Kumi Oguro 🎧

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Today we focus on photographer Kumi Oguro.

Born in 1972 in Japan, Kumi Oguro lives and works since 1999 in Antwerp, Belgium. After studying photography, which she began in England in 1996, the photographer worked on different media, such as video or mixed installations, with the research subject of the links between still photographic images and the moving images of cinematographic language. A research that marks with its seal all the work of the artist.
A first book titled Noise was released in 2008 by Le caillou bleu editions. This is, according to the artist, a reference to “white noise”, a sound signal with no particular frequency that can be heard when tuning a radio between two stations. This subtle sound, swinging between language and interference, embodies the tenuous border on which photographer Kumi Oguro bases all her photographic creation. It is about this fleeting moment between two states, as if suspended in time, where the image presented oscillates between different narrative interpretations.
The photographer then published the book “ Hester », in September 2021, published by Stockmans art books, which was shortlisted for the Belfast Photo festival prize. This opus takes its name from one of the main characters of the novel A prayer for Owen by John Irving, published in 1989. Hester Eastman is presented there as a chaotic creature, very gendered, becoming a rock star, yet all in contrast in her love for one of the characters. It is once again this “in-between” that interests and fascinates Kumi Oguro, this moment of indecision between two states or two actions that she tries to transcribe in her photographs of exclusively female subjects. Because for her, only women possess within them this extreme duality combining fragility and strength, playful and tragic, seductive and strange.

All of Kumi Oguro's photographic work plays on a state of unease caused by images that are fairly simple in their composition, but which we cannot fully understand: we never know exactly what is happening before our eyes, or more exactly, we cannot know with certainty the action that took place just before the shooting. Is it gambling or a macabre event? Is it fetishism of body parts such as legs, hair or hands, or is it the celebration of the female body? In the color images of Kumi Oguro, women – or rather parts of women – take place in an interior or exterior setting. These pieces of flesh, rarely bare, often molded in tights for the legs for example, seem to emerge from improbable or incongruous places such as bathtubs, cupboards, curtains or even under doors.
Kumi Oguro says she dreams a lot and draws inspiration from the snippets of dreams she remembers in the morning to create these images without logic, without a narrative framework, without a determined explanation, which are like alternative realities to our daily lives.

Although many photographs may at first sight suggest the staging of a crime or a suicide, such as that of a female body suspended in the air, the framing of which shows only the legs hanging in the air, with a foot covered in red paint evoking blood, death is never the real theme of the image. We see here that the photographer has specifically asked her female model to raise the toes of her left foot, proving that she is not dead or passive, but very much alive and active. This tiny little detail shifts the image from the status of representation of a hanged man to that of a dreamlike being in simple levitation.

Doubt is therefore a founding element of Kumi Oguro's approach, which seeks to show us something beyond representation, a narrative in-between between dream and logic, between reality and fiction or even between still photographic image and narrative unfolding. cinematographic.

Charlene Veillon
Art historian. Doctor in Contemporary Japanese Photography

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MALL｜KEI ONO

Kei Ono presents his project here MALL.

“What I see is where I live. New housing is being built around the mall. The road is lined with electronics stores and chain restaurants, and delivery trucks come and go. It's the kind of place we now live in. Things that I had vaguely recognized individually until then seemed to be connected today through the mall.

I was convinced that my camera, which I had used for many years since I was a photography student, was suitable for this theme. Carrying my camera tripod, I kept walking. Was it an extension of the portrait to the landscape?

through the words of Kyouhei Ishiguro (Animation Director, Director)

"I made an animated film in a shopping center where "Our words like bubbles", and I realized that even those that seemed to me to have similar exteriors and interiors had their own personalities. Even though the concept is the same, in fact they are often done in a way that is rooted in the region. And you can only realize this if you observe as if you were looking "in the eyes" of a shopping center. Making an animation can also be described as creating a setting, and especially when considering the artistic setting of the scene, one must pay attention to details that are usually overlooked. That's why I could notice the individuality of each mall.

I feel the same type of observation in this work. When Kei Ono's angles carve out details that are often overlooked, you realize once again that even an ordinary place is special to someone. From afar, it looks like a huge, lumpy, inorganic box, but inside, many people come and go, and thousands of organic lives certainly exist. It's rare to find a subject whose expression changes so much depending on where the camera is placed.

The mall, as a collection of photographs, is also fascinating in its variety of expressions. And since I've taken hundreds of pictures of malls to make cartoons, I have a personal sympathy for them."

For more details, you can consult Kei Ono's website: click here

You will also find a link to the publisher's website: click here

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jidôhanbaiki / vending machine 🎧

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Today we take a look at the vending machines by photographer Eiji Ohashi.

More than 14 years ago, Eiji Ohashi began a strange series devoted to a no less strange object: the vending machine, or jidohanbaiki in Japanese, commonly abbreviated as jihanki.

Awarded several international prizes, such as the Moscow International Foto Awards (2016), the Photo-eye Best Books (2017) or the Special Photographer Award at the 34th Higashikawa Awards (2018), Eiji Ohashi has published 3 books over the years entirely devoted to vending machines: Roadside Lights (published by Zen photo gallery in 2017), Being There (in 2017, at Case publishing), and finally Roadside lights Seasons: Winter(at Case publishing, in 2020).

Le jidohanbaiki is an everyday object for the Japanese, first appearing in the Archipelago in 1888, but developed en masse from the 1960s. On urban avenues (especially in Tokyo), there are a plethora of these distributors mainly offering vacuum-packed food, cigarette packets or drinks in cans or bottles. The latter alone represent more than half of the number of jidohanbaikiin Japan, more than 4 million machines in total. Not to mention the distributors of more “confidential” goods, such as new or used panties, live lobsters or even raclette cheese!

However, in competition with convenience stores conbini open 24 hours a day, 24 days a week, the number of ATMs has been steadily decreasing in urban centers since the early 7s. However, in the most remote places or those less accessible to people – or to convenience stores! –, like the mountains of Hokkaido, the northernmost island of the Japanese archipelago, where the photographer Eiji Ohashi was born, lives and works, the jidohanbaiki remains a safe, long-lasting and reassuring value.

"Reassuring" is not an empty word in the case of Eiji Ohashi, who has made the vending machine his totem. Indeed, he affirms that the presence of these machines in the most isolated corners, stripped of all human presence, has something of the order of the reassuring: the electric light that they emit continuously gives them an almost warm air, like the saving glow of a lighthouse lost in the immensity, which tells you that you are not alone in the world.

More than documentary or anecdotal photography, these are real photo portraits of these machines that Eiji Ohashi has been producing since 2008. The photographer sees in them a similarity with human beings. Like us, the jidohanbaiki are exposed to loneliness, especially in the vast spaces of Hokkaido; like us, they must be attractive or they will disappear, work tirelessly to sell better. For the photographer, there is definitely something human in these servile machines, slaves to our well-being, which we no longer even notice, but which the artist seeks to reveal through his photographs. In other words, capturing the invisible of our daily life and revealing it in a new light through his photos.

Eiji Ohashi has photographed vending machines from all angles, in all seasons, in color and black and white, day and night. Mainly at dusk or just before dawn, in the heart of the snowy winter, for the photos that appeared in his latest publication Roadside lights Seasons: Winter. A single constant in all these photographs: the landscapes depict the distributors of Hokkaido encountered during the wanderings of the photographer, who likes to look for new jidohanbaiki, as one would seek to meet new friends.

Charlene Veillon

Art historian. Doctor in Contemporary Japanese Photography

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Yasuhiro Ogawa 🎧

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Today we focus on Japanese photographer Yasuhiro Ogawa.

Born in 1968 in Kanagawa, Japan, Yasuhiro Ogawa graduated in English literature. A detail that is not so anecdotal when you look at the photographer's series, all imbued with the dreamlike and romantic Gothic spirit so typical of English literary works.

Yasuhiro Ogawa began his professional artistic career in 2000, winning the Taiyo Award that same year, during his very first solo exhibition. He then won the 2009 Photographic Society of Japan New Comer Award for his first publication entitled Slowly Down the River. Five more photobooks will follow, including The Dreaming released in 2020, then reissued in 2022 by Sokyusha and Blue lotus edition, and the latest, Tokyo Silence, released by T&M Projects in 2022.

