Essay and edit by Dan Abbe 

A few months after arriving in Tokyo, and speaking almost no Japanese, I found myself at a small gallery opening. People were sitting around a table, and at one point a kind woman directed my attention to a sprightly older gentleman. “That’s Kazuo Kitai,” she whispered. “He’s very famous.” I nodded dumbly.

For a photographer from Japan’s celebrated generation of the 1960s and 70s, Kitai has had a relatively subdued reception in the West, and even, to some extent, in Japan. Still, that’s beginning to change; he was included in Martin Parr’s 2011 “Protest Box,” and a book of his early photographs (“Barricade,” designed by John Gossage) was published by the American bookseller Harper’s Books in 2012. Meanwhile, a career retrospective at Tokyo’s Metropolitan Museum of Photography, which just closed in January, will only help to raise his profile at home and abroad. It may have taken some time for audiences to recognize Kitai’s importance to Japanese photography, but then again, it’s nothing new for Kitai to wait around for others to catch up to him. In the 1960′s, he self-published his book “Resistance,” a pioneering document of his experiences in the thick of Japan’s student protest movement, but it met with little response.

Kitai is best known for these protest photographs, and it’s possible that he was the photographer most directly involved in the student movement. At the same time, it’s worth noting that there were other people with cameras who were similarly committed. In the notes for “Barricade,” John Gossage mentions photography books published by university photo clubs that show not just a similar level of engagement with protest movements, but also a similar aesthetic, so perhaps it’s best to say that Kitai is the most well-known photographer to participate actively in the student movement.

Kitai’s early work shows student demonstrations, and clashes with police. Still, in his recent retrospective, among the most powerful work was a series of photographs that Kitai took while living for months inside College of Art at Nihon University alongside fellow demonstrators, who had taken over the building. These images represent objects like a coat hanger or a chair in the context of this activity. Here, Kitai’s photographs are not violent, instead letting the objects—and the anti-government graffiti in the background—speak for themselves.

After the student protests in Tokyo, starting in 1969 Kitai began spending time in farming village of Sanrizuka, on top of which the Japanese government intended to construct Narita International Airport. As he did at Nihon University, Kitai spent months living alongside the farmers who fought against a forcible eviction from their land. It is a great privilege to introduce some of Kitai’s Sanrizuka photographs here.

Many Japanese photographers, even members of what was then considered the “old guard,” captured the raw power (so to speak) of students in the city, but Kitai’s documentation of Sanrizuka reveals a different face of resistance. The smiling face of an old woman appears next to aggressive graffiti declaring “Total Opposition to the Airport.” This woman, a group of children, and a man whose good looks would make him fit right in at any Japanese office all form part of the movement. Among other things, these photographs show that revolution is not the exclusive domain of the young and angry.

Sanrizuka eventually became a kind of stronghold, complete with a lookout tower. But when the government sent in troops to storm the encampments there, the village was taken rather easily. Kitai wryly notes in the text that accompanies these photographs that all of these places “are now beneath the runways of Narita International Airport.” Sanrizuka could be seen as the Altamont of the protest movement in Japan; not just the crushing defeat, but tensions between farmers and students led to a weakening of the movement in general. As for Kitai, he moved farther away from the city, and documented other rural communities like Sanrizuka. The existence of these villages was not threatened directly by government construction projects, but instead by a cultural shift towards urban economic growth. (This work was published as “Mura-e,” or “To the Village.”)

Look carefully at Kitai’s photograph “Old Lady Faces the Water Cannon.” Across the road, in the background, there’s another photographer shooting the scene. It’s entirely possible that he, too, made an image as visually dramatic as this one. That’s secondary, though; what’s significant about Kitai’s photograph is that he’s on one side of the road, and the journalist is on another.

All photos © Hiroshi Takizawa

Unconscious Photography

It’s been a big month for photography in Tokyo. German conceptual photographer Thomas Demand and Japanese ephemeral photographer Rinko Kawauchi each had big museum exhibits up, while Space Cadet had an 18-person (!) group show. Meanwhile, old hands Araki, Moriyama (see below) and Yashuiro Ishimoto (R.I.P.) all had excellent shows. Something for everyone, in short. The contrast between Demand and Kawauchi was interesting, though: they’re of the same generation, but their approach to photography couldn’t be farther apart. Demand has practically worked out an entire theory of images, while Kawauchi is the leading representative of a concept-less, aesthetically-driven photography which seems to emanate (as if “by nature”) directly from the photographer’s brain. This kind of “unconscious photography,” which is directed towards finding casually observed moments of beauty, has a lot of currency in Japan, and I still think that’s a positive thing.

