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).

War is Surreal

The more that war or combat is portrayed in various media the less I feel like I will ever really be able to understand what the experience is like. If that is true, is it possible to truly prepare our service men and women for what they will face? They may be prepared with the best physical and technical training, but how can we prepare them psychologically for something that can’t really be simulated? And, if we can’t prepare them psychologically, how will we deal with the inevitable post traumatic stress some may encounter on their return home. These are all questions that came up as I view two well-paired bodies of work currently hanging at SFCamerawork dealing with different aspects of the prosecution of war.

Mother with Babies, Fort Polk, Louisiana from Theater of War
© Christopher Sims

The first, Theater of War by 2010 Baum Award Winner Christopher Sims, is a combination of portraiture and environmental images that shows us an aspect of soldiers preparation before deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan. Sims shows us a glimpse of the fake villages the military creates and populates with “actors” to provide a stage upon which various scenarios are acted out. Despite the fact that, as Sims’ artist statement sates, “The designers and inhabitants of these worlds take great pride in the scope and fidelity of their wars-in-miniature,” the absurdity of a woman sitting in a folding chair spinning wool next to a RPG only makes me think there is no way to properly prepare soldiers for what they will encounter. It also highlights the near impossible task regular armed forces face when they’re up against irregular forces, especially in a populated area. Even if you take the military aspect out of it the images are representation of a simulation. They are one person’s edited view of an interpretation of a foreign place and people which calls into question, more so than usual, the veracity of photography.

Captain Elizabeth A. Condon, New York Army National Guard, veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, with daughter, Kate, and mother, Elizabeth, Troy, NY, June 2008 from Soldiers’ Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan
© Jennifer Karady

In contrast to the careful preparation prior to deployment, the second body of work shows us the aftermath of deployment, the psychological damage, and the sometimes faulty support system that soldiers face on their return to the US. Jennifer Karady‘s Soldiers’ Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan show soldiers reenacting  traumatic situations from their deployment, but in their home setting, often with friends or family members in the scene as well. Though perhaps not as intricately staged as Gregory Crewdson’s work, I feel that Karady’s work is more immediate. By that I mean that though both artists construct staged narratives replete with psychological drama, I think of Crewdson’s work as being more removed and clinical, lacking the emotional weight of Karady’s work. A lot of that may have to do with being able to read the soldiers’ recounted descriptions of what they were feeling or the situations they were reenacting. Yet even before I read the accounts, I looked at the images and wanted to learn more about the people pictured. Not something I often feel with Crewdson’s work.

from Twilight
© Gregory Crewdson

All in all, a really smart paring of two thought provoking bodies of work. Both are up through the first week in August, so if you’re in San Francisco this summer, check out the show.

Travelogue(s)

Telling a story is both easier and more difficult than it has ever been before. Easier because there are any number of ways to get your story out in front of a large audience. More difficult because the number of stories out there is so great that it’s easy for yours to get lost. So whether you’re telling a tale of illegally crossing the border into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan or taking a trip to Las Vegas to celebrate your 40th birthday it has to be well told.

In 1986 the photographer Didier Lefèvre went into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan for the first time while covering a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) mission. Of the four thousand frames he exposed only six images were initially published. Thirteen years later his friend Emmanuel Guibert suggested they collaborate on publishing the story of Lefèvre’s journey and, with the help of Frédéric Lemercier, Le Photographe was published in France in three volumes between 2003 and 2006. In 2009 the English version, The Photographer, was published in one large volume by First Second.

The Photographer, p. 74

Being based on actual events I don’t know if you would call it a graphic novel, but the illustration drives the bulk of the narrative with Lefèvre’s photographs working as accents. It’s similar to, though not quite as powerful as, the film Waltz with Bashir and its shift from animation to photographic images. In the film’s case, the change takes place at the end to maximize impact while in The Photographer Lefèvre’s images are sprinkled throughout allowing the viewer places to rest and contemplate. I also enjoyed how, in many places, we’re given the equivalent of a contact sheet where we can see a sequence of shots and the one that has been selected (or discarded). Seeing the contact sheets sometimes gives you a better idea of what the photographer is looking for. Another example that comes to mind is the Diane Arbus shot of the boy with the toy hand grenade in Central Park. Looking at the contact sheet the boy looks fairly normal in most of the shots, but the in the image she chose the boy looks mentally unbalanced. I don’t pretend to know why Arbus chose that particular shot, but, for me, seeing the shots she didn’t choose make that image all the more interesting.