Yasuhiro Ogawa's mostly black and white work is built around his many trips to Japan (as for his series Okinawa, Shimagatari, Lost in Kyoto, Landscape through Windows et Tokyo Silence), but also worldwide (for its series Slowly down the River or even The Dreaming).

The series the dreaming – the dream – is a geographical journey, notably passing through Japan, China, Myanmar, India, Cambodia, Tibet, and even Guatemala. But it is also a journey through time, into the past, since the artist went back nearly 30 years in his life, when he made these trips. It was in his early fifties, from Tokyo where he currently lives, that Yasuhiro Ogawa nostalgically plunged back into his multiple black and white travel negatives, printing his prints in the camera, with the impression of reliving a old dream. The monochrome shots of The Dreaming – capturing here a landscape seen from the window of a train; here a lonely snowy station platform; here natives in their daily life – are like troubled dreams, where the blurring of certain images echoes the impression of old memories from another world. A romantic, dreamlike world, as if sleeping, like the people you meet on trains, dozing or sleeping soundly.

With his latest series, Tokyo Silence, Yasuhiro Ogawa takes another trip, this time sensory, between China and Japan. This black and white series was born from an observation: the opposition between the deafening noise of the Chinese city, made up of cries, horns, loudspeakers, and the deep and strange calm of the Japanese capital, where no one no one speaks loudly in transport, no one shouts in the street, no one honks. There is certainly a perpetual background noise in Tokyo with advertisements from giant screens, sounds from gaming halls, music from shops, but it is not the noise of Chinese human activity. The photographer says he tried to capture this paradoxical silence with his Leica. This gave life to images of crowds, of speed, but where the focus on still calm human faces, with little expression, recalls Yasuhiro Ogawa's “Tokyo silence”.

Charlene Veillon

Art historian. Doctor in Contemporary Japanese Photography

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“Tekiya” by Yang Seung-Woo 🎧

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Today we are interested in the series Tekiya by photographer Yang Seung-Woo (梁丞佑).

This series focuses on the festive and disturbing world of tekiya, these Japanese street vendors, owners of food and game stands present in all festivals and popular celebrations, or even along the alleys leading to temples and shrines. After more than 10 years of work, the unpublished color photographs of Tekiya have just appeared, in November 2022, in a catalog published by the Tokyo gallery Zen Photo Gallery. We discover a contrasting testimony, alternating festive atmospheres and scenes of life of the tekiya, these showmen who are considered to be at the origin of Yakuza, the Japanese mafia.

The photographer Yang Seung-Woo, of Korean origin, arrived in Japan in 1996, a graduate of the Nippon Photography Institute and the Polytechnic University of Tokyo, is used to portraits "in immersion" of characters on the edge of social marginality . His most iconic series, The Best Days, published in 2012, is devoted to the daily life of Japanese organized crime, Yang Seung-Woo having been led to frequent Yakuza in Korea and Japan.

For the series Tekiya, the photographer rubbed shoulders with these fairground people for more than 10 years. His series began in 2011 when, out of financial necessity, he responded to an ad for a job as a salesman at a mobile catering stand. He will have to wait a year before finding the opportunity – and the time! – to take out his camera to immortalize from the inside this atmosphere that fascinates him. Become in his own words the king of yakisoba (fried noodles) andokonomiyaki (a kind of savory thick pancake with various accompaniments), Yang Seung-Woo first sought to capture the atmosphere of matsuri, to realize in the end that his series was in fact centered on the actors of these festivals, in other words the tekiya.

This is why this series alternates very varied scenes, combining wide shots of the crowd in front of the stands, the preparation of food, the showmen counting their recipes... Or even more intimate images of the back stages of this exhausting and difficult life , where we can see a tekiya asleep under her griddle, a shopkeeper changing her newborn on a cooler between food sales, and naked men in a public bath, relaxing after a hard day's work.

The series Tekiya also has a darker side, because it hides nothing of the social affiliations of certain fairground people. We therefore see men covered with tattoos, with the little finger amputated from a phalanx - the prerogative of yakuza-, as well as rare photographs of New Year rituals celebrated with great fanfare by members of organized crime.

Tekiya takes a look that is both tender and uncompromising on these people with a harsh life, sometimes on the verge of marginality, that Yang Seung-Woo rubbed shoulders with closely. In 2019, the Zen Photo Gallery printed 700 copies of a new edition of The Best Days, that of 2012 having long been exhausted. It was also an opportunity to exhibit 30 photographs from this incredible series totally devoted to Yakuza, in their rawest intimacy. An event that will not happen again soon since the photographer, a young dad in 2018, will no longer exhibit this series so as not to risk shocking his daughter one day, before she is 20 years old. A very long sleep for the Yakuza by Yang Seung-Woo.

Charlene Veillon

Art historian. Doctor in Contemporary Japanese Photography

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Decotora, the art of the tuned truck 🎧

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Today we are interested in the series Decotora by photographer Tatsuki Masaru (田附勝).

This colorful series, started in 1998 and still in progress, focuses on "decotora", the Japanese art of the tuned truck, in other words the fact of visually modifying the appearance of a truck by adding paint, neon , body parts or even interior accessories, in order to personify it and make it unique. A practice that would have developed in the 1970s in Japan, and which took the name of "decotora" (or "dekotora), modeled on the English "decorated trunk", literally "decorated truck".

Tatsuki Masaru has been documenting the Japanese trucking community for over 20 years. In all his series, the photographer devotes himself to an almost anthropological description of our societies, whether through photographs of folk dances, Tohoku hunters, rural fishermen, or even these little invisible hands of supply What are truck drivers?

It was with this series that Tatsuki Masaru published his first book in 2007, Decotora, published by Little More editions. Between 2020 and 2021, the photographer took 12 new shots, published in a new opus published by T&M Projects, under the title Decotora – Hachinohe. Several of these photographs were shown for the first time this summer 2022 at Gallery Side 2, in Tokyo, with the particularity of being presented in a metal frame sporting the same flashy colors as the trucks in the image.

How did this series start? Contrary to what one might think, these are not photographs of an absolute fan of truck tuning. It is not a hobby photography, nor an aesthetic research. Even if the beauty of these images mixing neons, metallic paints and flamboyant bumpers is undeniable, this one is a consequence and not a goal. The highlighting of this particular decorative style results, on the contrary, from the observation of the invisibility of the community of truck drivers in our societies, which are nevertheless totally dependent on them.

Tatsuki Masaru says he became aware of this fact during a professional experience. A part-time delivery driver to pay the bills, he came across his first customized trucks on the road. It was by rubbing shoulders with this community that he realized that he knew nothing of the lifestyle of these truckers, or of the way in which they managed to create such painted decorations, lights and fairings. The photographer then followed a driver in his decotora to better understand these men who spend most of their lives in their truck. It was from there that Tatsuki Masaru started his series in 1998.

Decotora is interested in the world of truckers, and in particular in the pride of this paradoxically discreet - if not to say secret - community, but yet ultra conspicuous in its vehicles. The series highlights the different settings that the photographer has come across, representing the hopes of truckers, their families, or even their prayers in the face of a job where they risk their lives on the road every day to bring us all modern comfort.

More than a documentary, the long series Decotora by Tatsuki Masaru is a magnificent tribute to these knights of the road, all dashing in their iron steeds shining with a thousand lights.

Charlene Veillon

Art historian. Doctor in Contemporary Japanese Photography

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Japanese kite, Wadako series 🎧

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Today, we are interested in "wadako", Japanese kites.

Wadako is the title of a series by photographer Mami Kiyoshi. Since 2003, her photographic work has followed the same rigorous documentary process, always identical: Mami Kiyoshi meets a model, she then goes to his home or to a place linked to his personal history. She stays there for 2 days, the first being devoted to a long interview with the model about her private and professional life. The second is dedicated to the installation of a staging of the model among the objects that best represent it, and to the shooting. In the final phase, Mami Kiyoshi digitizes the silver photographs, and reworks the colors and contrasts to bring out the details.
This logic of documentary photography, almost from the daily archive, was transposed in 2018 to the Japanese world of kites. In the series Wadako – which literally means “Japanese kite” –, several craftsmen, among the last remaining Japanese kite workshops, were photographed in their working environment, surrounded by their creations.
This series is presented at the French Institute of Japan – Kansai, Kyoto throughout the month of October as part of the Nuit Blanche festival.