That said, I wonder whether this style is starting to exhaust itself. If we look at unconscious photography as a project, won’t the number of beautiful objects to be “discovered” run out? Isn’t the internet (if not just Flickr by itself) hastening that process? Where can this photography “go”? Those questions aside, unconscious photography of the Japanese sort has a lot more to answer for in light of last year’s triple earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster. My complaints from last time about the photographs taken after 3/11 are still there: it seems like a lot of photographers are going up to the disaster area without any real idea of what they should be doing, except for the vague sense that, since they are a photographer, they should be taking photographs. In this situation, an unconscious approach is bound to fail. (One major exception to all this is Naoya Hatakeyama, whose post 3/11 work will be shown in San Francisco starting late July.)

It’s in this context that I’d like to introduce Hiroshi Takizawa, a young photographer who came to photography late, after studying Psychological Counseling in college. In this series, “Dream Exit,” he’s developed what I would like to call “consciously unconscious photography.” Takizawa is really, seriously trying to think through his dreams and recognize them in real life. So, he hasn’t developed a Demand-esque concept of image-making here, and he’s shooting on the fly, but he’s motivated by specific reasons that go beyond “just” showing something beautiful. (Takizawa describes “Dream Exit” as an interior series, and its companion, “A Rock of the Moon,” as exterior.) To be frank, he suffers from the opposite problem as unconscious photographers; where they might sometimes lack an explanation for their work, Takizawa’s explanation is sometimes hard to untangle. But this is not such a bad problem to have—at least there’s something there. To put it plainly, Takizawa (among others) has taken up the task for young Japanese photographers coming up behind Kawauchi: to develop, out of the aesthetic of unconscious photography, some kind of consciousness.

Forgot About Daido

Most of what gets consumed of Daido Moriyama’s photography is a re-release of his old material, and I had genuinely started to wonder whether he had anything new left to show us today. I was happily proved wrong, though, by his recent exhibit “Color.” The title is simple enough, and it hints at the fact that the photos in the show were all snapshots taken on a digital camera—and I’m pretty sure they were printed directly from Moriyama’s SD card. The images did not look “good,” in the sense that you wouldn’t buy one to hang up on your wall. I’m also pretty sure, though, that Moriyama’s intention was to keep these images from being easily consumed. After all, he’s the guy who made grainy images popular (not that that was his goal), but this digital grain just makes everything look cheap and unappealing. Why even bother to take and exhibit these photos, then? Well, the photos are all of Tokyo, but not the city of bright lights. Instead it’s a combination of the forgotten Tokyo (decaying post-war buildings) with the ugly Tokyo (endless vending machines, chain stores). It’s as close to a contemporary and radical photography as I’ve seen in Japan, and it’s a perfect argument for Moriyama’s continued relevance.

PH

One of the strangest (or most frustrating) things about watching Japanese photography from Tokyo is how difficult it can be for people outside of Japan to acquire the books that are being produced here. There are a few specialty shops that carry Japanese photobooks, but especially when it comes to young photographers, there are many publications that aren’t available online. So a friend and I have started a new website, PH, which is selling many photobooks from Japan, at no markup. Hiroshi Takizawa’s book “A Rock of the Moon,” Daisuke Yokota’s zines and many other titles are available.

© Kenya Sugai

Birds

I think enough has been written about the one year anniversary of the March 2011 earthquake, so I want to leave it alone for this month at least. It won’t be going away anytime soon over here.

The photos this month come from Kenya Sugai’s series “Bird.” To put it very simply, this is the best work on the mythical Tokyo salaryman that I’ve seen. Michael Wolf’s “Tokyo Compression” is an interesting entry in the field, examining the life of a salaryman under the cold, existential light of Tokyo trains. Sugai’s photographs show the small, and sometimes absurd dramas of the salaryman. He shows a sometimes dark sense of humor about these people. I like to think that, instead of mocking these people, he’s studying them as some other species.

The photo above represents the series well. It’s really an unspectacular image—it really just shows a guy holding a piece of bread in a bakery. But so many of the details are off: why does it look like he’s just standing there looking at other customers? Why is he just holding this loaf of bread instead of placing it on a tray? (Every Japanese bakery has trays that you use before paying.) Is he lost in thought, or just catching a quick nap? It looks like he’s waiting for something to happen, but what? The flat, possibly digital nature of the image adds to this overwhelmingly boring effect.

