, they claim, only when there is a gap in the thinking process.  This happens quite frequently and just as frequently we don’t notice.  But we can train ourselves to be attentive and to rest in those moments and thereby extend the experience.

The flash of perception is ...

Japan's forgotten history: The First Skyscraper, the Asakusa 凌雲閣 Ryōunkaku

The Ryōunkaku (凌雲閣 Ryōunkaku, lit. Cloud-Surpassing Pavilion or Cloud-Surpassing Tower) was Japan's first western-style skyscraper. It stood in the Asakusa district of Tokyo from 1890 until its demolition following the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923. The Asakusa Jūnikai (浅草十二階?, lit. Asakusa Twelve-stories), as it was called affectionately by Tokyoites, was the most popular attraction in Tokyo, and a showcase for new technologies as it housed Japan's first electric elevator.

- Wikipedia 

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Kageyama Koyo - Beach Pajama Style Moga, Ginza, Aug 1928

KAGEYAMA Koyo 影山光洋 (1907.5.23-1981.3.1) Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Pref.

Photographer of prewar and post-World War II scenes of everyday life in Japan.  Moved to Tokyo in 1926 to pursue his dream of becoming a photographer. In 1927, entered Tokyo Koto Kogei Gakko's (now Chiba Univ.'s engineering dept.) photo dept. Entered Asahi Shimbun newspapers in Tokyo in 1930. In 1945 when the war ended, he left Asahi Shimbun and became a freelance photographer. 

http://photoguide.jp/txt/KAGEYAMA_Koyo

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Book Review: Ross, K. (2015). Photography for everyone: The cultural lives of cameras and consumers in early twentieth-century Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Although an academic text, this is an easily readable account of popular photography in Japan in the two decades prior to World War II.  Where the work of this period is typically characterized as dominated by modernism, Ross is interested in exploring the wider practice of hobby photographers and their practice of geijutsu shashin.  The Japanese word can be literally translated as art photography, and is typically taken to mean pictorialism, photos that mimic the standards and conventions of painting, particularly impressionism.  Ross argues that the term as used in Japan encompassed a number of styles, including realism, but cites only one prominent text (Saito Tazunori’s 1932 How to Make Art Photographs) as evidence while admitting that most images in reader contests employed “lyrical or expressionists modes,”  and as elsewhere in Europe and North America, the historical trend was away from pictorialism towards realism.  Nevertheless, the text is chock full of interesting information on how cameras were sold (in large department stores and a wide network of second-hand shops);  how they were marketed (professional-level kit to men, easy-to-use gear to women);  and the role of clubs and photo contests in the dissemination of aesthetic (and democratic) values.  Included are a generous selection of period advertisements and how-to illustrations.  Perhaps of most interest is the question of why photography was so popular among the Japanese middle class, a question Ross answers with reference to JB Jackson, editor of Landscape magazine, on the dignity and self-affirmation of craftwork in the industrial age.  (Kerry Ross has a PhD from Columbia University and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at DePaul University.  A short professional biography from a 2009 conference is available here.)

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Fuchigami Hakuyo's “A Train Rushing”

列車驀進, Ressha bakushin by 淵上白陽, Fuchigami Hakuyo

“A Train Rushing” first appeared as the opening gravure image in the October 1930 issue of Asahi kamera. From the moment it was published, this image has symbolized the mastery of photographic form exhibited in Japanese modernism of this period. Today, “A Train Rushing” regularly appears in exhibition catalogues and histories of modern Japanese photography as the pinnacle of modernist photographic aesthetics.

Excerpt From:  Ross, Kerry. Photography for Everyone: The Cultural Lives of Cameras and Consumers in Early Twentieth-Century Japan. Stanford University Press, 2015

列車驀進, Ressha bakushin
淵上白陽, Fuchigami Hakuyo

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Ina Nobuo - Return to Photography

Japanese Masters: Shinzo Fukuhara

I found this remarkable description of a remarkable person and could not help but share.  Links to photo resources can be found below.  

After Shinzō Fukuhara returned to Tokyo in 1913 from the United States and Europe, where he studied pharmacology [at Colombia University] and pursued his interests in photography, he took over the day-to-day management of his family’s company, [the Tokyo pharmacy] Shiseidō, when his father retired and neither of his older brothers was found fit to run the company.

Sci-Hub: 47,000,000 free journal articles

Just ran into this item in my news feed and decided to give it a test drive.  It appears social sciences are also available.

I don't have any papers I'm in need of just now, so I chose a random topic [contemplative photography] for a Google Scholar search, from which I chose a suitable looking item (not interested in book reviews, for example, but full articles).  That lead me to this article page, which shows an abstract but requires a subscription to read the entire article.  From there I copied the DOI (digital object identifier), circled in red on the screen shot.

I pasted the DOI into the Sci-Hub search box, entered a capture code, and - voila!  I had a PDF of the full article.

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Review: Essential Street Portrait Crash Course, 12 February 2016

Yesterday, I attended the following 8-hour workshop, part of the annual Dubai Photo Week organized by Gulf Photo Plus.

I signed up for the class in December and am no longer clear why I did so.  As so much of my photography the past three years came out of my OCA classes, perhaps the lack of a course had me looking for a bit of structure and focus.  I think I was also interested in developing my street photography skills and saw this as chance to not only challenge myself, but also as an opportunity to meet fellow Dubai photographers with similar interests.

20-Shot Assignment: Tree

In fact I took perhaps 30 images, but many were variations, and many simply unremarkable and unpresentable.