The series Wadako – Stories of Japanese kites was born from the collaboration between the Japanese photographer Mami Kiyoshi and the French researcher Cecile Laly, a specialist in Japanese kite culture. Indeed, noting the slow decline of this traditional craft after the Second World War, a consequence of the modernization and Westernization of the country, Cecile Laly had the idea of launching a study project in order to list this craft in a catalog. . But rather than focusing on the kites, she chose to highlight the manufacturing workshops.

According to his research, kites arrived in Japan in the XNUMXth century, but probably originated in Southeast Asia. Traditional Japanese kites are made of washi, a light and strong paper made by hand from mulberry fibers, glued to a bamboo or cypress wood frame. The Japanese kite is a flat object, whose shapes and patterns can vary according to each region and even each workshop.
In Japan, the kite has a mainly festive use. From the 5th century, we know from representations that it was a popular entertainment for young and old, mainly associated with the Boys' Day on May XNUMXth. Even if there are currently various festivals dedicated to kites, with the making of giant pieces or kite battles, this traditional craft is now in great danger of disappearing, the workshops dying out with their elderly craftsmen.
It is therefore the story of these people, for whom the kite represents their whole life, which is immortalized in the series. Wadako, whose portraits are at the same time documentary photography, archive, historical testimony and visual artist photography with this almost pictorial work of light so typical of the work of Mami Kiyoshi.

Charlene Veillon
Art historian. Doctor in Contemporary Japanese Photography

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Yu Hirai, Between dog and wolf🎧

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Today, we are interested in the series “Between Dog and Wolf” by photographer Yu Hirai (ひらいゆう).

Between dog and wolf is mainly made up of portraits, that of Yu Hirai or members of his family. These are portraits most often made indoors, in various places where the artist lives, but which almost always show an outdoor space – a piece of sky, a landscape, a building facade – through open window or balcony. Series Between dog and wolf illustrates this precise moment when natural daylight decreases and gives way to artificial light from homes. The silhouette in the image thus marks a kind of threshold halfway between the interior and the exterior, the latter being symbolically represented by the dominant colors red and blue. For the artist, the color blue expresses the outside world, objective reality and the unknown. Red, on the other hand, represents his memories, his dreams, his inner universe. This meeting of two colored atmospheres symbolizes the expression "between dog and wolf" which defines the twilight, when we no longer distinguish things very well and everything becomes blurred. This is why the portraits in this series are really only opaque silhouettes, obtained by focusing on the external background and not on the face.

Between dog and wolf, one of Yu Hirai's first series, started in 1997, is still in progress. Iconic, this series of color silver prints concentrates all the intimate questions that will punctuate the artist's journey. Exhibited until October 15 at the Salon d'art in Brussels, the series Between dog and wolf is also presented at the DongGang International Photo Festival in Seoul, Korea, on view until June 30, 2023.

Yu Hirai was born in 1963 in Tokyo. She moved to Paris in 2002 where she still resides.

Photographer, but more generally multimedia artist, Yu Hirai articulates all his creations around the concept of identity. Halfway between the Japanese tradition of the diary and pop abstraction in acid colors, Yu Hirai reveals to us on photo paper an interstice of freedom where reality and fiction can mingle without colliding.

Looking back, Yu Hirai sees today in the faceless portraits ofBetween dog and wolf, an echo of the things left unsaid and the secrets that marked his youth in Japan. Indeed, it was only at the age of 20, when she was about to leave to study in Belgium, that Yu Hirai learned from her mother that her father was not Japanese. His parents were Koreans who had emigrated to Japan in the 1920s. Although born and raised in Japan, his father had had his Japanese nationality withdrawn after the 1945 defeat and the return to independence of the Korea. Having chosen to remain in the country where he had grown up, he lived stateless until the end of his days. A complex situation, made even more difficult by persistent discrimination, which encouraged many immigrants from countries colonized by Japan to conceal their origins. His father never told him his story. She discovered it bit by bit, over the years, through her mother.

There is no doubt that the discovery of this past explains the strange relationship that Yu Hirai maintains in his photos with the notions of interior and exterior (uchi et soto in Japanese), very important in the Archipelago since they largely define the relationships between people, depending on whether one is in the family or in the collective sphere.

This discovery especially made Yu Hirai aware of the questions of identity that punctuate all his series, when the great History joins that more intimate of the families.

Charlene Veillon

Art historian. Doctor in Contemporary Japanese Photography

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Shishi odori 🎧

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Today we are interested in dance "shishi odori".

Traditionally, in Japan, the summer period rhymes with Obon, a Buddhist festival honoring the spirits of the ancestors. Nowadays, Obon is primarily a family celebration during which people return to their hometowns and tend to the graves of their ancestors. Obon takes place over 3 days, originally from July 13 to 15, but the transition to the Western Gregorian calendar in the second half of the XNUMX^e century moved this holiday to mid-August in many regions. Obon gives rhythm to the whole Japanese summer, according to its lit lanterns to guide the spirit of the dead and its dances to remember those who have disappeared.

If the "bon odori" (dance of the Bon) is the most emblematic of the dances of the summer period, others also take place during the summer, always related to death and the soul of the deceased. This is particularly the case of "shishi odori", the dance of the stags.

Le shishi odori is from Tohoku, a region located on the east coast of the main island Honshu. Made up of mountains and forests, the nature of Tohoku is wild and rich in game. By tradition, it is a hunting territory. This rough and beautiful life was immortalized between 2006 and 2010 by the photographer Tatsuki Masaru (田附勝), in his series simply titled "Tohoku". It was while following a group of deer hunters that Tatsuki Masaru began to photograph both hunters and their prey.

From his first series "Decotora" started in 1998 dedicated to the extreme tuning of Japanese trucks, up to the "Tohoku" series, Tatsuki Masaru focused on an almost anthropological description of our societies. Through his lens, he testifies as much to the harsh solitary reality of the truck driver as to the harsh existence of the inhabitants of the mountains or the implacable reality of hunting.

Among the color images in the series "Tohoku", there are many photos of slaughtered deer, sometimes skinned, sometimes just bones, sometimes just their antlers, sometimes a boy proudly holding the heart of the beast as a trophy, or just the still warm blood of the animal on the snow pristine mountains. The harshness of these photos echoes the harshness of the life of these villagers.

Yet in this region, the animal is the object of a very particular ancestral veneration. Traditionally, in Tohoku folklore, a mixture of Shinto, Buddhist and animist religions, the spirit of animals killed during hunting is thanked with an offering in the form of a dance. This is the origin of shishi odori.

Dance shishi odori (鹿踊り, which can also be translated as shika odori, literally "the stag/roe deer/fallow deer dance", is an offering to thank the spirits of the animals who gave their lives – and their meat – to nourish humans.

Originally, from its beginnings in the XVI^e century, then during the Edo period (1603-1868), mainly in the prefectures of Iwate and Miyagi, the performances of shishi odori took place during the summer period of Obon. The dances were then practiced after a hunt, the dancers performing with the skulls of the deer killed. Today, shishi odori is also practiced during festive events linked to good harvests or in homage to the deceased, for example during the commemoration of the dead on March 11, 2011, when the tsunami hit the coasts of Tohoku.

Some sources suggest that the shishi odori dance is inspired by the movements of a wild deer, others that it mimics the gestures of a farmer (the deer being traditionally associated with the agricultural world). Still, the dancers' masks, black or red, representing the head of an imaginary creature close to the lion, must be topped with antlers. The hunters therefore have the central role of providing part of the costumes for the shishi odori dancers, which is underlined by the photos of Tatsuki Masaru.

By a cruel coincidence, the photographer's series was published in July 2011, just after the tragedy that devastated the villages photographed by Tatsuki Masaru. Many hunters, dancers and costumes were swept away by the wave. These images therefore have a special memorial role, as if the souls of these people – and animals – had been printed on paper before their physical disappearance. This twist of fate marked the photographer who continued his work after 2011 on the deer hunters of Tohoku, in what was left of their devastated region. In November 2011, he produced the documentary "Is the blood still red?", or the series "Never Again" on the resignation of a hunter following the discovery of radioactive substances in deer food, and "Kuragari", about his nocturnal encounter with a deer in a forest.