I really recommend Sugai’s “Telepathy” series as well.

Photographer Links Matched to Some Songs (no particular connection)

Emi Fukuyama x Lucio Battisti – “Una”

Hiroshi Takizawa x Novos Baianos – “Samba da Minha Terra”

Mika Kitamura x  Amanaz – “Khala My Friend”

Naohiro Utagawa x Pachanga Boys – “Time”

Links bouncing around the Japan blogosphere

Yasuhiro Ishimoto (1921-2012): The “Visual Bilinguist” in Japanese and American Postwar Photography: Early last month, photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto passed away at the age of 90. He’s left behind a large body of work which should really interest just about anyone. I recommend reading Caille Millner’s response to understand the impact of his photos, while Russet Lederman’s longer piece linked here provides a good historical overview of his work. (Readers passing through Japan between April and June can see an exhibit of his work at a museum just outside of Tokyo.)

“Despite his crucial role as both an advisor to and photographer in numerous exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago, Ishimoto’s death was largely ignored in the American press and sadly unnoticed by most in the western photographic community. This is a shame because Ishimoto was a remarkably talented photographer whose work merged a western formalist approach, learned under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Chicago Institute of Design, with a Japanese attention to subtle beauty.”

ippiedom: Microcord takes a look at a strange, strange photobook from the 1970s, “Ipy Girl Ipy.” Think Easy Rider, in Japan, in photobook form, complete with a companion LP which now sells for $400.

I’d never heard of the book, its photographer or its model, but it was going cheap and the sample page spreads looked interesting so I sprang for it. It arrived a couple of days later…

Dizzy Noon: An Exchange of Culture and Awkwardness as Guests Entertain Hosts: John Sypal reviews a photobook by Takao Niikura which documents a day in 1965 when the Atsugi Naval Base was opened up to the general public. Strange interactions and rich color photos abound.

Page after page we see Japanese visitors with hands together, an expression of reservation? No one ever really looks comfortable, not when trying to order fifteen cent hamburgers at a window in English, and certainly not when partaking in a square dance with Americans in their Roy Rodgers Western Dress shirts. Younger Japanese women group together in threes and twos as they look apprehensively at the photographer. Indeed, the only young Japanese woman we find smiling is one arm in arm with her sailor boyfriend.

A Colorful Vision of Japan’s Past, Present and Future: I interviewed photographer Kazuyoshi Usui about his new book “Showa88,” which made a strong impression on me. Usui is not just working directly with Japanese history, he’s playing around with it. It’s pretty rare to find someone so engaged like this, and he was a fun interview–I hope it comes through.

“I respect Tarantino a lot; he can take old and new culture to create something new. I’ve been interested for a long time in doing something like this. There are lots of famous Japanese photographers from the 1960s—Hosoe, Moriyama, Araki—and I don’t want to copy them. The challenge is how to take that sense, or essence, and make it fit in the world of 2012. There’s a lot to work with there!”

There’s so much interest in Japanese photography on the English-speaking web, but not nearly enough connections from the Japanese side. With that in mind, I thought a kind of “Tokyo digest” could be a useful feature for LPV, as a way to circulate a bunch of links that might otherwise go unnoticed. Bryan’s digest is extremely timely, but these features will most likely be a lot slower; there’s really not quite as much happening on the Japanese photography internet. There are a few blogs worth following, though: John Sypal’s blog, Microcord and Japan Exposures (recently revived after a long, post-quake hiatus). My new notebook is posting photos of photobooks, which seems like the thing to do in 2012. I swear I haven’t found any decent blogs in Japanese yet. Still waiting!

MP1

The photos in this post were all taken by Daisuke Yokota, a young photographer in Tokyo doing some strange and noteworthy things with flash, Photoshop and re-photography. These photos come from his series “Site.” Yokota is participating in a few online photography projects, which are linked below.

He’s also a member of a photographic group called MP1, which just wrapped up a show at G/P Gallery, one of Tokyo’s higher-level spaces for contemporary photography. I’m interested in MP1 because one of the members of the group, Futoshi Hoshino, is not a photographer at all; he’s a post-doc researcher in aesthetics. Photographers often have difficulty explaining their work, so why not get around that problem by enlisting someone else to speak on your behalf? It seemed like a solid idea, and Hoshino wrote a lucid statement for the show. I went to their talk event (what are these things actually called in English?) curious about what would happen. Maybe predictably enough, though, the interviewer spent most of the time trying to pry difficult answers out of the photographers, while Hoshino looked on, no doubt wishing to butt in and answer himself!

