Book review: Ihei, Kimura. Akita. 1978 (2011).

Mutsumi found this book at a beer bar in Ikebukuro Station.  We were slaking our thirst after a long day of walking, not there for the books.  In fact we were lucky they didn’t have a table for us when we came in.  We sat at the bar instead, near which is a bookcase with a small collection of mostly magazines.  When we found Akita, we cleared the bar, started at the front, and worked our way through what must have been around 200 plates, all black and white, and shot in the post-war period, from the 1950s-70s.  As the title indicates, the subject is the prefecture of Akita, still a rural area of Japan that from the looks of these images has changed drastically in the past half century.  Apart from the occasional bit of English – the word “post” on a postbox, for example – or a motorcycle or car in the background, it seems these photos could have been taken 100 years ago, or even 500 years ago.  There are no signs of mass produced anything – no TVs, radios, cell phones, watches, name brands, baseball caps, or even something as simple as zippers.  All the clothing appears to be hand-made, everyone walks or in winter uses sleighs, motor power is provided by animals, and home life appears to center around eating, drinking, talking, and smoking.  The images are absolutely amazing for revealing a way of life that when it was recorded neither the subjects nor photographer could have imaged disappearing within 50 years of having been recorded.  Sometimes we can’t see the significance of what photographers record until years later, after which we are incredibly thankful for the investment in time and effort, despite others not being able to see the value in the work as it was being produced. Thank you, Kimura-san.

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Exhibit review: Jigoku Wonderland: Buddhist Hell Scenes, Tokyo, Japan

Jigoku Wonderland:  Buddhist Hell Scenes
Mitsui Memorial Museum

Opening day was not as crowded as expected.  Not crowded at all, in fact.  Mutsumi said it was because this was a B-grade exhibit, not something likely to draw hordes of fashionistas.  The building was perhaps more impressive than the exhibit, an early 20th century construction that has been designated an Important Cultural Property.  The exhibit featured approximately 100 pieces ranging from the 13th century to the present, all connected to the theme of hell as conceived in Japanese Buddhism.  A few texts were on display, but most items were paintings, drawings, or sculpture.  As with the work collected in the exhibit of the Belgian Fantastic, many of the paintings and drawings demanded close inspection to appreciate the detail filling out the corners of the canvas or paper.  Common themes included the depiction of Emmao and the ten judges of hell, the corresponding ten levels of hell, and the various tortures perpetrated by the guardian monsters against their human victims, which consisted in the main of burning, boiling, dismembering, and impaling.  Altogether this was a well conceived and interesting collection of art.  It might have been improved by a suitably gruesome soundtrack of roaring flames, sawing bones, banging metal, dripping blood, breaking bones, screams and moans.  Museum management needs to rethink customer relations.  We were told off by a guard for using our mobile device within the exhibit.  We were not photographing or talking on the phone, just searching maps for our next destination.

A selection of small images of some of the exhibit items is available on the museum's Japanese language website:  http://www.mitsui-museum.jp/exhibition/index.html

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Review: Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

While this is a lovely facility in an upscale neighborhood, I was disappointed on three counts.  The first seems to be rather common to Japan, the prohibition of photographing exhibitions.  I would have liked to have taken an image or two for this blog.  I’ve been to exhibits that actually encourage the taking and sharing of images on social media as a form of free advertisement.  It makes for a more interactive experience of art than simply acting as a passive consumer/viewer.  Secondly, there is no permanent display.  Apparently there used to be, but it was long ago removed.  And lastly, there was no display during my visit of Japanese photography.  Fortunately, I found an excellent exhibit of a Japanese photographer -- photography permitted -- at Gallery 916.

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Exhibit Review: Nihon Eiga: The History of Japanese Film, Tokyo, Japan

Nihon Eiga: The History of Japanese Film
National Film Center, Tokyo

Nihon Eiga is a permanent exhibit featuring a small portion of the National Film Center’s large collection of film artifacts, such things as posters, scripts, still images, camera equipment, and props. Like many Japanese spaces, the area is small but used to good effect by layering and stacking.  There is very little unused wall or floor space.  Material is organized chronologically beginning with visual storytelling before the arrival of film and continuing on through to a final section on animation. Throughout there are small video screens displaying clips of historically relevant films.  During my weekday visit, I saw only three other guests and had no difficulty availing myself of several of the available stools, a nice to chance to relax while also enjoying parts of the display.  Japanese cinephiles are sure to find some mention of their personal favorites here, though there may be only one or two items per person.  Kurosawa, for example, probably Japan’s best known director to audiences outside Japan, is represented by costume sketches for Dodeskaden and a scrapbook of production stills of Ikiru collected by its star, Shimura Takashi.  Among the other items of interest was an original script of Tokyo Story, a collection of personal items of Tanaka Kinuyo, and the original puppets in the 1964 production of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.  The Center also has a regular screening schedule, often centered around a director, actor, genre or theme.

Publication: The Big Issue North: Sept 2016

The OCA/Big Issue editor picked up one of my Japan images for the September 2016 issue.  This makes three in almost as many months.  Might an Almaty image be next?

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Yakyu: Japanese Baseball Stadium Culture

On Shooting
My photographic goals for six weeks in Japan were hardly ambitious.  I had no intention of capturing the spirit of Japan.  I’ve practiced long enough to know that any representation is partial.  For most of the trip I had no photographic plan at all.  The only part for which I had were the visits to five baseball stadiums.

As with many projects, the conception was grander than the final product.  Perhaps what sets the good photographer apart from the average is taking the time to reflect in order to try understand why the output didn’t line up with expectations.  

Photographer: Mankichi Shinshi

Here's someone whose work reminds me of my own.  I found him through this article at FotoFirst.  His website is here and he is on most of the major photo-sharing sites:

Think Twice:  http://www.mankichi44.com/
Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mankichi44/ 

Contemplative Photography: Chapter 16: Seeing Space

“By its very nature, space is the most nonconceptual photographic intention we can work with because it is difficult to solidify or overlay ideas or associations.”

The stereotypical concept of space is sky, the vastness of the desert, the rolling breadth of oceans, the inky expanse of “outer” space.  There are of course other kinds of space:  that tiny gap between my car and the parking deck wall, the space between a child’s front teeth, the space between words.  There’s even a space bar on the keyboard.

A Google search reveals the following:

Hamaya Hiroshi: Sukayu Hot Spring, Aomori, 1957

What an amazing image.  Mixed bathing and given the boy lower left what appears to be entire families, probably much of the village.  Apart from the woman standing behind the shakuhachi player there are no genitalia or mammaries on display.  A group of bodies top left forms a triangle, capping a curve that leads the eye down to the boy bottom left.

Seven images in this series can be found at the Getty Museum website.

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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.

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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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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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.

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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