Japan: A Self-Portrait opening in Tokyo

I have been a bit quiet over the past few days as I have been busy working on two exhibition projects. Last week I went to Sweden to meet with a museum who will be holding the exhibition, Tokyo Stories, which I curated last year and was shown during Paris Photo 2008 at Artcurial. The details still need to be confirmed, but I'll be posting on this again soon I'm sure.

The exhibition that has been keeping me really busy these past few weeks (going on years) is Japan: A Self-Portrait, based on my first major project in the field of Japanese photography, the book published by Flammarion in 2004. The exhibition brings together work by the leading photographers of the postwar years, a time of radical and disruptive change for Japan and to my mind one of the richest photographic periods in the country's history. The photographers included in the show are: Ken Domon, Hiroshi Hamaya, Tadahiko Hayashi, Eikoh Hosoe, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Kikuji Kawada, Ihee Kimura, Shigeichi Nagano, Ikko Narahara, Takeyoshi Tanuma and Shomei Tomatsu. You can find out more on the show on the Studio Equis website or on the excellent Tokyo Art Beat. The exhibition opens at the Setagaya Art Museum from 2 May to 21 June and will then travel to other venues in Japan. I hope that some of you will get a chance to see it.

Update: I just did an interview with the blog on Japanese photography, Japan Exposures.

Photographers speak

A new addition to the blogosphere from Dean Brierly, photography editor and writer, Photographers Speak is a collection of interviews that he has conducted with photographers over the years. His second post is an interview with Saul Leiter, whose show at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson was a huge success last year. Leiter has been receiving quite a bit of recognition for his early colour work, which seems to have spent most of its life hanging around in boxes in his apartment. I am glad that he decided to air it out and show it to the world.

Denis Darzacq

I first came across Denis Darzacq's work last year with his series La Chute. For this series Darzacq worked with dancers from troubled neighbourhoods in the Paris suburbs, capturing their bodies suspended in mid-air against the grim urban landscapes of their quartiers. The series reminds me of the seminal film on the Paris 'banlieues' (suburban ghettos), Matthieu Kassovitz's 1995 film, La Haine, which film famously ends with the words, "L'important c'est pas la chute, c'est l'aterrissage" (It's not the fall that counts, it's the landing). La Haine was a fictional study of the escalating crime and violence that was threatening to set many of Paris's suburbs alight: a high-velocity fall that was sooner or later going to a lead to a painful and explosive landing.

Over 10 years later, it looks like not much has changed and that many of these areas are still in free-fall. But Darzacq's images are a far cry from La Haine's gritty black and white aesthetic. The young dancers' bodies are captured in graceful and oddly fragile poses, frozen in mid-fall. And while these cityscapes aren't exactly inviting, there is a certain graphic beauty in these compositions. I think Darzacq's the basic technique for La Chute is a really simple and intelligent use of photography's ability to show us the invisible. I liked these even more when I found out that they were shot on film without any involvement from Photoshop. I haven't seen the prints, but it sounds like they don't disappoint.

I also suggest checking out the more recent series Hyper, where Darzacq captures these teenage bodies floating through the overlit hypercolour landscapes of France's hypermarchés. There is also a short film that gives an interesting insight into the process of making these images without spoiling the magic.

Hiroyo Kaneko

Hiroyo Kaneko has just been awarded the 2009 Santa Fe Prize for Photography for her series Sentimental Education. The series is a study of her family bathing in Japan's sento (public baths). I was taken with the simplicity and directness of these images, which feel contemplative without being overly lyrical.

It is interesting to see that at least two young Japanese photographers are receiving plaudits for their work around the family (Asashi Masada recently won the excellent Kimura Ihee Award for his 2008 book in which he cleverly reworked the idea of the traditional family portrait). In an age when the institution of the Japanese family is said to be in freefall, it is interesting to see that, in some photographic quarters at least, it is alive and well.

Osamu James Nakagawa

The Japanese-American photographer Osamu James Nakagawa has just been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to support his work on the Banta and Gama series. With Banta, Nakagawa explores the scars of the Pacific War opposing Japan to America on the cliffs of the island of Okinawa. I was intrigued by the format (which doesn't translate well on a screen) and the fact that these seemingly classic landscape photographs have been "digitally-manipulated" (I would be interested to know how).