Still, the idea of the group is interesting, and I am interested to see how it develops.

Internet galleries and zine distributors

Yokota is involved with a number of internet projects designed to promote the work of Japanese photographers. Although these sites all have servicable English, and everyone here is interested in what foreigners will think of their work, it seems like almost none of these sites have made a push online to find proverbial viewers like you. Go forth and spread the word!

Parapera is an excellent site distributing zines, mainly of photography. If you’re looking to buy some cheap independent publications made by young Japanese photographers, this is the place.

Spacecadet is a kind of Tinyvices clone for Japan. It’s very useful, and is updated with some frequency.

Trynome is another web gallery that’s probably worth a look.

Planetary Photobooks is a new publishing initiative which is putting out 20 or 30 books by young Japanese photographers, all print-on-demand. There is no way to order them from outside of Japan, though, I’m only linking to it to show you the (sometimes nonsensically) insular nature of things happening here.

Articles bouncing around the Japan blogsphere

There’s not a whole lot, but a couple things popped up recently.

‘The New Social Photographer’

This post was a response to the last article that I posted up on LPV, talking about the reaction among Japanese photographers to the 3/11 disaster. I wrote a comment back, but no response.

The post-war artists saw themselves as elements of a social fabric and their view was outward, on society, its values and behaviours. The view of the photographer itself is a reflection of those values. It still is, only that the view direction has changed from outward to inward. - [Japan Exposures]

‘Kohei Sugiura: The Japanese Photobook as Object’

Russet Lederman wrote an ode to the book design of Kohei Sugiura. He’s responsible for 1960′s/70′s treasures like Kawada Kikuchi’s “The Map,” and other books which the important people will tell you are important. (I’m sure they’re actually good though)

Touching, handling and reading a book designed by Kohei Sugiura is a distinctive experience that delivers the sublime pleasure associated with “objectness.” - [ICP Library Blog] 

The March 11 earthquake and its effects will necessarily loom over any attempt to think about Japan’s 2011. These effects are not going away anytime soon, even if it’s entirely too easy for Tokyoites to forget about what’s happening up North. For their part, photographers have made an effort to show people what’s happening in Tohoku, but I’m not sure that much of the work being produced so far is all that useful to anyone. I think it’s possible that my general disappointment with post-3/11 photographs so far could be linked to a broader turn away from representing people in Japanese photography.

I don’t want to go down the path of “the old days were so much better,” but if you look at photographers like Hiromi Tsuchida and Kazuo Kitai, their primary interest was other people–and I think this was not so much because of something “beautiful” or “interesting” in the people themselves, but because they could produce some kind of effect by showing these people to an audience. Tsuchida’s “Counting Grains of Sand” is an easy example of what I’m talking about. The book examines crowds in 1980s (“bubble”-era) Japan, building up from groups of just a few people to a fairly dramatic conclusion, in which hundreds of faces are packed into the frame. Outside of Hiroh Kikai, it’s hard to think of prominent and contemporary Japanese photographers who are equally interested in people; Kikai himself is probably more respected outside of Japan anyway.

From “Counting Grains of Sand,” © Hiromi Tsuchida

A newer type of photography, represented by Rinko Kawauchi and Masafumi Sanai, favors  abstract, object-based explorations. I like this work: I recently found a used copy of Sanai’s “Ikiteru” the other day, and I think it’s very good. But I don’t think this type of photography is well-suited to deal with something like a natural disaster which is affecting hundreds of thousands of people. I haven’t been moved by his recent work, but I really respect Daido Moriyama for saying in this video [skip to the 50 minute mark] that, from the beginning, he decided absolutely to not shoot any earthquake-related photographs, because it wouldn’t make any sense for him personally. What a sensible thing to say! Meanwhile the amateur shooters at ROLLS TOHOKU have been showing up most professionals, for the simple reason that they are able to show us people in a natural way.

From “Ikiteru,” © Masafumi Sanai

Asahi Camera Magazine published a special magazine of post-3/11 photography, and it sums up the weak response. The photographs mostly show objects and houses, to varying degrees of poignancy. I can’t understand why these photographs are all that we’re seeing. I want to know what people are doing!

