Review: Tokyo-e @ Le Bal

Le Bal's Japanese summer season continues this week with the opening of the exhibition Tokyo-e, which brings together work by Yutaka Takanashi and Keizo Kitajima with a series by an almost complete unknown photographer, Yukichi Watabe, a photojournalist who worked in Tokyo. The three groups of work on show are very different, related only through their strong connection to the Japanese capital. Although this selection seems a little arbitrary (as is almost inevitably the case with city-based shows), Tokyo-e is a rare opportunity to see an exhibition that goes beyond the ever-popular Moriyama, Araki or anything-from-Provoke choices. Tokyo-e only opens officially tomorrow, but here's a little sneak preview to whet the appetite.

Kitajima gets the lion's share of the exhibition space with the entire downstairs floor including work spanning 15 years of his career, from his 1970s series in Tokyo and Okinawa to his work from the 1980s taken in New York, Eastern Europe, Berlin, Seoul and Beijing. The most striking feature of the Kitajima room has to be the Photo Express Tokyo grid, a band of photographs covering an entire wall. The installation is a nod to the 1970s Camp gallery where Kitajima covered the walls, floor and ceiling of this tiny Shinjuku space with his prints. In conjunction with this show, Le Bal and Steidl are releasing a facsimile of the full set of 12 Photo Express Tokyo booklets that Kitajima made in 1979 at the rate of one issue per week throughout the 12-week run of the exhibition.

Although Kitajima's work features most prominently, I found the upstairs room to be the more successful half of the show. The combination of Takanashi's Machi, a series of opulent, colour-drenched shopfronts and interiors from Tokyo's Shitamachi district, with a clever installation of Watabe's small 'film noir' vignettes creates the sense of wandering through the streets of a city from the past. The Watabe criminal investigation series is a wonderful anomaly. Shot in 1958, these photographs document a criminal investigation by the Tokyo police of a horrific murder by a suspected serial killer. In a radical departure from the straightforward 'objective' documentation that was so prevalent at the time, Watabe's photographs could be a set of film stills given how heavily they seem to be influenced by film noir, an effect which is compounded by the charismatic lead investigator, a kind of Japanese Humphrey Bogart figure. While they are different in every aspect, the installation of the two series ties them together nicely: the size of the Takanashi prints almost make it possible to walk into these city spaces, which have now all but faded away, while the labyrinthine installation of Watabe's small prints, which visitors look down on from above, echoes the detective's experience of searching for clues.

With an artist talk by Kitajima tomorrow (Friday 20 May) evening, one by Takanashi on Sunday (22 May), a film programme and a bunch of other events to come, Tokyo-e comes complete with some terrific bonus features and is definitely worth the visit.

Tokyo-e (Yutaka Takanashi, Keizo Kitajima & Yukichi Watabe), Le Bal 20 May - 21 August 2011

Rating: Recommended

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.

Hyères 2011

I've just recently returned from the 2011 edition of the Hyères fashion and photography festival which takes place at the Villa Noailles. For those who are not familiar with Hyères (I was not until a couple of years ago) it's important to note the use of the word "and" between 'fashion' and 'photography'. This is not a fashion photography festival but a festival with two distinct parts. Given that I know next-to-nothing about fashion photography and possibly even less about fashion itself, I wasn't sure what to expect, but I came back genuinely energised.

Hyères doesn't have the same visibility as the Rencontres d'Arles and in fairness the festival takes place on a much more intimate scale than the vast sprawl of it's cousin from up the road. Whereas a lot of the work being presented in Arles is well-known and critically recognised, Hyères functions more like a photographic incubator, both by focusing the competition on emerging young talent and also by exhibiting work that you are unlikely to see elsewhere. For instance the 2011 festival included a selection of Erwin Blumenfeld's photographs all of which were used as Vogue covers, something you are unlikely to see in a photography museum. After seeing this show and stepping into a newsagents, I couldn't help feeling that fashion photography as a genre seems to have regressed hugely from the inventiveness and experimentation of Blumenfeld's era, particularly for established magazines like Vogue.

The core of the photography component of the festival is a group exhibition of a shortlist of 10 emerging photographers, one or several of whom are selected by a jury for a grand prize. A look back at the shortlisted photographers from previous festivals and you are guaranteed to find not only excellent and exciting work and a lot of genuine discoveries. This year was no different, with work by Andrey Bogush, Kim Boske, Emily Hyperion Dubuisson, Katarina Elvén, Anouk Kruithof, Ina Jang, Mårten Lange, Marie Queau, Awoiska van der Molen and Marc Philip van Kempen. Most of the short-listed photographers  have no experience of fashion photography at all and, in addition to the grand prize, a few of them may find themselves trying their hand at it for the first time following Hyères, an exercise which I think would be fascinating for any emerging photographer.

This year's grand prize winner was the young Dutch photographer Anouk Kruithof. She was selected unanimously by the jury for her inventiveness and her versatility. The series she presented at Hyères, the Daily Exhaustion, is a wonderfully simple idea in an equally wonderfully simple book/zine form, but I also recommend a trip to her website which is full of interesting material. A special mention was also given to Katarina Elvén, a set designer from Sweden who is working on a an ambitious but very thoughtful project relating to surface and aesthetics... one to look out for in the future. I also made another discovery in Hyères, but this one was on the jury rather than the shortlist. Fellow jury member and a photographer, provocateur and penseur, Jason Evans: the man behind the Daily Nice, the New Scent, contributor to the terrific Words Without Pictures and much more.

One particularly refreshing aspect of the festival is the time that is allocated to see each photographer. Portfolio reviews, which appear to be becoming more and more popular, seldom offer more than 20 minutes per review whereas at Hyères jurors spend between anything between 30 minutes and 1h30 with each of the shortlisted photographers, almost enough time for a conversation. But the thing that really makes Hyères stand out from other photography festivals is that it creates a space to consider photography in a different context. Just by combining fashion and photography, the festival is forcing us to reconsider what we think of as photography and offering a reminder of how insular the 'fine art photography' world can be. Whether you like fashion photography (or any other applied photography for that matter) or not, it has to be recognised that it is too often dismissed as inferior or just plain ignored by the art photography world. During my four days in Hyères I found myself having more conversations about photography in its many different forms than I have at all the other photography festivals I have attended put together.

Aside from these issues of substance, combine the fact that this all takes place in an absolutely gorgeous 1930s modernist villa and that being on photo-jury duty also involves a collective swim in the Mediterranean and you will understand why Hyères has immediately become a personal favourite.