It's as if Tatsuki Masaru has been haunted by the spirit of Tohoku deer ever since he met the hunters. Perhaps this is the key to understanding shishi odori : a celebration of the life which passes and is transmitted between the still living beings.

Charlene Veillon

Art historian. Doctor in Contemporary Japanese Photography

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Instagram #002 – kawada_kikuji

INSTAGRAM

@kawada_kikuji

Every week this photographer publishes his creations – definitely to follow!

A few elements of biography

Emblematic Japanese photographer, Kikuji Kawada made a name for himself thanks to his poetic and highly symbolic photography. His body of work has been constantly evolving since the post-war period.

As a co-founder of the VIVO collective in 1959, this photographer shared a creative vision of the expressive and individualistic potential of photography with other members, including Hosoe Eikoh, Narahara Ikko, Tōmatsu Shōmei and Satō Akira. Kawada held his first solo exhibition in the year VIVO was formed, before exhibiting The Map (Chizu) in 1961 at the Fuji Photo Salon in Tokyo. Today, The Map (Chizu) is recognized as one of the most important examples of Japan's unique post-war photobook culture, incorporating text, abstract surfaces and fragmentary imagery to compose an intricate and meditative elegy to Japan of this period. Another post, Sacred Atavism (1971), comprises six chapters dealing with the grotesque which highlight Kawada's strong anti-classicism and individual vision.

Kawada gained a reputation in the United States through his inclusion in the New Japanese Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1979. His longest and most renowned series The Last Cosmology was captured between 1980 and 2000. Originally published in parts in the 1980s, it was compiled into a publication and solo exhibition in 1995. The series apparently connects the dramas of heaven at the end of two historical epochs on earth: the "Showa" era with the death of the emperor in Japan and the 20th century. Kawada received the Photographic Society of Japan Annual Award in 1996 as well as the National Photography Award at the Higashikawa International Photography Festival the same year.

In 2011, Kawada received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Photographic Society of Japan, highlighting his international and national fame, and he was honored with a solo exhibition at the Tate Exhibition – Conflict, Time, Photography (2014). His work is held in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Japan, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, New York, the Center Pompidou and the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

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MANTIS 🎧

"Mantis religiosa", the praying mantis by Yutaka Takahashi

Today, we are interested in the praying mantis!

“[…] of interest at least equal to that of the cicada, but of much less fame, because it makes no noise […], the beast that prays to God […] is Praying Mantis. This quotation, taken from the renowned entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre (1823-1915), opens the strange photographic collection Praying Mantis, by photographer Yutaka Takahashi. Published in 2020 by iKi editions, this book serves as a showcase for magnificent color macro photographs of praying mantises, taken on the spot in Japanese nature. It also contains in the preface, a literary creation commissioned for the occasion, entitled "Prière au jardinet", by Marie Berne, author of the novel The great love of the octopus published by L'Arbre Vengeur.

This series will be presented from June 11 to August 13, 2022 at the André Malraux media library, Nadar gallery, in Tourcoing.

Originally from the Mediterranean basin, the praying mantis has spread in Asia to Japan. It was the meeting of the insect in the course of 2015 with the photographer Yutaka Takahashi that gave life to this series. The artist tells in the book Mantis how he suddenly found himself fascinated by this insect to which he had never really paid attention until then. Out in his garden early in the morning with his camera, he was looking for a subject to photograph. His gaze then fell on a praying mantis hanging on the wall of his house. He instantly fell in love with this being who seemed to be staring at him with its huge eyes, since the mantis, in addition to having excellent relief vision, is the only insect that can rotate its head 180°. This allows it to follow the movements of its prey or any point of interest with its eyes, without moving its body. Like humans, the mantis can really stare at you and follow you with its gaze.

For 15 days, Yutaka Takahashi engaged in a kind of hide-and-seek with "his" mantis, until he found her at the end of her life in a flowerpot. This is the origin of the series Praying Mantis, an ode entirely dedicated to this particular insect.

Easily hated because of its reputation as a cannibal (it usually eats its male after mating), this little beast nevertheless deserves to be known. The work Mantis reveals it to us under different aspects, from its hatching to its predations, passing through its elegant beauty with its two front legs mimicking the gesture of a prayer – hence its name “religious” mantis.

Let yourself be seduced by these surprising photographs, between the entomological archive and the ode to nature and life.

Charlene Veillon

Art historian. Doctor in Contemporary Japanese Photography

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Photogram 🎧

Podcast text

Today we focus on "Photogram".

The photogram is defined as a photographic image obtained without using a camera. A photogram, also called "photogenic drawing", is obtained when one or more objects are placed on a photosensitive surface, and the whole is exposed for quite a long time directly to natural or artificial light.
For his photograms from his series Others From the Future, the Japanese photographer Ken Kitano used large-format color photosensitive paper, a space entirely plunged into darkness and… a baby!
So let's explore this intriguing series, asking ourselves about life itself, its origin, its future.

Ken Kitano has received numerous prestigious awards for his photographic work, which mainly focuses on human beings and the social relationships we have in the contemporary world. One of his most iconic series is Our face. These are strange portraits, in black and white, drawn on a human scale, whose blurred appearance – almost ghostly – is due to the photographer's technique. Ken Kitano makes several portraits of various people having the same trade or a bond in common. Then, in his laboratory, he superimposes the negatives of the portraits and produces a print bringing together all these people on the same image, thus abolishing all social borders in favor of a unity of the human.

The photogram series Others From the Future which interests us was born from Ken Kitano's chance meeting with an obstetrician who had discovered his Our Face series in 2011 at the Tokyo Metropolitan museum of photography. She was the one who asked him if he would be interested in a series about babies. Ken Kitano then visited his clinic and began photographing newborns.
He then experimented with his first photograms. He placed babies aged between 2 and 6 months on a transparent plate placed above a photosensitive colored paper. With the baby moving during the long exposure time, it was impossible to predict the end result. But what appeared in the image was a bright red shape. These bright red shapes are the silhouettes of babies silhouetted against a black background.

In the text published in his book Others From the Future, published by Bookshop M in 2021, Ken Kitano recounts the strange feeling he experienced when faced with these little beings who had only existed in this world for a few hours. He then began to wonder: where do babies come from? What kind of world do they exist in before entering ours? Will we ever return to that other world?
The hypothesis he arrived at is that perhaps the world “outside of it” where babies come from is red… But if we in our world see these images in red and black, what would then be the opposite effect? In other words, what color would life take on from the other world? This questioning inspired him to produce inverted, positive images, creating pink silhouettes on a white background, then declined in blue or white, etc.

Unlike the photograms of babies by English photographer Adam Fuss, Ken Kitano's silhouettes do not seem to be swimming in amniotic fluid. Babies are more like weightless in an ethereal world different from ours. This effect is further accentuated by the imposing scale of the life-size prints, sometimes with several babies in the image.
Ken Kitano's photograms question the viewer on his origin, on the beyond of our world and our perception. Where are we going ? Where do we come from ? From the future perhaps…

Charlene Veillon
Art historian. Doctor in Contemporary Japanese Photography

Text written and read by Charlène Veillon

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NEKO 🎧

"Neko", the cat in contemporary Japanese photography

Today we look at the cat in contemporary Japanese photography.