Diane Arbus contact sheet

To be perfectly honest, I doubt I’d like The Photographer as much if it were just Lefèvre’s photographs. There is something about the combination of photos and illustration, and even the size and heft of the book (11.7 by 9.4 in., an inch thick, and over 2 lbs.), that makes it appealing. Though the line work is heavier and looser, the drawing style strikes me as Tintinesque. There’s a similar use of color and sense of adventure. Add to this Afghanistan being in the news a lot lately and I found myself devouring it in large chunks.

Finally, the use of the black and white reportage reminded me of something from Salman Rushdie’s novel Fury. He (or his character) found it curious that black and white photography, “the most unreal of processes,” now stood for “realism, integrity and art”. That may have been true when Rushdie originally wrote those words, or when Lefèvre shot the photos, but I wonder if today the ubiquity of color photography hasn’t left black and white photography seeming dated or, at the very least, self-consciously arty.

On a lighter note, Alec Soth’s slideshow of a trip to Las Vegas for his 40th birthday is another example of the flexibility of story telling media. People are more willing to experiment with ways of telling a story. In this case Soth, normally a still photographer, is experimenting with an A/V presentation.

One of the great things about Soth’s slideshow (other than the actual images) is how self-contained and almost circular the narrative is. It begins with him wanting to buy a limited edition of Bukowski poetry. He can’t afford the book, so being in Vegas, he tries gambling to raise the money. You can probably guess how that turns out. But don’t despair, he turns the experience into a piece of art that references both Vegas and a bit of poetry from the unattainable volume which he then sells for the price of said volume. Genius.

More Dollar Signs

I went to last Saturday’s SFCamerawork auction expecting to see a lot of photos being sold below the low estimate which is pretty much what happened. Of the 151 lots, 114 sold for below the low estimate, 33 sold within the range in the catalog, and only 4 exceeded the high estimate. As I said, this is what I expected given the state of the economy. What I didn’t expect was, when I went back and looked at my notes from the last auction I attended, that those numbers were roughly the same distribution as in 2006.

Though there were more lots in 2006, 180  to Saturday’s 151,  the percentage of pieces that sold for below the low estimate was actually greater 78% to 75%. There were more sold above the high estimate in 2006, 7% to 3%, but there were also fewer sold within the estimate range, 15% to 22%. It makes me wonder how they come up with their estimates. Does Camerawork come up with the estimates or are they provided by the person who donates the work? In Camerawork’s case it’s probably in their best interest to have the estimate high so that the buyer will feel more inclined to bid if they think they are getting a piece for within or below an estimate. With the donors, especially if it is a gallery representing the artist or the artist themselves, then it gets a bit trickier. You want the work to go for as much as possible, but you don’t want it to go for under the estimate and possibly effect future prices. Though, to be honest, I’m not sure that this auction has that much influence on prices.

The four pieces that sold for above the catalog’s high estimate were Richard Gilles’ Clement Ave. & Oak Street, Ann Hamilton’s book weight (human carriage), Dinh Q. Le’s Untitled, and Hank Willis Thomas’ Who Can Say No To A Beautiful Brunette?. The Dinh Q. Le actually went for $12,000 on an estimate of $5000/$8000 establishing a new record (according to the auctioneer) for a piece sold at a Camerawork auction.