© Kazuma Momoi

© Arao Yokogi

Hirokawa Taishi’s series of family portraits is the one exception here. His portraits of families living in evacuation centers are the most powerful photographs in this magazine. Perhaps it makes sense that a guy who had thought for years about the ‘craziness’ of nuclear reactors in Japan would come up with a good response.

© Taishi Hirokawa

I am still convinced that the most useful photographs to come out of this disaster will not even be taken for years, because the scale of the destruction is so big. I want to know how relocated families are integrating into their new communities, whether or not people are rebuilding their homes next to the coast, how long people will be living next to rubble. Is photography even the right way to find these things out?

A few months ago, I had a small job shooting some event photos. I got to the place, saw Iino on the other side of the crowd. He was shooting for a newspaper, but I caught up with him later and asked him how the project was going. He said something to the effect of, “after the earthquake, it’s not a good time to be taking those photos, is it?” I told him that, given everything that’s happened, it might actually be the perfect time, but it didn’t look like that was going to change his mind.

© Naoyuki Hata, from “Burn”

A Japanese photographer recently said to me, “it feels like Japan is so behind the times–we’re still here taking these straight photographs!” As a human being unconvinced that photography needs to be conceptual at every turn, I see this as a strength. I rarely find myself wishing I could read some of the critical theory lite which passes for artist statements these days.

All that said, explaining your work in an understandable way can be difficult. The faux-academic statements (and faux-academic blogs?) try get around this difficulty by substituting Art Mad Libs for clear prose. I’ve even heard of photographers cooking up an artist statement after the fact, as a way to justify the photos they already shot. Are we experiencing a land-grab of theoretical ground?

© Naoyuki Hata, from “Embers”

© Naoyuki Hata, from “Embers”

Take a look at the images in this post so far. The photographer burned his own pictures, and shot them while he did it. Now imagine him saying that there is absolutely no concept behind them whatsoever. Would you believe him? I couldn’t, at first. This is the work of Naoyuki Hata, a photographer who is about to study photography at Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie for three years. (He’s also a haircutter at one of Tokyo’s top salons, and will be taking his proverbial talents to Amsterdam.)

He claims that his photos are completely straight, but he’s also understandably worried about how to explain this once inside the cold confines of the academy. While I might have laughed, professors may not see the funny side. He really believes his photos are straight, but if he says nothing, then he’ll just be leaving it up for other people to decide what his photos mean.

© Ryosuke Iwamoto, from “Untitled”

Ryosuke Iwamoto is younger than Naoyuki; he just graduated college this year and is now working as a photographer’s assistant. He has a couple of series up on his website. The first is called “Untitled,” a series of very straight photographs, mostly quiet moments shot on film. The second, “PpPpy,” is a more experimental series in which he plays around with digital images. Ryosuke has uploaded a ton of images to “PpPpy”; it’s become like a diary for him, and he says that he wants to overload the viewers who see it on his site. I’m interested in the relationship between Ryosuke’s two series. It’s obviously more painstaking to shoot “Untitled,” but I imagine that thinking about this series keeps “PpPpy” at least somewhat grounded.

© Ryosuke Iwamoto, “PpPpy”

I think the challenge for Naoyuki and Ryosuke is to explain their work to an audience that might expect them to have heavy statements. This is probably not an issue for Ryosuke’s “Untitled” series, because audiences are used to this kind of obviously straight work. (This is why Rinko Kawauchi doesn’t need to write anything.) But with material that looks so conceptual, having nothing to say could be a risk. Ryosuke went back and forth about wanting to include some of his thoughts about “PpPpy” for this post, but he decided to hold them back for now. Probably no big deal for someone who just started the series a few months ago.

© Ryosuke Iwamoto, “PpPpy”

© Ryosuke Iwamoto, “PpPpy”

After recovering from the shock of hearing Naoyuki say that his work wasn’t conceptual, we talked about how he ought to present it to his new classmates. I said, well, as much as possible, you should bring everything back to yourself, that should make it easy to understand. I thought it sounded like okay advice, but I had no idea if he’d find a way to do it. Later, he hit upon the beginning of a great (i.e. honest) artist statement, without any critical theory buzzwords. He said that he’d been working in a hair salon for 10 years, always surrounded by images of beauty. Casually, he mentioned that after all this time, he’d wanted to try destroying something beautiful.