Neko is the Japanese word for cat. It is also the title of a project initiated in 2017 by the collector and specialist in Japanese photography Sophie Cavaliero. Neko Project revolves around the special relationship that has always existed between cats and Japan, seen through Japanese photography. Neko is available in a publication published in 2019 by iKi editions, as well as in various exhibitions held in 2019 in France, Belgium and Holland, and in 2022 in Italy. ¹

For the record, in 2017, 87 Japanese photographers responded to the Neko call for projects launched by Sophie Cavaliero. A jury, made up of gallery owners, photo directors and photographers, selected 10 projects presented in detail in the Neko book. The book also exposes the other proposals, in a more rapid way, with as a bonus an article on Kai Fusayoshi, which can be considered as the precursor of this “cat photography” highlighted in the book.²

The project started from the observation of the omnipresence of cats in Japanese culture. In literature, with for example the novel of the early XNUMXth century I am a cat of Sôseki Natsume, an acerbic critic of Meiji society through the eyes of a cat; or from the 1936 book The Cat, his master and his two mistresses written by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, where the little cat Lily serves as hostage to a love trio. Cats in Japan are also ubiquitous in people's daily lives, in folklore and even in popular culture, from the soon-to-be XNUMX-year-old star Hello Kitty to the famous maneki-neko, including the cats of Studio Ghibli. Finally, they are logically muses for many Japanese photographers, from Chiro, the dying cat of Nobuyoshi Araki, to Sasuke, the lost and found cat of Masahisa Fukase.

Take the example of Shoji Ogawa ³, whose portrait photograph of a cat adorns the cover of the book Neko. This color photo of a cat's head, full face, close-up, staring at the lens with its large yellow eyes, touches us with its expressiveness. The gaze of this cat impresses us with its almost "humanity". Everyone can read in it a sort of contemplative resignation. Because the cats photographed by Shoji Ogawa are not the big house tomcats, pampered by their masters. Like the homeless or the little people photographed on the spot by Shoji Ogawa, they are stray cats, often in bad shape, with portraits "stolen" in the street, when their path crossed that of the photographer, at the detour of an alley in the city of Osaka. Hence the title of his series: Nekojigoku, the hell of cats…

Photographer Hiromi Kakimoto (垣本泰美) ⁴ proposed for Neko Project a series entitled Nekomata. This color series has its roots in the artist's interest in the stories, myths and legends always hiding behind the narration of an image. Hiromi Kakimoto looked at Japanese folklore featuring cats. It is said that big cats with a long tail, after a certain age, can turn into a nekomata, literally "forked-tailed cat", a supernatural creature with an evil character, which can play very nasty tricks on humans. Far from the kawaii (adorable) image that cats are usually given, Hiromi Kakimoto's photographs show us the ambivalence of this feline that is by turns cute and frightening.

Toshiko Hashimoto (橋本とし子) ⁵ proposed for Neko a series of photographs taken several years earlier, linked to his own memories. Title Nyah and Shah, these intimate photos feature the photographer's two former cats named Nyah (Japanese onomatopoeia corresponding to the French "meow") and Shah, after the sound of the first meow heard from the kitten. Nyah and Shah landed one night in the artist's small wooden house, and took up residence there. The tender eye of their adopted human mother then had fun capturing facial expressions and postures on photo paper, forming today, long after their death, a moving memory of a happiness shared between cats and humans. .

Neko project is a photographic illustration of this uninterrupted love story between cats and the Japanese.

Charlene Veillon

Art historian. Doctor in Contemporary Japanese Photography

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#001 – tomokosawada_artist

@tomokosawada_artist

Japanese photographer, Tomoko Sawada has always worked on self-portraiture and the question of identity. Exhibited all over the world and in the most renowned museums, Tomoko continues to dig the same furrow, adapting her subject to world news while keeping her Japanese culture of photography. More than ever, the question of identity is one of our biggest questions and Tomoko is there to help us in our thinking and delight us with the magic of her photos.

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Hideka Tonomura 🎧

Hideka Tonomura 殿村任香

Today we are interested in the photographer Hideka Tonomura.

Born in 1979 in Kobe, Japan, Hideka Tonomura is now an essential photographer. We have been able to discover it recently in major photography exhibitions. Her work arouses the enthusiasm not only of informed collectors but also of women who identify with the concerns of the photographer. Hideka allows women to face their daily lives thanks to the beauty and authenticity of her photographs.

So where can we discover this artist?

First in Paris, at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie - MEP in Paris in the exhibition Love Songs. Hideka Tonomura is there with her series "mama love" which she published as a photo book (her first) in 2008 with Akaaka Art Publishing. "mama love" reveals a terribly intimate subject - the love and sex life of her mother. Hideka Tonomura photographs her mother with a strange complicity who, in some shots, looks straight into the lens. As the series progresses, Hideka exemplifies a powerful and deep human story (a love story beyond taboos) unwilling to be consensual or voyeuristic. She transforms an intimate and personal subject into a universal story putting herself on the ranks of the greatest photographers. In this exhibition, Hideka Tonomura shows us how love transforms the world and how a photographer testifies to it all in provocation and modesty, making us spectators of this great questioning on family relations and romantic relationships.

Hideka Tonomura is doing again this photographic feat of turning a personal narrative into a universal subject with her project SHINING WOMAN PROJECT which attracted attention during the festival Kyotography in Kyoto, Japan by the "SHINING WOMAN PARADE".
This project started with a personal event, her cervical cancer. During her hospitalization, Hideka Tonomura meets women who, despite the illness, are sparkling with life. Touched by these encounters, she launched her project - SHINING WOMAN PROJECT - to celebrate them. Since 2019, the photographer has been traveling around Japan to meet the women who contacted her via the project's Instagram account (hideka_tonomura) and produces portraits of women who are fighting cancer, thus changing the way we look at cancer and the women affected by this disease. It is therefore the first time that a parade brings together all the participants and supporters of this project. There "SHINING WOMAN PARADE” helped spread the message to a wider audience, message that I hope will be heard from Europe despite the travel restrictions!

Hideka Tonomura was also present at Kyotographie in the event “10/10 Celebrating Japanese Women Photographers” presented at the HOSOO GALLERY with another series “die of love”, considered by the artist as her own "theatre of love". The photographs immerse us in his personal universe with intense colors, meaningful blurs and an introspective angle of perspective. Her photos are like a healing diary, allowing her to share her joys and sorrows to better tell us about life and death themselves. Here are some words from the photographer:

(French translation)
“Love has no form
If love has a form,
let it be a photograph at the very end
It's nothing but paper
Just a laugh -
Life itself is ridiculous, after all
Ah, a tragicomedy, it is"

—Hideka Tonomura, "die of love"

Finally, let's not forget his exhibition "Love" to come to her Japanese gallery, Zen photo gallery in Tokyo, from June 3 to July 2, 2022. This exhibition will be like a kind of retrospective to better appreciate all of Hideka Tonomura's works.

On behalf of all women, a big thank you to Hideka Tonomura!

Text written by Sophie Cavaliero and read by Charlène Veillon

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Zaido 🎧

"Zaido Ritual" by Yukari Chikura (地蔵ゆかり)

Today, we are interested in the "Zaido ritual".

The Shinto ritual Zaido, combining purifying rites and sacred dances, is the main subject of a series by photographer Yukari Chikura. Title Zaido, this series has won numerous awards, including the STEIDL BOOK AWARD in 2016, which resulted in a luxurious publication in 2020. This photo book was notably voted best photo book of 2020 by Vogue, Vanity Fair and LensCulture, among many 'others.

The series Zaido entered the collections of the National Library of France in 2013. It is also presented this spring 2022 at the HOSOO gallery, in Kyoto, as part of the prestigious Kyotographie international photo festival, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.^e birthday.

Yukari Chikura, a trained music composer, came to photography and the Zaido ritual following a series of personal tragedies. The sudden death of her father from cancer, as well as a serious accident from which she almost did not survive, added to the trauma of the earthquake, the tsunami and the nuclear accident in Fukushima in 2011, devastated Yukari Chikura , plunging her into a deep depression. She says her late father then appeared to her in a dream, telling her to go to a remote village in northeastern Japan where he had once lived.

Obedient to this dream, Yukari Chikura, camera in hand, initiated a strange pilgrimage that led her to a place deeply buried in snow. In a freezing winter cold, with temperatures that can drop to -20 degrees, she discovered the Zaido, this 1300-year-old ritual, still practiced today by a few rare villages.

It is the resilience of the Zaido through time and the abnegation of the local populations to perpetuate this sacred heritage that have given new meaning to the life of Yukari Chikura. Year after year, she photographs the practitioners of this ritual, creating a poetic series imbued with mystery and spirituality, where beauty hides behind each snowflake.

Every January 2, well before dawn, locals, young and old, brave the snow and the cold to come together to practice Zaido. Derived from Shintoism, the animist religion of Japan, this ritual combines ascetic practice of purification and dances for the deities, in order to ensure good fortune and protection.