Dinh Q. Le, Untitled, 2004

I’m missing data from 2007 and 2008, but Le’s work seems to be on the rise in terms of popularity. In 2003 a piece estimated at $850/$1000 sold for $1100. In 2004, on the same estimate a piece sold for $2600. In 2005, for a work the same size as 2004, the estimate moved up to $4500/$5500 and the work sold for $3200. Though it didn’t meet the estimate there was still an increase in the price reached compared to the previous year. The work on offer this year was the same size as both 2004 and 2005 and again the estimate had moved up and was exceeded. The bidding can down to two particular bidders. The winning bidder also bought lots from John Collier, Flor Garduno, Todd Hido, Pirkle Jones, Marion Post Walcott and Edward Weston. I don’t know if the winning buyer was a dealer or collector, but the underbidder was a dealer, who could have been bidding for a client, his gallery, or himself.

In general the lots are quite affordable. Whether it was a boom year like 2005 or a bust year like this year a majority of the lots went for $500 or less (roughly 60% in 2006 and just over 50% in 2009). So, if you are looking for affordable art or just want to watch the show, the SFCamerawork auction is a good place to start.

I also mentioned Sarah Thornton’s book, Seven Days in the Art World in my last post and wanted to follow up with a mention of the special report on the art market that she co-wrote with Fiammetta Rocco in the Nov. 28th–Dec 4th of the Economist. The report considers the art market in light of the current economic conditions and addresses issues like primary vs. secondary markets, Andy Warhol as a “bellwether”, and the flow of Chinese art back to China. It’s worth checking out as either an addition to the book that deals with more current events or as an introduction to the topic.

Free-range

As with many residents of the United States last week my thoughts turned to food. The most obvious reason being Thanksgiving, but there was also the audio version of Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma on the long drive to and from our meal in Southern California. In hindsight it may not have been the best choice as it had me calculating the corn content of the Thanksgiving dinner between bites. For those who haven’t read or listened to the book, Pollan traces four meals from their origin to his table and in the first section (the one we listened to on the drive) the path he takes is through the industrial food system which centers around corn, a path that ends at the pinnacle (or nadir depending on your point of view) of the industrial food system, the fast food meal.

Tessa Bunney from Hand to Mouth

It’s seems like more than a coincidence that the latest issue of Daylight Magazine, which I picked up before the trip, also focuses on agriculture. In it Peter Menzel’s images of feed lots and turkeys in California are compelling and related perfectly to the season, the location (driving through huge monocultures), and themes in Pollan’s book, but it was Tessa Bunney‘s work in the Romanian Carpathian mountains that I keep coming back to. I think they play into the same pastoral ideal that Pollan discusses that, even though I grew up on a small farm, I can’t help being seduced by. The idea of an idyllic life of simplicity lived in harmony with nature that conveniently leaves out all the work that’s involved and the nearly impossible situations the small farmer faces in the modern consumer culture.

Tessa Bunney from Hand to Mouth

Tessa Bunney from Hand to Mouth

Books, Libraries, and Photography

The following post was started quite some time ago, but sat waiting to be finished as life intervened and my focus shifted from talking about and making art to paying my rent. Now that I’ve regained a semblance of normalcy, it’s time to return to my much neglected blog.

A while back a writer friend of mine suggested I should read Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman, a book about the experiences in reading and, by extension books. It had come up as part of a discussion of our mutual, if slightly differing, love of books. To use Fadiman’s terms my friend’s love of books tends towards the carnal, consuming both their soul (the words and ideas) and their body (annotating pages, breaking spines) while mine tends toward a courtly love where, in addition to appreciating the words, the book as an object is something to be venerated. As with most things, the middle ground is more populous than either extreme and though I may choose to copy passages of interest into a notebook rather than marking the original text I’m sure Ms. Fadiman would be pleased to know that a copy of her book lies spine up, pages splayed on my desk, paused in the reading, rather than stopped.

Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Lengua Madrid, Candida Höfer

The point I am gradually coming to is that there is something about the book as an object that appeals to me. So much so that I have tried to capture, with limited success, this fascination on film (see group 04 in the photography section of the main website). Many of the photos were shot at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, a place created in defense of the activity of browsing. For those interested, an article on the library appeared in the May 2007 issue of Harper’s and was accompanied by images by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin. If you appreciate a good library, you should also check out the series of library photographs by Candida Höfer (though her images tend to be more about the spaces than the books).

