Stuart Woodman, Now We Are 30

Stuart Woodman recently sent me Now We Are 30, a book of his polaroid photographs which is the first to be published by his imprint, Doubleplusgood Books. The book is based on a series of pictures that Stuart took every day for a year, his 30th as you may have guessed. You can get copies online from Doubleplus and they also have a list of a few bookstores around the world that are carrying copies.

P.S. While we are on the subject of polaroids, Sean Cousin is in the process of setting up a PDF magazine on integral Polaroid photography. He is looking for submissions so, for any polaroiders out there, find out more here.

Virgilio Ferreira

Virgilio Ferreira is a Portugese photographer who is fond of experimenting with focus, or the lack thereof. His previous series, Daily Pilgrims, was a series of 'portraits' in which the subject is blurred and the background in focus (the series is currently on show at the Museu da Imagem in Braga, Portugal). In his latest ongoing series, Uncanny Places, Ferreira has experimented with a new technique involving two exposures of the same subject in quick succession (no digitalism involved, medium format film only). His aim "is to create a notion of continuity between “there” and “here”, where two points in time overlap in the same place."  The images are unsettling and he certainly achieves the "strangeness" he is aiming for. Ferreira is a conceptual photographer and, while his ideas do not always execute perfectly, there are some interesting photographic adventures to be had in his world.

Pierre Faure, Burning Fields

I met Pierre Faure wandering around the labyrinth of Paris Photo last November and have since been meaning to post about a series of work in progress that he showed me at the time. The series, entitled Burning Fields, is a study of the limits of light in urban areas. Faure drives to the edge of towns or cities until the light begins to dwindle sufficiently. This is a complicated and time-consuming process as the pictures look nothing like what the naked eye would see (on close inspection of some of these images you can see stars piercing through the orange hue of the sky). I found this idea of photographing the frontiers of light fascinating: a reinterpretation of the concept of 'city limits'. The images have a certain ominous quality that is compounded by the title of the series which resonates with the expression 'burnt field' used to refer to the landscapes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki following the atomic bombings. These could be images of the sun rising too close to Earth or of a massive fire engulfing a city. Faure has also published an excellent photobook on Japan from a series of images taken during his residency at the Villa Kujoyama. Hopefully Burning Fields will make it into book form before too long.

Guido Castagnoli

Guido Castagnoli's images of small Japanese towns focus on familiar territory: there is other similar work floating around (Takashi Homma's work on suburban Tokyo stands out from the crowd), but the originality of Castagnoli's images is the light. These scenes of empty parking lots, amusement parks and all-but-abandoned main streets, tend to be shot in colder, more bleached-out tones. Castagnoli's images have a sun-drenched warmth that I haven't seen elsewhere. If provincial Japan was in 1970s California...

Review: Andrew Phelps, Not Niigata

As soon as I heard the name of Andrew Phelps's latest book I was intrigued. Niigata is not the most obvious prefecture in Japan for a foreign photographer to choose as a photographic subject (Tokyo's magnetic pull certainly doesn't seem to be weakening). I was all the more interested as Niigata is an area of some importance in Japanese photographic history. One of the most important series of the postwar years, Yukiguni (Snow Land), was shot in Niigata by Hiroshi Hamaya. Hamaya was deeply interested in Japanese folklore and he chose Niigata as a photographic destination because of the many folk traditions and rituals that remained intact and revealed a 'traditional' Japanese way of life during a deeply troubled period where American occupation filled the vacuum left by years of militarism.

Phelps's Not Niigata is part of the European Eyes on Japan project that has been running every year since 1999 and which invites photographers who are working in Europe to "record for posterity images of the various prefectures of Japan on the theme of contemporary Japanese people and how they live their lives." This always seemed like an interesting photographic exercise to me, but after seeing some of the results in previous years it became clear how difficult it is. The participating photographers often only have a couple of weeks to photograph a specific region, which isn't a lot of time to try and get your bearings and come to terms with how things work in a country that is pretty radically different to Europe. One of the great strengths of Not Niigata is the fact that this difficulty is acknowledged from the outset. In his short introduction, Phelps writes:

"My way of working is a bit like making a poodle or a swan out of a shrub. Small bits of the mess are snipped away until some sort of form starts to take shape. (...) In the end if all goes well, I end up with something that may slightly resemble a poodle or a swan. But it's definitely neither a poodle or a swan and it's definitely not Niigata."

In some ways this project feels more like it is about the experience of going to a very foreign place for a very short time and trying to document ("for posterity") contemporary life, than it is about Niigata specifically. Phelps is very aware of this delicate position, as is obvious from the title of the book and even in the cover image, where a scene from Niigata is reflected with slight distortions on a pond or canal. This probably isn't the right comparison to make, but it reminded me in some ways of the film Lost in Translation, which isn't really about contemporary Japan, but about the feeling of being lost in a totally alien environment. I found that Phelps made subtle references to his position as a foreign photographer in some of these images, such as in this image of four children peering up at the strange gaijin who is taking their picture.

Phelps also successfully avoids reproducing exotic visual clichés of Japan or the Far East. In one image, he has photographed a tree that could have been silhouetted against the sky to produce an image that conforms to our vision of 'oriental' beauty. Instead Phelps has photographed the whole tree in a straightforward way and in the bottom right of the image he has left in a lamp post with two red spot lights on it.

He doesn't run away from the 'traditional' either: urban scenes that could well have been taken in Tokyo sit alongside images of two women dressed for a rice harvest festival or of an old woman sitting on a tatami mat in a traditional Japanese house. The overall picture that emerges from the picture is nuanced: we are shown old people, presumably in those rural areas that have been almost entirely abandoned by the young generation, and the young who hang out in modern cities that look like they could be anywhere in Japan. Natural beauty rubs up against modern anonymity and a certain sense of dilapidation. This Niigata does not feel like it has a bright future, but more like a place in limbo.

There are some great, understated, but astute images in this book. I found some of the portraits and the images of the more 'traditional' aspects of life in Niigata to be slightly less interesting. Overall I was left with a slight feeling of dissatisfaction, as I think Not Niigata would have been more successful if Phelps had developed more on this sense of displacement and alienation. But then I suppose that wouldn't be sticking to the script of the European Eyes on Japan project. Phelps feels like a very intelligent and thoughtful photographer and I look forward to seeing what his next project will be.

Not Niigata (Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, 36 colour plates, hardcover, limited edition of 888 copies, 2009).

Rating: Recommended