This kind of personal formulation seems like a good way to communicate one’s intentions and build up some trust with the viewer. Of course, both Naoyuki and Ryosuke are aware that they are playing with photography, but they’re trying to avoid having their work become some kind of cliche. It’s possible that one or both of them may end up playing the heavy statement game, and if so I wish them the best of luck! For now, though, I’m hoping that they will be able to develop their own voices.

The Shinjuku amateur scene can be hit and miss; for each revelation there are a few shows that probably needed some more time to develop. Still, after seeing five or six shows in a few hours, I usually come out with some new ideas of what’s happening here. I’m going to break the shows I saw down into a few different categories.

Radical young ladies

When I think about young Japanese female photographers, the first name to come to mind is Hiromix, who blazed a trail for an early kind of “lifestyle” color snapshot photography in the 1990s. Hiromix was well ahead of her time, but it’s now pretty common to see a cut-rate version of her work, with plenty of focus on the “lifestyle” element but not too much on the actual snapshot!

Koyuki Tayama and Noriko Chiba (no site) were doing interesting things within the daily snapshot form. Tayama in particular really impressed me with her subtle black and white compositions, and her entirely handmade (!) books, which sold out very quickly. Chiba has been studying with master photographer Issei Suda, and while her work is still a little bit rough, it was darker and more poetic than I’m used to seeing.

Koyuki Tayama, “Ariadne’s Thread” @ Totem Pole Photo Gallery:

Noriko Chiba, “Horoboro” @ M2 Gallery:

Derivative stuff

I started my walk off at two shows which were a little disappointing for their lack of originality. Yu Nakamura (no site) showed photographs of a small river which cuts through the middle of Shibuya, one of Tokyo’s biggest and loudest neighborhoods. It would make for an interesting photo project–if the brilliant and internationally famous Naoya Hatakeyama hadn’t already done the same project years before! Takehiko Nakafuji is a good shooter, and I like the first photo here, but he also painted himself into a Daido-shaped corner.

Yu Nakamura, “Down Town River” @ Roonee 247:

Takehiko Nakafuji, “Street Rambler” @Niepce Gallery:

Guy out of left field

This is not a “Japan thing” at all, just a 25-year-old guy with a project about weird daily excesses. The title is “The Edge of the Ordinary.” I love it.

Daichi Asahi, “The Edge of the Ordinary” @Place M:

Although many (not all) of the Shinjuku photographers are non-“professional,” they’re also far from casual “amateurs.” It’s common to hear that someone develops their film and makes prints in the bathroom of their cramped apartment. Many studied photography in college, but like in the West, there’s no pot of gold waiting for them. Most everyone works a day job unrelated to photography. Common goals I hear are to put up the next show, enter a competition, eventually publish a book. Being part of the community here is important: there are many ongoing photography seminars and workshops, including a famous one at Place M. I think having so many other people interested in the same thing keeps people motivated to continue working, even if an external reward may never come. As a lively secondary scene which is often more interesting than the fine art world, the Shinjuku galleries are an important platform for the young and serious.

So far most of the photographs to come out of Tohoku are, naturally, taken by photojournalists. I’m keeping track of links to earthquake-related photos, which I’ll update as new work comes through. It’s probably not yet the time for representation, though photographers with few professional obligations to “inform” their audience are also in the region. It may take longer to produce a body of work which represents, say, one effect of this massive displacement, but I’m sure that we’ll see it. The ROLLS TOHOKU project is one of the most interesting things to come out yet. A photographer gave disposable cameras to some regular people (including children) in areas badly affected by the tsunami. Someone also told me that Ishikawa Naoki, a young photographer who’s published some well-regarded books, is already shooting up there. I hope it’s not just a rumor.

As for Tokyo, on the face of it things have more or less returned to normal, though there are small clues that they aren’t quite the same: unilluminated McDonald’s signs, cordoned-off subway escalators, signs posted at stores informing you of a limit on water purchases. Not to mention the incredibly frequent aftershocks. A Japanese friend here said, “I think all we can do now is continue to live as usual.” This could be read in a negative light, but I think making an effort to “live as usual,” whatever that may mean, is one of the more optimistic things we can do here. With that in mind, I want to turn to an excellent photography book which came out a few months ago,
©Seiji Shibuya

“Dance” is published by Akaaka-sha, which has been one of the most exciting photography publishers in Japan for new work. Almost one year before “Dance,” Akaaka published Aya Fujioka’s “I Don’t Sleep,” which has already had the LPV treatment. “Dance” and “I Don’t Sleep” are similar only in that they share a quality which I call “akaakaesque,” a term loosely defined as a book that’s in color, printed with rich tones, and above all, has no concept or function other than expressing the photographer’s aesthetic point of view. 2010 was actually something of a down year for Akaaka, but “Dance” really stood out.