Thought Book, 2001, Abelardo Morell

When considering books as a subject for photography many people reference Abelardo Morell. I have to admit I also associated Morell with his Book of Books (which I finally picked up at Green Apple Books recently) and his camera obscura work. I also thought of him as working exclusively in black and white. In January, however, I saw him speak and was surprised to see a range of work from early street photography to his most recent experiments with making camera-less images and even shooting in color.

Upshot, 2003, Thomas M. Allen

One of the reasons people probably photograph books is that they are so convenient, they’re everywhere. It was probably a rainy day and Thomas M. Allen first started cutting up and photographing the pulp novels that ended up in his book Uncovered. There is also something romantic about books, the accumulation of knowledge they symbolizes or the possible worlds and stories they hold between their covers. Their influence reaches beyond their pages, shaping the way people see the world. Interacting with books from an early age can leave a lasting impression as I imagine it did with Marc Joseph. His series New and Used, a series of used book and record shops, shows a love for these objects, the search for and collection of them, and the life they lead when their original owners have given them up.

Something caused all these artists to consider either the book itself or the life of books. So, though many have proclaimed the death of print, books still seem to hold some cultural resonance. Will there ever be a time when people will look at these varied portrayals and not recognize books? It seems more likely that images of books will become quaint, like pictures of rotary phones, but I doubt they will ever be unreadable.

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.

New Europeans

Men in tank tops or shirtless, close ups of hands, cigarettes, a girl who was sold into sex slavery at fourteen, Coca-Cola signs, kids playing harmonicas, the various languages and writing of the subjects, shop workers, a child on a straw mat on the dirt covered with flies. These are some of the things that make up New Europeans at Stephen Wirtz gallery, an ongoing project by Magnum photographer Jim Goldberg. The work is a window into the lives of immigrants and refugees in Greece and the Ukraine, but the issues involved are not unique to these two places, war, displacement, migration, racism, human traffic, torture, etc.

The multiplicity of stories and subjects is mirrored in their portrayal. There are images in both color and black and white, some tack sharp and others blurred. There are Polaroids, contact prints, large gallery prints, even a book dummy taped to a table. Some images are matted, some have mat between the image and frame, some images bleed to the frame, almost all the images are framed in black, but there is at least one case where there is an image pinned to the wall unframed.

Untitled, 2007, from New Europeans, Jim Goldberg

For me, the most powerful images in the show are a series of Polaroids on which Goldberg has had the subject write. Some write only their name, others write part of their story. In some cases the stories are translated and written on the back of another Polaroid that is placed in the frame next to the portrait. The portraits range from a straight on confident gaze to the mere suggestion of a face floating in blackness, but they are unified by the application of the touch of pen to image and the subjects willingness to share their stories. This inclusion of the subject’s voice is something Goldberg has been doing since his earliest work, Rich and Poor and his ability to get people to open up about their lives is astounding.

My first real exposure to Jim Goldberg’s work (that I can recall) was this past summer when he came to talk to a class I was taking. As part of his presentation he showed various stages of his book, Raised by Wolves. He had a couple of Xerox dummies as well as a couple of dummies made from taped together 4×6 machine prints of the potential page layouts. I thought they were fabulous, both as objects and as a way of working. The form seemed to fit really well with the subject matter. Unfortunately, some of the tactile immediacy was lost in the actual printed version of the book. I understand that it was a necessary step to reach a larger audience, but I can’t help feeling that the final piece was too polished. I feel the same way about parts of the New Europeans show.

For example, there is a group of dozens of small photos taped together that in itself is great, but then the whole thing is put behind glass in a huge frame that must be ten to twelve feet wide. Again, I think I understand why it is done, but it distracted me from the images. There are also some large gallery prints that gave me pause. There is a feeling of intimacy in viewing the smaller images and reading the stories of the subjects. Even the smaller images without text have a personal quality to them. I feel like I’m looking through someone’s shoe box full of photographs. It is this feeling of intimacy that I associate with Goldberg’s work, the need to get up close and examine it, that I don’t get from the larger gallery images. As compelling as those images may be, they feel a bit out of place.