Two notable issues, the first being focus.  Standing under the tree looking up, everything seems in focus to the eye.  In truth, the eye is rapidly readjusting to the many layers to which to the mind brings its attention.  The camera cannot do this.  It typically locks on to one or two layers and the rest, while clear on the lcd, is out of focus in the capture.  The only remedy for this is physical distance and zoom.  Unfortunately, there isn't enough distance to be had under the tree.

The other issue is finding and bringing out some kind of pattern within a subject that has no easily identifiable shape.  A leaf against the sky is easy.  A shape emerging from a bramble of branches is not.  Part of the problem is seeing, of isolating a shape, the other is using focus properly to capture it.  I tried a couple of these and they were absolute failures.  Maybe I will have to have another look at Friedlander's The desert seen.

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20-Shot Assignment: Automobile

Like the parking meter shot only moments before, I couldn't produce 20 images of this yellow Camaro.  I actually shot more that 20, but many were variations or not worth reproducing.  Sixteen was a good number for creating a 4x4 collage.

Perhaps the biggest impediment on this exercise was not being in the moment with the work, but feeling put upon to complete an exercise.  I didn't linger as long as I could have.  One concern was being found out by the car owner or some passerby.  It may also be because I was working on an assigned subject, rather than something one of my own interest.

I very much appreciate this type of exercise.  Too often we are in a hurry and don't give ourselves time to see all the interesting little facts of a subject.  I'd like in future to do this with a tree.

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20-Shot Assignment: Parking Meter

Like practicing Buddhists everywhere, the complaint of boredom leads to calls to investigate the condition of boredom.

“Boredom is merely a symptom that you haven’t open your eyes wide enough."

Book Review: Dubai 1962.

Kawashima, Yoshio, and Kimi Makishima-Akai. Dubai 1962. Dubai, UAE: Motivate Publishing, 2010. Print.

The Sankei Shimbun, one of Japan's leading newspapers, sent a writer and photographer on a tour of the Middle East in 1962.  What happened to the rest of their work during this period is not documented, but the photos of Dubai survived.  For reasons unexplained, photographer Yoshio Kawashima did not, as per company policy, turn over his negatives, but kept them for himself.  Forty years later he found them in storage and presented them to the Dubai Tourism office in Tokyo, Japan.  The tourism official afterwards showed the photos to one of the ruling Sheikhs, who on learning that the reporters were still alive invited them to a return visit to Dubai.  This is turn lead to an exhibit of the photograph collection and the publication of this book.

The images here are priceless, a glimpse into a world not far in time, but certainly long gone.  Included here are photos of the Sharjah airport, panoramas of the Creek and other areas of town, a day at the Ruler’s Court, snapshots of life in the market, and perhaps most unusual for this period images of a traditional wedding.  Kawashima is an able photographer, but the historical value of the images is far greater than any artistic merit.

Also included is the story of Abdullah Kamal, the merchant who lived in prewar Japan, spoke fluent Japanese, and served as Kawashima’s interpreter in 1962, as well as photos from the 2008 Dubai exhibit of these images.

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19th century mountaineer and photographer Vittorio Sella

In anticipation of my March trip to Georgia, I've been reading on the Caucasus and today ran into the work of Vittorio Sella.  It appears he is most well-know for his mountain landscapes and the published  books appear to be devoted to just this.  Of more interest are his ethnographic images of villages and village life.  

More on Sella:

Review: Frank, R. (2008) The Americans

Frank, R. and Kerouac, J. (2008). The Americans. Gottingen: Steidl.

I looked at this collection a couple of years ago and recall being unimpressed.  I ran into repeated references to the book in reading Bystander: A History of Street Photography, so thought I’d have another look and see how my perception may have changed.  I am struck here by several images.  Two from New Orleans, the bus and a the collection of pedestrians on Canal Street, seem very painterly as they include so many variables that would seem impossible to orchestrate outside a painting or a staged photo session.   The image of Butte, Montana, from a 4th or 5th story window and US 30 Nebraska are dense images with deep perspective and loads of detail, the kind of images that draw in the eye and encourage wandering.  The portraits are in general unappealing.  Some are out-of-focus, show the backs of heads, were shot in low light and are excessively grainy.  The two that piqued my interest include the Miami elevator girl - shot from above while she looks up at something or someone out of frame - and the waitress at the Hollywood diner - shot from below while she stares at something out of frame, a Santa head just above hers like a Christmas halo.  As a set the collection features such a variety of locations and subjects that it feels diffuse and lacking in coherence.  It’s hard to see how they all hang together apart from having been taken over two years by one person between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. 

Images below.  

Book review: Dyer, G. (2005). The ongoing moment.

Dyer, G. (2005). The ongoing moment. New York: Pantheon Books.

This book is an enjoyable read, full of witty observations on photography, photographs, and photographers.  It can also be exceedingly frustrating in its lack of direction:  there are no chapters and no summaries of what it all means.  While themes are certainly evident, they are explored rather like those in music or a novel, obliquely, often inferred, and not all at once.  Despite the non-academic approach to composition, Dyer includes a bibliography and annotates, though one wonders how the author decided, with such a meandering text, that a fact or an observation was deemed diversionary.  Dyer appears to have viewed a large number of photographs, though from those he quotes it seems his viewing was restricted to the work of more widely known photographers appearing in most history texts.  Rather than historical periods, aesthetic trends, or artists, Dyer organizes his writing around subjects such as blind beggars, hats, stairs, men in coats, barber shops, and gas stations.  This allows him to exemplify what might be his primary theme, that “the history of photography seems to consist of photographers doing personalized versions of a repertoire of scenes, tropes, subjects or motifs.”

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