©Seiji Shibuya

What really draws me to “Dance” is the way that it takes the concept of lightness as a legitimate starting point for a work of photography. The Japanese photography scene has not been blighted by the self-flagellation I sometimes feel in American or European artist statements, but at the same time it’s rare to find a photographer who is willing to mount a proper defense for the place of humor in photography. In a sometimes poetical statement that accompanied the exhibit for “Dance” at Akaaka’s gallery, Shibuya writes: “There’s a difference between the world seen by the eye and the world seen by photographs. Here I feel humor, and hope… like a new bud sprouting, or seagulls flying overhead, let your cheeks be filled with smiles.” As Kool Keith once said, “people don’t always do this,” but it’s exciting to see humor taken seriously! A weighty statement could have easily ruined these photographs.

©Seiji Shibuya

“Dance” was put together from all of Shibuya’s photographs, including ones he said he’d forgotten. He told me it took roughly one year to edit, and the sequencing of the book is one of its strong points. Many of the photos in this book are very elemental, and there are a few different passages which riff on the same subject, like fire, or flowers. Himeno-san, Akaaka’s editor, used a similar technique in “I Don’t Sleep,” but in that book it was used to convey emotional tension. Here, it’s more like prolonging something pleasurable. Hedonism and photography go hand in hand, but I think this is a unique way to represent it. This short video shows a little over half of the book, including two of these passages:

Aside from this editing technique, Shibuya’s work also stands out for some individual snapshots which are really well done. At times the photos are a little bit vague, but they are balanced out by other photos with exceptionally strong composition. The photo of a woman sitting on a bench, together with cherry blossoms and an ad for chocolate particularly struck me.

©Seiji Shibuya

©Seiji Shibuya

Shibuya is not trying to say anything too obviously “important” with “Dance,” but there’s a place for that even in light of what’s happening in the rest of Japan. His work has a clear direction, and he’s brought this concept in line with his photos without forcing anything. This unburdened approach to photography strikes me as a breath of fresh air, and it’s certainly not a bad time for that now.

“Dance” is available at the Japan Exposures bookstore.

©Seiji Shibuya

The photos in this post were all taken by Tsuneo Yamashita, a photographer who lives in Tokyo but has been taking black and white snapshots in Okinawa for over almost 30 years. They come from his book “Another Time on the Ryukyu Islands,” published in 2009 by Tosei-sha. In a statement for the series, he writes, “When I took these pictures, I had no intention of introducing Okinawa, or explaining certain events. These were simply taken while on short personal trips, printed out after my return, and stashed away in a box for myself. [...] I never submitted any of these photos to school, and just kept them with me for many years.”

I want to focus on the connection between photography and personality that Yamashita brings up. This is nothing new, as Yamashita’s work references other serious black and white snapshot photographers like Shigeo Gocho, an interesting photographer active in the 1970s. This kind of work is probably less interested in making a statement and more interested in showing the photographer’s (highly personal) way of looking at things–it’s a relatively free style, in that it’s not weighed down by a concept.

Not only Yamashita and Gocho, but the two most popular Japanese photographers today, Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki, work in this way. These two living “demigods” are probably the first two Japanese photographers that LPV readers will know, and with good reason: looking at their work is a great place to start with Japanese photography in general, and this personal style in particular. Lately, I’ve been feeling like they’ve been a little bit overexposed, but because of their massive reception abroad I think it makes sense to introduce (or, perhaps, re-introduce) them here. I hope that showing Yamashita’s work will make it clear that while they are a good place to start with Japanese photograhy, they’re not where you have to end up.

Daido Moriyama is famous for the high contrast, grainy black and white look he pioneered in the 1970s. This style pretty much flattened everything it touched. In other words, Moriyama was expressing himself through technique more than anything else, so when you look at these photos you don’t get a strong sense of “place.” Although he did not get a lot of recognition while he was actually producing this work, he is now an internationally famous photographer, and his style has become widely influential. Recently bookstores and museum gift shops in Japan have been flooded with Moriyama product: limited run magazines, t-shirts, buttons and other knick-knacks. Still, as Moriyama’s commercial stock has risen, the quality of his work has dropped off. He’s continued to mine the same territory of wandering an urban landscape and making contrasty prints, but it feels like much of his recent work is predictable: “Moriyama does Sao Paulo,” “Moriyama does Buenos Aires,” and so on.