There are, however, places where the method of display added to the viewing experience. On one wall there is a grid of images, five rows of seventeen. The images are black-framed black and white contact prints with extra black around the images so the predominant feeling is a black grid on a white wall. The images themselves are mostly portraits and there are two white gaps in the grid where there are no images. This absence adds a poignancy that would not be there if the grid were complete.

On the whole a very compelling show. It will be interesting to see where it goes and what form it will take when it is shown in Paris in the spring of 2009.

Hiroshi Sugimoto at the de Young, Part II

<this is a continuation of a previous post>

Mathematical Form: Surface 0002, 2004, Hiroshi Sugimoto

From photography’s earliest days there has been a lot of overlap between science and art, especially when images are removed from their original context. Images originally taken for scientific purposes can be aesthetically pleasing and images taken for artistic reasons can help describe the world in which we live. Between these two poles of photography, the descriptive and the expressive, there are myriad permutations. In Conceptual Forms Sugimoto is making images for artistic purposes, but the subjects are models of mathematical functions that originally served another purpose. In the Hirshhorn catalog he writes…

While not wholly subscribing to the post-Renaissance rational scientific view of the natural world, I do appreciate those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century optical devices and experimental implementations that gave visible form to unseen hypotheses … The mathematical models are sculptural renderings of trigonometric functions; the mechanical models were teaching aids for showing the dynamics of Industrial Revolution-age machinery. Art resides even in things with no artistic intentions.

At the de Young eight Conceptual Forms were shown on the front and back of four panels in a hall where the entire end wall was a mirror. Why the mirror? I liked the effect, but other than optically doubling the panels and length of the hall what was its purpose? Was it another reference to the camera? I don’t know. At the opposite end was Sugimoto’s sculpture Dini’s Surface, a repeating metallic spiral about eight feet tall.

Up until this point in the show the framing of the photos had been subdued, black frames for Dioramas and natural frames for Portraits, but with Conceptual Forms the frames were a silvery metal. Most likely a nod to the machined quality of the forms. There were a number of people who commented to me that they thought that the show felt over produced and that the framing of the images was one of the things that bothered them. The first time I walked through the show I took no notice of the framing (except when there was no frame) and even on later viewings it didn’t bother me.

One thing that did bother me a little was how the next (and last) room was set up. You entered the room looking at a wall with three images from Theaters, to the left was a little alcove with one image form Mechanical Forms and La Boite en Bois (The Wooden Box), and to the right a room with five images from Architecture. After the Architecture images there were four more Theater images as you exited the exhibition. To me, it seemed a bit disjointed, like they ran out of room.

That said, the Theaters series (along with Seascapes) are my favorite Sugimoto images both conceptually and visually. I find the idea of compressing an entire movie into a single frame and the resulting white screen blankness very compelling. It could be that, as with Seascapes, I feel a more personal connection with the subject matter, but I also like the formal qualities of the images. I also wonder if these two bodies of work are the ones Sugimoto himself feels closest. The seed for each was planted early in his life. For Theaters it was sitting in a dark theater as a high school student trying to capture an image of Audrey Hepburn with his Minolta SR7 and Seascapes from a train journey as a child.

