Eikoh Hosoe: Theatre of Memory @ AGNSW

I've just come back from a ridiculously short trip to Australia for the opening of Eikoh Hosoe: Theatre of Memory at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. This is Hosoe's first solo show in Australia and his first trip there. In addition to having the master himself present, he came accompanied by Yoshito Ohno, the butoh dancer and son of Kazuo Ohno, the co-founder of butoh who passed away last year at the age of 103. Here's a quick behind the scenes glimpse at the opening week of the show.

Yoshito Ohno performed at the opening of the exhibition. You can see a video of one part of the performance here. There's also another video of Ohno's puppet performance at Zen Foto in Tokyo last year (note the Elvis Presley tune which is crucial to the tone of this performance). After the opening Hosoe and Ohno gave a fantastic artist talk in the exhibition space where they spoke about how butoh developed and how Ohno and Hijikata collaborated with Hosoe over the years.

Beg, borrow or steal.

Hosoe's next project? Butoh as embodied in Australia's native trees.

Book of the Week #3: Ikko Narahara, The Sky in My Hands

Ikko Narahara is a contemporary of Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe and Kikuji Kawada (with he who formed the short-lived but influential VIVO agency in Tokyo in 1960). He is probably the least well-known of the four in the West, although his book Europe: Where Time Has Stopped has become highly collectible. This is an exhibition catalogue from his recent retrospective at the Shimane Art Museum. The catalogue is as 'traditional' as they come, covering his entire career in great detail, with no less than 48 pages (!) of bio (including several pages of personal photos from throughout his life) and a pretty extensive (complete?) bibliography. Although the book isn't a particularly exciting object in itself, it is a wonderfully detailed resource and a great reminder of how incredibly diverse that work was.

Ikko Narahara, The Sky in My Hands (Soft cover, 308 pages, B&W and colour plates, Japanese text only).

Update: Book of the week is moving to eyecurious books etc. Look out for new picks there!

November Photo Madness in Paris

November has always been THE big photographic month in Paris, but this year is looking like it will be a record breaker. Here's a list of some of the big events happening in Paris this month. I don't know how I'm going to make my way to all of these, let alone blog about all of them, but hopefully I'll manage something.

• Mois de la Photo. The month of photography kicks off today with 50 exhibitions around the city (including a contribution by yours truly, an Eikoh Hosoe exhibition at the Photo4 gallery on the left bank). This year is the Month's 30th anniversary and the theme is the MEP collection (yawn), but there are some good exhibitions to look out for in there.
• Mois de la Photo Off. These days it seems you can't have a festival without their being a side event and with twice as many exhibitions as the Mois de la Photo itself the 'Off' will be giving the main event a run for its money.
• Fotofest Paris. The good people behind Lens Culture are organising the first edition of this portfolio review event, in collaboration with the renowned Houston Fotofest (yours truly will be be making an appearance here too as a portfolio reviewer).
• Paris Photo (18-21 Nov.): One of the best attended photo art-fairs in the world, this has become a passage obligé for most of the photoworld. Expect too many people, lots of moody black and white images (this year's spotlight is on the Central European photo scene), no natural light, too much looking over shoulders, too many parties with too many cigarettes, WAY too many photographs... and yet you wouldn't want to miss it.
• Offprint Paris (18-21 Nov.): In parallel to Paris Photo, this will be the first edition of Paris's very own photobook fair, which is an interesting reflection of the current growing excitement around photobooks. While we're on the topic of photobooks there's an interesting exhibition opening next week at La Monnaie de Paris on the photobook svengali, Gerhard Steidl, which looks like it'll be worth a look.

If you love photography and you weren't planning to be in Paris this November... what were you thinking?

Interview: Eikoh Hosoe's Butterfly Dream

The exhibition, Eikoh Hosoe: Theatre of Memory has just closed at the Japanese Cultural Institute in Cologne. I did an interview with Hosoe during the opening weekend and a video extract has been posted on photographie.com.

Update: Just a few minutes after posting this, I found out that Kazuo Ohno has just passed away at the age of 103. The New York Times has an obituary here.

March Madness: 1 month, 2 exhibitions

Blogging has been slow this month since I am curating two exhibitions opening in March. The first of these, Tokyo Stories, with work by Hiroshi Hamaya, Tadahiko Hayashi and Shigeichi Nagano, opens at Stockholm's Kulturhuset on 6 March. I'll be giving a talk from 1-3pm that day on Japanese photography and photographing Tokyo, so for any Swedish or Stockholm-based readers out there, do come along. The show runs from 6 March to 2 May 2010, and you can find out more about it here and here.

Then on 20 March, Eikoh Hosoe: Theatre of Memory opens in Cologne at the Japanese Cultural Institute. We are producing a catalogue for this show, which I am very excited about so keep an eye out for more news about that in the next couple of weeks. You can find out more about the exhibition here and here.

In between all of this, I am planning to turn at least a couple of the 20+draft posts that have been staring at me for weeks into published ones.