The series Zaido consists of color photographs (with some black and white), combining snow landscapes bordering on abstraction, and shots of dancers or ascetics. We see, for example, an almost naked man, dressed only in a fundshi, the traditional men's undergarment, kneeling in the snow, practicing a mizugori, a ceremony of purifying ablutions in icy water in the early morning. All this in order to be pure before his dance. The color image appears blurry, as it is dotted with small white spots. These are snowflakes, the image having been taken in the middle of a blizzard.

Another black and white shot shows in its center an endless stone staircase, crossing a forest of gigantic conifers, all under the snow. Yukari Chikura explains that when she discovered this staircase, she thought that if she could reach the top, like the brave locals during ceremonies, maybe she could meet her late father there, this staircase being the link between the world below and the divine.

Yukari Chikura dedicates these shots that almost saved his life, to the hope that can be born in despair.

Charlène Veillon - Art historian. Doctor in Contemporary Japanese Photography

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Dating self-portrait 🎧

"Self-portraits for omiai" by Tomoko Sawada (澤田知子)

Today, we are interested in the "photographic portrait of meeting".

The photographic portrait for omiai (or premarital encounter portrait) is the exclusive subject of a 2001 series by photographer Tomoko Sawada. Entitled Omiai, this series made up of 30 self-portraits is presented until June 2022 in the group exhibition Role Play held both at the Observatory of the Prada Foundation in Milan and at the Prada Aoyama building in Tokyo.

But what is the history of this portrait in Japan? In past centuries, in the Archipelago, the portrait or the self-portrait was not a pictorial genre as developed as in the West. There were indeed a few portraits of Zen masters or aristocrats, but it seems that traditional Japanese thought, which does not value the ego, was a brake on individualized representation.
Things have changed a lot in the modern era, especially with the arrival of photography in the Archipelago at the beginning of the second half of the XNUMXth century. The photographic portrait has gradually become just as common there as in the West. However, it has found a very special use in contemporary Japanese culture: the portrait for omiai or prenuptial encounter portrait!

This particular photographic portrait is linked to the practice of omiai, the “arranged meeting” for a marriage between two people who do not know each other. The omiai would have been born in the 6th century in samurai families, then it would have spread to the entire population. It is estimated that today XNUMX% of Japanese marriages are still done by omiai.
These photos are taken from both the feminine and masculine sides, even if the posture and clothing codes are stricter for young girls. These portraits are then exchanged between the parties, often through families, who want to see their offspring make a good marriage.

The photographer "with 1000 faces" Tomoko Sawada is a fan of self-portraiture. She uses photographic staging and her own person to explore identity and societal issues. In all her series, she embodies various female characters to bring out the stereotypes: the bride, the high school student, the sweet lolita, or even the young girl to be married. She also questions the photographic practices of our society, such as class, wedding and omiai photos.
In this series, Tomoko Sawada transforms into 30 different young girls. With the help of wigs, make-up, costumes, she imitates the very serious photos taken by families for the purpose of an omiai: after all, it is a question of selling her offspring on a photo! The photographer therefore copies the gestures and attitudes of the young girl to be married who must present herself in her best light, in classic clothes and in magnificent and expensive furisode (the long-sleeved kimono reserved for single people), in a very reserved attitude, feet together, most often hands also crossed, face serious, eyes fixed on the objective.
The repetition of these similar young girls in the omiai portraits makes us aware of the artificiality of these social self-representations. By photographing her own face each time in her self-portraits, Tomoko Sawada demonstrates the interchangeability of these young girls subjected to "a role-playing game", that of the child to be housed. "Roleplay", as the title of the Prada Foundation exhibition currently presenting Tomoko Sawada's Omiai series.

Charlene Veillon
Art historian. Doctor in Contemporary Japanese Photography

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Third Wave Feminism 🎧

"Third Wave Feminism" by Yurie Nagashima (長島有里枝)

Today, we are interested in the theme of "the feminist third wave".

The expression "Third Wave Feminism" (3^e feminist wave) designates a new feminist wave that appeared in the United States in the early 1990s, bringing together various political demands and artistic practices from all countries, and especially from all minority and community groups where women are doubly marginalized or stigmatized.

From October 2021 to March 2022, the XNUMXst century contemporary art museum^e century of Kanazawa, in Japan, hosted an exhibition where the curator Yurie Nagashima, Japanese photographer, chose to challenge the images produced by 10 Japanese photographers and videographers from the angle of the 3^e feminist wave.

Entitled in French "Countermeasures against awkward speech: from the point of view of the 3^e feminist wave", this exhibition offered an original feminist interpretation of works produced since the 1990s by Japanese female and male artists who do not claim to be feminists.

But what is feminism and what does it have to do with contemporary Japanese photography? Curator Yurie Nagashima started from the observation of her own experience as an artist who made her debut in 1992. She was a pioneer in the exhibition of the female photographic self, inspiring in her wake a whole generation of female photographers working on and with their body. His work of self-portraits at the time depicting his naked body, his daily life or his family was quickly cataloged by the male critics ofonnanoko shashin, in other words "photo of a girl". As if talking about the female body was reduced to a social or gender category, or even to a secondary “girlish” subject. Series Self portraits by Yurie Nagashima, initiated in 1992 but still in progress, gradually revealed the feminine strength of the photographer and the power of the self-portrait as a radical feminist gesture opposing the gaze and patriarchal values.

For Yurie Nagashima, the 3^e Japanese feminist wave took place in this artistic context of forced invisibility, where defining oneself as a feminist was almost impossible. It is this observation that Yurie Nagashima wanted to question by inviting artists who have worked on the female subject without expressing themselves on the feminist question.

Taking part in the exhibition herself, Yurie Nagashima exhibited prints from her series Self portraits, including a 1993 black-and-white photograph of herself lying naked on her stomach on a futon alongside her brother, also naked, in the family home. This staging aimed to question the contemporary Japanese trend of "hair nude" photography, featuring exclusively naked women, frontally, exposing their pubic hair. Intimate hair is still very taboo in Japan and its exposure is legally prohibited, but under the guise of "artistic photography", "nude hair" showed the female body as a single object of male desire for the male gaze.

This exhibition was therefore a challenge, offering feminist reinterpretations of images produced since the 1990s on the female subject, in this particular context of the 3^e Japanese feminist wave, where the photography of women by women could until now only be a onnanoko shashin, a photograph for a girl. The dialogue initiated in this exhibition will perhaps allow a feminist legitimation of the gaze on the female body.

Charlène Veillon - Art historian. Doctor in Contemporary Japanese Photography

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Cherry blossoms 🎧

Cherry Blossoms by Risaku Suzuki (鈴木理策)

Today, we are interested in "cherry blossoms"!

The cherry blossom is the exclusive subject of a series by photographer Risaku Suzuki entitled Sakura , the Japanese name for cherry blossom. A subject both banal and erudite, the cherry blossom is omnipresent in traditional Japanese culture. But what is its place in the photo of Risaku Suzuki?

Risaku Suzuki has been photographing cherry blossoms for over 20 years. He feeds his series every spring Sakura , which continues to be presented internationally, as in April-May 2021 at the Danziger gallery in the United States.
Each year in Japan, towards the end of March, the flowering of this small pale flower, so important in Japanese culture, begins. The Japanese then gather under the cherry blossoms to picnic and practice ohanami, the celebration of this flower that lives only a short time. Its beauty is therefore intrinsically linked to its “ephemerality”.

Although Risaku Suzuki is interested in other natural motifs, such as mountains, the sea, snow or even water lilies, the series Sakura is one of the photographer's most iconic. It is made up of large format color prints made from 10 by 12 cm or even 20 by 25 cm film sheets, which allows for extraordinary details in the image. We see in close-up the branches of cherry trees loaded with clusters of white or pale pink flowers, silhouetted against a background of blue sky.
The construction of the image is literally "stunning", since the shot is taken from a low angle, giving the viewer the impression of being under the branches of the cherry tree, as if raising their head to the sky. to admire the sakura.