My first view of the ocean came as an awakening. Of course I must have seen the ocean before, but this is my earliest and most vivid recollection of it. I spied it from a Tokaido Line train, the seascape passing from left to right. It must have been autumn, because the sky had such vast, eye-opening clarity. We were riding high on a cliff, and the sea flickered far below like frames of a motion picture, only to disappear suddenly behind the rocks. The horizon line where the azure sea met the brilliant sky was razor sharp, like a samurai sword’s blade. Captivated by this startling yet oddly familiar scene, I felt I was gazing on a primordial landscape. Perhaps it is strange that a child should have prelife memories, much less words to express them. The experience left an indelible mark on me.*

Union City Drive-in, Union City, 1993 Hiroshi Sugimoto

Thomas Kellein, in his essay in the book Hiroshi Sugimoto, Time Exposed has the following to say about Theaters:

The white rectangle in the Theaters obliterates the stream of images and captures in a blaze of light the whole time factor of moviegoing. Only thus, as the trace of an illumination, does the cinematic experience have duration for Sugimoto. Light assumes the place of a story, whatever its title, and of the arbitrary, constantly shifting positions of the camera. Not only are individual films transitory; the film medium itself, photography’s great rival, seems to have lost its capacity to survive.

Film has “lost its capacity to survive?” That seems a bit much, doesn’t it? I don’t know if he is writing from any special knowledge he has from Sugimoto, but that’s not what I get from these images. For me, the white square holds all the potential of a blank piece of paper. It can hold anything, be anything. I love that by capturing one movie, Sugimoto is talking about all movies. If anything has “lost its capacity to survive” it is the great old movie palaces and drive-ins that Sugimoto has photographed. In the age of the megaplex and Netflix I wonder how many of these theaters are still functioning as theaters? It’s not the medium of film that is changing, but how we experience it.

Finally, two thoughts. First it’s interesting that there weren’t any examples of Sugimoto’s Colors of Shadow, work from 2004 and 2005 that was included in the Hirshhorn show. Was it a space issue? And second, we’re not done with Sugimoto yet. Beginning on October 12th the Asian Art Museum will be showing Sugimoto’s History of History as well as Stylized Sculpture: Contemporary Japanese Fashion from the Kyoto Costume Institute.

* Hiroshi Sugimoto, Kerry Brougher and David Elliott

Rinko Kawauchi, Part II

I have to say that the Rinko Kawauchi talk last night was a bit of a let down. I don’t know what I was expecting, but she talked mostly about how she got into photography (most of which is covered in the interview link I posted yesterday) and the photography that she showed was all from the Foil website.

On the up side she did show some video work. The work consisted of two five minute sections of a larger twenty minute piece that she will be showing in New York. Ultimately she is planning to do an hour long piece. The video consists of short snippets, anywhere from two to ten or fifteen seconds, of a lot of the stuff you would expect her to be interested in, light sparkling on water, carp, fireworks, a butterfly flapping its wings, etc. Some of the clips have ambient sound, some do not. The reason she gave for her experiments in video is that when she photographs things she feels a lot of “stress” and wanted to be able to capture the motion of things as well.

A few other random points of interest;

To use Alec Soth’s differentiation between book photographers and wall photographers, she is definitely a book photographer. This is probably obvious to anyone who has looked at one of her books and marveled at their exquisite pairings and lyrical sequencing, but it was nice to hear her say (albeit through a translator) that she felt that books were “the most complete form of my photography”.

***

Kawauchi credits three people for her development as an artist; Katsumi Asaba, an art directior who encouraged her early in her career as a photographer and gave her some commercial assignments, the publisher Masakazu Takei (who was at the lecture and seems to be quite a character, see here), and Martin Parr, who invited her to show at Photo Arles in 2004 and introduced her work to a wider audience.

***

I also thought the way she talked about her first book, Utatane, was interesting. Usually the title is translated as “catnap”, but Kawauchi thought of it more as the place between waking and sleep, or between life and death and that she was “standing in the midst of this divide.” Utatane is also the work that most closely relates to her new video work in that the relation from image to image is less apparent than in her other work. In all her work, images are captured without thinking (無心) and she likes to complete projects while they still have life/freshness (いきがいい). Deciding what she is going to shoot beforehand makes it uninteresting.

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After the lecture I had the opportunity to ask her if she felt any kinship to the other young women photographers she’s often lumped together with (specifically Yurie Nagashima, Miwa Nanigawa and Hiromix who won the Ihei Kimura Award the year before she did). Her response was that she didn’t because she felt she came to be known slightly later than they did.