Book Browsing: Ueda Yoshihiko

On the final day of a trip to New York City last week I stopped in at Dashwood Books to peruse their excellent selection of photo books from Japan. I picked up a copy of hi mi tsu ki chi by Nishimiya Daisaku which I first heard about here on Little Brown Mushrooms. I also saw a couple of interesting volumes from University of Tokyo Press. What caught my attention about these two books was the design of the covers, full bleed images of items floating on black backgrounds with areas cut out creating a lower level for type. I later found that art direction for these books was provided by Hara Kenya, a well know designer and design philosopher (White, Designing Design) with photography by Ueda Yoshihiko. The subject of each book is museum specimens, one of birds from the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology and one of stone implements from the University of Tokyo Museum.

BIOSOPHIA of BIRDS, the larger of the two volumes 168 A4 (28 x 20.4 cm) pages, contains specimens of birds in various stages of unpacking. Some of the birds are on stands as if ready to be displayed, but most look like they have just been taken from storage, some bound and tagged, some still in their boxes. All are photographed on the same black background.

BIOSOPHIA of BIRDS

spreads from BIOSOPHIA of BIRDS

ONE HUNDRED STONEWARES, closer to square in format (24.2 x 23.4 cm) and a bit thicker at 186 pages, is a collection of stone tools photographed in a similar manner.

ONE HUNDRED STONEWARES

spreads from ONE HUNDRED STONEWARES

Both books were published in 2008 and in trying to find out more about them I came across what seems to be the first in the series, CHAMBER of CURIOSITIES, published two years earlier. Sadly I haven’t seen this one in person because it looks the most interesting. Rather than a typology of a single subject (birds or stone tools) it’s a collection of oddities from bones to butterflies.

CHAMBER of CURIOSITIES

Ueda Yoshihiko from CHAMBER of CURIOSITIES

The books I saw at Dashwood are beautifully produced and priced to match, but if you’re fond of museum collections or typologies they’re worth taking a look at given the chance. Also, to see more images from Ueda Yoshihiko’s other work, go here and here (text in Japanese).

Still Life with Dead Animal

On a recent trip to NYC I went to the Met to see the show of Dutch paintings from “The Age of Rembrandt”. First of all, it’s been a long time since I’ve been to the Met and I’d forgotten how huge the place is. It also now includes a new gallery for modern (since 1960) photography, but I was really there to see the paintings.

Falconer’s Bag, 1695, Jan Weenix from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Last spring I saw Vermeer’s Kitchen Maid at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and it knocked me out. I know, I know, Vermeer is one of those artists whose work is so well known that it’s easy to feel blasé about the whole thing, but seeing that particular painting in person (even more so than the Girl with a Pearl Earring at the Mauritshuis in the Hague) was a memorable experience. So I was looking forward to seeing the five Vermeers that the Met has as well as any still life that might be there. On the whole the show was quite good, though I was disappointed that there were only a limited number of still lifes among the many portraits and landscapes and the Vermeers weren’t quite up to the Kitchen Maid. Maybe my expectations were too high. Anyway, that sets the context for the work of another artist I saw later that day.

While thumbing through a copy of Photograph at a gallery in Chelsea I came across a photograph that reminded me of the Dutch still lifes, but instead of the usual rabbit or game bird this image contained a wallaby. Needless to say I was intrigued, so I made a point of seeing the images in person.

Wallaby with Tarpaulin, 2006, Marian Drew

The artist’s name is Marian Drew and she finds these subjects by the side of the road in her native Australia. The gallery notes say that, opposed to the bounty portrayed in traditional still lifes, her images are a commentary on human wastefulness and disregard for wild animals. I don’t know that I get the wasteful aspect of it because the images themselves are generally quite minimal, seldom is the table overflowing. I do however see roadkill a comment on the intersection of the wild and the developed, the often disastrous consequences of that intersection, habitat loss, etc. Despite the somewhat gruesome subject matter there are some wonderful images.

Wombat with Watermelon, 2005, Marian Drew

That said, seeing the images in person there was something I hadn’t noticed in the smaller image in the gallery guide. In many of the images there was a halo around the objects on the table. A kind of spotlight effect that I found distracting. I feel her best images are the ones where this effect isn’t as strongly evident. Later I learned from the gallerist that the effect was due to the fact that Drew photographs these images in complete darkness and illuminates the objects with a “torch”. She doesn’t know herself exactly how the lighting is going to turn out until she sees the image. Personally, I would rather have the images lit with a more natural light. I don’t know that her method adds anything to her intended meaning. It would be interesting to know the reasoning behind shooting the images in this way.

The intersection of man and animal (and being in NYC) got me thinking about Alessandra Sanguinetti’s from On the Sixth Day. I saw some of those images at the ICP show Ecotopia last year and finally got around to buying her book at Dashwood Books (an excellent shop with a very strong section of Japanese photography) the same day I went to see the Drew show. One of the images from the series is also a still life, though much more naturalistic than either Drew’s work or the Dutch paintings.

Still Life from On the Sixth Day, Alessandra Sanguinetti

Beyond the visual difference there is also a considerable difference in the image’s meaning. Rather than the wastefulness and disregard for the natural world portrayed in Drew’s images Sanguinetti was photographing subsistence farmers in Argentina who are intimately linked with their surroundings.

For anyone who hasn’t seen On the Sixth Day, I highly recommend it. It is a visual tour de force and will definitely make you think about the origin of the piece of meat on your plate.