However, Risaku Suzuki reduces the depth of field to a single point, giving everything else in the image a blurry, fluffy, foreground and background blending effect. For the photographer, forcing the viewer to search with their eyes for the point of sharpness in the image is important, as he says his work is essentially “about vision and time”.

- Vision, because looking at a sakura from the ground is an endless visual challenge: each flower has its own beauty, and yet it is impossible to see them all, on all the branches, in all the clusters. The gaze fatally focuses on just a few, like the point of sharpness in Risaku Suzuki's image.
- Time, because the cherry blossom being ephemeral, it forces Risaku Suzuki to run to the parks every year at exactly the right time for his photographs. Time markers of the arrival of spring, sakura symbolize both an annual repetitive cycle and a fleeting passage on earth. They therefore embody both an eternity and a moment.

More than the representation of a national symbol of beauty, the series Sakura by Risaku Suzuki is actually an ode to the treasures of nature.

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March 11, 2011 🎧

March 11, 2011 – March 11, 2022, Post-Disaster Life Photographs by Yuki Iwanami (岩波友紀)

For this SUGOI POD of March 2022, the news brings us to a serious subject: the 11th anniversary of the disaster that occurred on March 11, 2011 in Japan. That day, an earthquake, followed by a tsunami, ravaged the east coast of the country, leading to a nuclear disaster in the Fukushima power plant. Since this fateful date of March 11, 2011 until today, many artists, including many photographers, have felt the need to go to the scene of the tragedy. Whether to help, criticize, testify or document the events that have plagued this region. Documenting humanity in the face of disaster is precisely one of the favorite subjects of Japanese photojournalist Yuki Iwanami, whom the news places today in the spotlight of SUGOI POD! Indeed, his recent series Threads in the dark, devoted to the difficult and slow return to normality of the affected inhabitants of Tohoku, has just won the prize of the Irie Taikichi Memorial Museum of Photography in 2021.

Who is Yuki Iwanami? Born in 1977 in Nagano, he began his career as a photojournalist in 2001. A career that led him to cover difficult subjects in Cambodia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but also to document the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the devastations of the tsunami of 2011. In 2003, he started working for the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shinbun, considered one of the best-selling daily newspapers in the world. His press photos have won numerous awards, including for example the Paris Photography Prize in 2013 with his photo entitled “Deprived of his mother by the tsunami”. This black and white image shows in the center the little Yuzuha Suzuki, 2 years old, in the arms of her father, in the city of Onagawa, completely destroyed by the wave. The little girl, deprived of her mother and her home, looks at the camera. Her father, from behind, tries to make his way through the wreckage of cars and various debris.

Press photography holds an important place in the history of Japanese photography. It developed in the 1930s, supported by the rise of newspapers and the creation of the first photographic magazines. It lays the foundations of documentary photography of the 1950s, which will testify to the social reality and the miseries of the post-war period. This documentary trend has made its comeback on the Japanese art scene after the 2011 tragedy.

Yuki Iwanami, freelance photographer since 2015, therefore has the particularity of sharing between photojournalism and art photography. The border between the two genres is very thin, even totally permeable, when we speak of documentary photography or the realistic vein. The latest Yuki Iwanami series that we are now going to discover are not press photos, even if their purpose is to bear witness to a difficult situation. The award-winning photographic work Threads in the dark, literally "son in the dark", is an illustration of the resilience of the festivals of the Tohoku region, which nevertheless continue to occur in the disaster areas. A decade after the disaster, life is still very difficult for the locals who have sometimes never found a decent home, and who still live in what were originally temporary shelters. The local community, or what is left of it, organizing these festivals with the means at hand since 2011, is of great moral and psychological support for these vulnerable populations.

Yuki Iwanami's photographs demonstrate the visceral human social need behind the apparent futility of a party. This series captures the reality of the survivors of March 11, 2011, who are trying to "return to normal" in a world that is still totally turned upside down.

Let's dwell for a moment on a few images from this magnificent and touching color series. Here, a miko, a priestess shinto, poses alone in traditional white and red outfit on a beach. You should know that every year, on the anniversary date of March 11, religious ceremonies are held on the beaches in memory of the disappeared carried away by the wave. There, a photo of dancers in traditional costumes bowing to statues of Buddhist deities facing the beach; divinities believed to protect the inhabitants from the thunderbolts of the ocean. Again, the photo of an old, weathered black and white photograph of local dancers from shishi odori, "the dance of the stags". Traditionally, the performance of shishi odori take place during the summer period of Obon, a Buddhist festival honoring the spirits of the ancestors. But the shishi odori, also originating in Tohoku, is also practiced in homage to the deceased during festivals. Another photograph shows a broken dancer's mask against a black background. Found in the debris after the passage of the wave, this mask looks at us with the only eye it has left. In Threads in the dark, Yuki Iwanami shows the links forged between the populations and their local festivals, which together resisted the wave and the tremors. As the title suggests, Threads in the dark shows men, women, children united to each other as if connected by invisible threads that transcend darkness.

Yuki Iwanami has produced other series bearing witness to the terrible suffering of the people who lived through the tragedy of March 11, 2011. Let's take the example of the series one last hug (one last hug) published in 2020. This series combines photographs and stories centered on three fathers who continue to search for their missing child, swept away by the tsunami. Because today, 11 years after the disaster, just over 2 people are still missing, for around 500 dead... The series takes place in 16 places particularly affected by the wave: the Okawa municipal elementary school Ishinomaki City, Minamisoma City, and Okuma City. one last hug bears witness to the natural desire of fathers to know what happened to their children, who were never found. This is a spotlight on parents who feel forgotten by the rest of the population and the authorities, too eager to turn the page. These families cannot grieve, but they continue their lonely battle, encouraged by some recent miracles like the body of this 61-year-old woman found in 2021, 10 years after her disappearance. The color photos of one last hug take you by the throat. Like these images of children's clothes covered in mud from the tsunami, laid out flat, resuming the shape of a small body. The series alternates wide-shot photographs of large-scale search efforts with zooms in on objects of missing people found buried in the ground. There are also more personal memorabilia, such as images of candlelight vigils or children's texts and drawings.

These photographs confront us with the difficult and painful questions of loss, mourning, memory. These ghosts of missing children, of whom only a few clothes remain in an image, seem to question us about the very meaning of existence.

In terms of response, it was the Supreme Court of Japan that addressed these families at the end of 2019, confirming the court decision of 2016, then 2018, to grant the equivalent of several million euros to the parents of 23 children who died on March 11, 2011 at Okawa Primary School in Ishinomaki. For the sad story, that day, 74 students perished, swept away by the waters (64 dead and 10 missing exactly), following the inaction of the school management. Indeed, after the first tremors, the management had given the order to the children and the teachers to wait in the playground, where they lost more than 40 precious minutes. They were then swallowed up by the wave as they began to evacuate to higher ground.

The Irie Taikichi Memorial Photo award received in 2021 celebrates the talent of this harsh reality artist. Yuki Iwanami put his camera at the service of documenting and testifying to life after the disaster.

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Electric poles 🎧

Podcast Text - Electric Poles by Tomoaki Makino (牧野智晃)

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「empathize」 🎬

jun fujiyasu presents here his most recent project, 「empathize」.

This project was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Tokyo, Top Museum, as part of the exhibition "Close-up Universe - Contemporary Japanese Photography vol.16" (from November 30, 2019 to January 26, 2020).

Since birth, Jun Fujiyasu has faced recurring questions about his twin status. The first of these questions is: "Should I be aware that I am a twin?" The second question is rather a fear, a fear of the artist that he is confused with his brother.

This project helped the photographer to answer these questions, allowing him to assert his own identity in front of his brother. By meeting other twins and photographing them, Jun gains empathy, and little by little, answers his questions while proposing a photographic project, an effective and disturbing testimony to this question of identity.

To consult the artist's website: click here

to consult the site of the exhibition: click here

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CHESTNUT｜Yasuyuki TAKAGI

Yasuyuki Takagi presents here his most recent project, CHESTNUT.

“When I was young, there were small family photo labs in every neighborhood offering one-hour development. People would drop off their film after their little outing for the day or after their special occasion...
... Now, with the digital age and camera phones, very few of these places still exist. There's a photograph of an abandoned photo lab front that I took many years ago. One can read on the sign of the storefront "photo service station MARRONNIER". I'm sure it used to be a place where neighbors dropped off their film the same way I did. These neighborhood places revealed people's lives in photographs to keep, to remember."