A real low point came with his most recent book and exhibition, “Nagisa,” which may have been a real attempt to branch out with his subject material (if not stylistically), but for me it fell flat–I got the impression that I was looking at the photos of a high school student on a trip to the beach with his first girlfriend, which I’m pretty sure is not what Moriyama was going for. He deserves the recognition he’s gotten, but the recent influx of his publications (there have been many) feels more like grist for the mill, rather than a late-period surge of creativity.

Nobuyoshi Araki, meanwhile, has kept up a consistent level of production over the years, and even as he (like Moriyama) gets on in years he shows no signs of letting up. He’s still putting out books of Tokyo street photography, still doing exhibitions where he shows up and wears a t-shirt with one of his own photos on it, and still basically being the man who everyone wants a piece of. Like Moriyama, he’s got a few DVDs out, but from what I’ve seen there’s been way less junk on the market.

While Araki is easily pigeonholed for his provocative color nudes, but the scope of his work goes well beyond that. Last year he put up an exhibit at Rat Hole Gallery with photos of his dying cat Chiro, which frankly blew me out of the water. I had been pretty skeptical of Araki, but this show won me over to him completely: I came to think that Araki’s genius doesn’t have anything to do with technique or composition, but the lack of distance between photography and his life. In terms of the Chiro exhibit, I mean to say that I could *feel* the connection he had with this animal. There was this one photo where he was looking into the dying cat’s eyes, and there was something extraordinarily human about it: not in the cat of course, although its eyes were “expressive,” but in that I just made the mistake of saying “he was looking into the cat’s eyes,” and not, “a photo representing this gaze.” This explanation might be kind of pedantic, so I could also just say: it was cosmic.

Moriyama and Araki have already established themselves as monoliths of Japanese photography, and while Araki can still rock pretty hard I do think it’s time to start looking at some other people. Incidentally, seeing Yamashita’s 2009 exhibit of these prints gave me a simiarly visceral experience as Araki’s cat photos. The leaves in the bucket and the fish laying out especially grabbed me, though at all expect that to translate to your screen. (If it does, email me.) Yamashita is working in a “straighter” way than Moriyama or Araki, but all the same his personality is there in the work. He doesn’t have much recognition even inside of Japan, but he’s put in the same dedication to make photography a part of his life as his internationally celebrated colleagues.

Hi, I’m Dan Abbe, and this is the first in a series of monthly columns about Japanese photography for LPV.

If nothing else, you probably have some image of Tokyo in your head, and to say that it’s a stimulating place would be an incredible understatement. This is true not just because of its famous neon, but because it’s the center of pretty much everything related to Japanese photography. Between the number of museum shows, gallery shows, camera shops, bookstores, pro photographers, amateur photographers, and regular people just snapping away on the street, the sheer amount of photographic activity here is difficult to comprehend. There’s even a photography bar in Tokyo. I’ve been here for over two years, and the idea that there are more photography shows in one month than I could physically attend still overwhelms me.

One of the best parts about Tokyo’s photography world is that it’s generally quite open. Photographers are usually present at their own exhibits, opening parties are casual, and people are really interested in talking about photography. Even the most famous photographers are accessible: Nobuyoshi Araki still puts up small Polaroid exhibits and shows up to the opening party, where he just hangs out and banters with whoever is brave enough to sit in front of one of the two “demigods” of Japanese photography. (More on Daido Moriyama later.) While it’s not like you’re actually going to start hanging out with Araki on weekends after chatting him up–unless, of course!–there’s a real community among photographers here.

I’m hoping to shed a little bit of light on this world, because I have a feeling that there’s a gap between the perception and the reality of Japanese photography. (Or maybe that there’s not much of a perception at all, I’m not sure.) There are pitfalls to being a foreigner writing about Japan, but I only want to say that I’m conscious of this, I don’t consider myself an authority, and I have no ”Japan axe” to grind!

The photos in this post are taken from Tatsuya Shimohira’s in-progress “Element” series. Shimohira is a young photographer who’s become interested in exploring spirituality through photography. The idea behind “Element” is to find a life force through different elements: water, animals, the sun, and so on. He told me he sees this series as a companion to his work documenting traditional Japanese festivals, or matsuri, in that they are each related to animism. Both of these projects, and many others, are up on his website.

There’s plenty of other interesting photography being produced here, so stay tuned for more.