The MARRONNIER book is a collection of photographs found in family archives or taken by Yasuyuki Takagi himself. The found and developed negatives come from the photographer's family. They date from the 50s, early 60s and today. The photographs resulting from this heritage are mixed with the own photographs taken by Yasuyuki Takagi. They are of all types, color and black and white photographs, 35mm, half frame, medium, large format films and expired Polaroids.

The photographs, presented in this project, are accompanied by a text by Marcelline Delbecq that you can hear in the video, reading an extract from her text.

A text by Russet Lederman "Memory and Life's Footprints" prefaces this project. Here is an excerpt:

"As easy as it is to classify as a diary an album containing family photos, it would be too simplistic in the case of Marronnier. The space created by Yasuyuki Takagi is indeed a complex web woven of archival photographs and contemporary, following a fluid timeline that undulates easily between past and present. Its visual purpose, to which are added the poetic fragments written by Marcelline Delbecq, evokes a set of universal experiences and common memories in constant evolution. Like the fragmentary denkbilder (thought-images) of Walter Benjamin, Yasuyuki Takagi and Marcelline Delbecq weave a web of ordinary experiences that resist closed definitions. Together, they invite us to wander the mind, to rethink the idea of family , to confront us with our lives and our deaths, both collective and individual."

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Ken Kitano｜Gathering Light

Ken Kitano presents here his most recent project, Gathering Light. He started this light project after the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Kitano installed a camera on a rooftop from winter solstice to summer solstice to create a long exposure. After six months, he carefully removed the device and retrieved the film. Once developed, the images were adjusted to bring together the information captured by the film; the invisible traces of light are brought to the surface. Unchanged for 4,6 billion years, the revolution of the Earth and the rotation of the cosmos are engraved in the photographs by a myriad of lines. The image appears and shows what the human eye was unable to perceive. For Kitano, it is the quintessence of photography.

Kitano lives in Tokyo, where he was born in 1968. In 1991, he graduated from Nihon University's College of Industrial Technology. He has been a freelance photographer since 2003. He won the "Society of Photography Award" in 2004 and the "Newcomer's Award" from the Photographic Society of Japan in 2007. In 2011, he won the "New Photographer Award" from the 27th Higashikawa Award and the "Special Prize" of the 14th Taro Okamoto Award for Contemporary Art. He has participated in numerous individual and collective exhibitions in Japan and abroad.

This photo series was presented in two exhibitions:

MEM Gallery / November 25 – December 24, 2017

Ibasho Gallery / September 14 - October 26, 2019

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A New River｜Ai IWANE

“Kipuka” is a Hawaiian word meaning the vegetation found in the lava ruins of the volcano, meaning a “place of new life” as a symbol of rebirth. I continued my travels between Hawaii and Fukushima with that word still in my heart.
While researching the song "Fukushima-Ondo," which immigrants from Fukushima brought with them to Hawaii, I met a drummer for the good dance which led me to set up my base in Miharu, Fukushima. Learn their dance Good, their festivals and rich folk culture actually meant learning what these evacuees had lost.
The tilted graves left in hard-to-reach areas in Fukushima reminded me of the graves of early generations of Japanese immigrants in Hawaii. The sugar cane villages in which the Japanese immigrants had built had either disappeared, abandoned in the wild, swallowed up by the lava of the volcano, or washed away by the waves and abandoned by the sea.
The mechanism of the 'Kodak Cirkut' panoramic camera that had been used in a photo studio in Maui in the 1930s was repaired by Haruyuki Ouchi, a craftsman from a watchmaker in Miharu, Fukushima, in 2013, and started over to function. As I had started interviewing the residents of Tomioka and Katsurao who were evacuating to Miharu at that time, I asked them to take me to their old homes and fields, as I wanted to take pictures of the Hamadori area of where the Fukushima Ondo came from.
The cirkut device rotated 360 degrees with its two-meter film, and automatically connected the site they saw daily in a circle without my framing. I continued to photograph hard-to-reach areas, including the Okuma, Futaba, Namie, and Iidate spillways.
In 2014, I brought cirkut back to Hawaii and researched the abandoned graves of the first generations of Japanese immigrants in the six islands where they migrated, namely Kauai, Oahu, Maui, Lanai, Molokai and the island from Hawaii. In 2018, the map of the island of Hawaii was renewed again, with the vast volcanic lava pouring out for the first time in twenty years, engulfing 700 homes.
Landscapes can sometimes disappear in a second. However, though far from home, the seeds of the lives that survived would once again spread and turn the black earth back into a forest.

Ai Iwane was born in Tokyo. She moved to the United States and enrolled in Petrolia High School in 1991. She lived an independent life while in school. In 1996, she became a freelance photographer after working as an assistant in Japan. While working with magazines and the music industry, Iwane has visited and studied unique communities in different countries, including Muntinlupa Prison in the Philippines (2010), Nikulin Circus in Russia (2011) and Sanxia, Taipei. Veterans Home in Taiwan (2012). Since 2006, Iwane has focused on the culture of the Japanese community in Hawaii, and she set up her second base in Miharu, Fukushima in 2013. Since then, she has continuously examined the relevance between Hawaii and Fukushima from the point of view of the immigration and has focused his research on this subject.

This photo series has been presented on many occasions including:

Kana Kawanishi photography

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Kumi Oguro 🎧

Kumi Oguro (尾黒久美): narrative in-between

Listening time ⏰ 5 minutes 39

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MALL｜KEI ONO

VIEWING ROOM

malls

jidôhanbaiki / vending machine 🎧

Vending Machines by Eiji Ohashi (大橋英児)

Listening time ⏰ 5 minutes 27

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Yasuhiro Ogawa 🎧

Monochrome dreamlike journeys of Yasuhiro Ogawa (小川康博)

Listening time ⏰ 4 minutes 49

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“Tekiya” by Yang Seung-Woo 🎧

Listening time ⏰ 5 minutes 01

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Decotora, the art of the tuned truck 🎧

Listening time ⏰ 4 minutes 56

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Japanese kite, Wadako series 🎧

Listening time ⏰ 4 minutes 41

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Yu Hirai, Between dog and wolf🎧

Listening time ⏰ 5 minutes 33

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Shishi odori 🎧

"shishi odori", the summer dance for the soul of deer

TOHOKU Series - Tatsuki Masaru (田附勝)

Listening time ⏰ 7 minutes 16

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Instagram #002 – kawada_kikuji

INSTAGRAM

MANTIS 🎧

"Mantis religiosa", the praying mantis by Yutaka Takahashi

Listening time ⏰ 5 min 32

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Photogram 🎧

Others From the Future by Ken Kitano (北野謙)

Listening time ⏰ 5 min 13

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NEKO 🎧

"Neko", the cat in contemporary Japanese photography

Listening time ⏰ 6 minutes 19

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#001 – tomokosawada_artist

Hideka Tonomura 🎧

Hideka Tonomura 殿村任香

Listening time ⏰ 5 min 32

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Zaido 🎧

"Zaido Ritual" by Yukari Chikura (地蔵ゆかり)

Listening time ⏰ 5 minutes 37

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Dating self-portrait 🎧

"Self-portraits for omiai" by Tomoko Sawada (澤田知子)

Listening time ⏰ 5 minutes 10

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Third Wave Feminism 🎧

Listening time ⏰ 5 minutes 34

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Cherry blossoms 🎧

Cherry Blossoms by Risaku Suzuki (鈴木理策)

Listening time ⏰ 4 minutes 41

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March 11, 2011 🎧

Listening time ⏰

11 minutes

March 11, 2011 – March 11, 2022, Post-Disaster Life Photographs by Yuki Iwanami (岩波友紀)

Electric poles 🎧

Electric poles by Tomoaki Makino (牧野智晃)

Listening time ⏰ 3 min 11

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「empathize」 🎬

Jun Fujiyasu｜「empathize」

CHESTNUT｜Yasuyuki TAKAGI

VIEWING ROOM

Ken Kitano｜Gathering Light

A New River｜Ai IWANE