Paper Work

I like paper. How much? Let’s put it this way, I just bought a book made up almost entirely of photographs of envelopes. It’s not even as if there is a wide variety of envelopes, they generally are all standard Japanese style envelopes. The difference is that each envelope is hand made from a variety of paper. Grandfather’s Envelopes is a sampling of the work of Kouzaki Hiromu’s twilight years. From the age of eighty to ninety-five this retired master builder made envelopes for no other purpose than to pass the time and practice a craft. Both the book and the envelopes within are beautiful in their simplicity.

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).

Memory Palace

Last Monday I had the opportunity to see two editions of Hosoe Eikoh’s Barakei (alternately titled Killed by Roses or Ordeal by Roses). The 1963 original, designed by Sugiura Kohei was under glass so I wasn’t able to see more that one spread and the slipcase, but I did get to see the 1971 version that was re-edited by Mishima Yukio, the writer and model for the series, and designed and illustrated by Yokoo Tadanori. Supposedly the whole project was done as a memorial for Mishima who committed ritual suicide shortly before the book’s release.

The book is phenomenal. First of all, it is big, 15 1/4 x 21 1/4 in. (38.735 x 53.975 cm) and unfolding the 4 panels of the case reveals the black velvet bound volume resting on the torso of Yokoo’s colorful saint-like representation of Mishima impaled by roses which, in turn, overlaps a vaguely Indian deity. The process definitely has religious overtones which were amplified by the fact that, to see the book, I had to visit a library’s special collection and the book was placed on a kind of foam pedastal for viewing.

The whole experience got me thinking about my last post about libraries and how I can recall various libraries and books that I found there, experiences that I consider important. In contrast, I can’t recall being in awe (as I was looking at Barakei) with anything I have seen on a computer screen. Don’t get me wrong, I have seen a lot of interesting things, but there is something about the mediation of the screen, or the elimination of some senses (touch and smell) that keeps the experience from reaching the same level. On some level I’m just predisposed to treating books with more reverence than computers even though at the most basic level they are both carriers of information.

Reverence is also a word I would use to describe Höfer’s images of libraries both in terms of how Höfer treats the spaces and how the builders originally constructed them. For the most part, the buildings shown are not just storehouses for inanimate objects, these are palaces build to house and celebrate knowledge. Thinking of palaces of knowledge, in turn, took me back Jonathan Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, a book that also touches on the idea of storing knowledge though the difference is the spaces Ricci creates are conceptual rather than physical. Ricci was a 16th century Jesuit missionary who used mnemonic strategies to both learn Chinese and spread the teachings of the Catholic church in China. The gist of the system is to create a space in your mind and fill it with objects/images that will help you remember a specific bits of information. The more specific and distinct the space is the easier it will be to remember the desired information. There is an interesting thread here of the movement from the internal to the external in terms of storage of information which also includes the subset of analog to digital, but that’s another discussion entirely. One thing I will say, however, is that I agree with Umberto Eco in his introduction to Höfer’s book, there is something to be said for browsing the stacks of a library.

Now what’s so important about the problem of access to the shelves? One of the misunderstandings that dominate the concept of libraries is that you go into one to look for a book whose title you already know. In reality it often happens that you do go to a library because you want a book whose title you know, but the principle function of the library, at least the function of the library in my house and of that of any friend we may chance to visit, is to discover books whose existence we never suspected, only to discover that they are of extreme importance to us. Of course, it’s true that this discovery can be made by leafing through a catalog, but there’s nothing more revealing and exciting than exploring the shelves that contain a collection of books on a certain subject–something that you wouldn’t be able to discover in a catalogue ordered by authors’ names–and to find another book beside the book you went to find, one that you weren’t looking for but that emerges as being of fundamental importance.

As Eco wrote about libraries he liked to visit in Toronto and at Yale I though back to some of the libraries I have visited and books that I relate to those specific times in my life. The library I frequented most growing up was the old West Tisbury library on Music Street a small two-story building where you had to climb a narrow stairway to get to the children’s section. The books that I can remember borrowing multiple times include Bulfinch’s Mythology and David McCauley’s Pyramid. The Vineyard Haven library was more modern and though I don’t remember any specific books there I do recall a quilt they had hanging on display. The quilt had panels done by different people, each depicting a different local scene. One of the panels was done by my grandmother and in the scene were sailboats with the initials representing me and my brothers. The Vineyard Haven library was also where I first encountered the kind of computerized index that would eventually replace card catalogues. As you may have guessed I loved the card catalogue as well as the sign out cards that used to be in books. You could look in the back of a book and see the last person to take it out and it’s history stamped in ink.

College opened up new libraries that were both broader and more specific. I studied among the stacks at Middlebury taking breaks to browse the aisles at random. Senior year I had my own carrel. The book that best represents those days is Nelson’s Japanese-English Character Dictionary. The RISD library (the old one on Benefit Street, not the new Fleet library which I have yet to visited) was a great example of what a library reading room, a large open room, but not too large, high ceilings, long tables, books all around including a on a mezzanine level reached by short spiral staircases around the room. Off of the main reading room was a section of the stacks that included design and photography books. That’s where, during a random bit of browsing, I first got to know the work of Josef Koudelka in his book Exiles. Most recently the cozy SFAI library perched atop one of the city’s many hills is a place I like to visit and I’m just beginning to acquaint myself with the libraries at Stanford University which is where I saw both volumes of Barakei.

Thinking of all these places, I question whether a completely digital archive can reproduce the library experience. Maybe I’m clinging to the past. I don’t dispute the fact that there are things a digital archive can do that a physical library cannot. On the subject of access alone there is no questioning the value of being able to make information available to a larger audience. But until it can recreate the serendipity of finding the thing you didn’t know you were looking for and the experience of seeing a book like Barakei in person there is still a place for the library.

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”.

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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.

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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.

Rinko Kawauchi

Untitled, 2007, Rinko Kawauchi

I’m looking forward to a presentation Rinko Kawauchi will be giving as part of PhotoAlliance’s lecture series on Friday (10.05.07). Since producing three photo books simultaneously in 2001 (Utatane, Hanabi and Hanako) and winning the prestigious Ihei Kimura Photography Award Kawauchi has been considered one of the great young photographers in Japan.

Links:
Info and work | More Work | Interview

If you are in NYC in the next few weeks, you can see her work in person at Cohan and Leslie, 1o.11.07-11.10.07

Also check out Ferdinand Brueggemann’s excellent post on Kawauchi (and Japanese photography in general here)

Hiroshi Sugimoto at the de Young, Part I

I’m sure there have been plenty of opinions voiced concerning the Hiroshi Sugimoto show that recently closed at the de Young museum. In fact, it was some of those opinions that made me want to take a closer look at the exhibition as a whole, rather than making this post just about what I liked or didn’t like about it. I have to say though that, on the whole, I found it quite impressive.

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The image that opens the show is The Music Lesson, a photograph of Madame Tussauds’ recreation of Vermeer’s A Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman (The Music Lesson). It is an interesting choice for an opening image because it is the only color image in the show. Is it meant to show Sugimoto’s presence (his tripod is visible in the mirror)?

The Music Lesson, Hiroshi Sugimoto

Kerry Brougher in an essay from the catalog for the Hirshhorn show (which shared a lot of the same work) suggests another reason, that Sugimoto is suggesting with this image that the entire exhibition space is “an extension of the camera obscura,” a dark space onto which images of the outside world are projected. The metaphor of the camera is one of the consistent themes of Sugimoto’s work along with time and the internal vision of the artist.

Earliest Human Relatives 1994, Hiroshi Sugimoto

The first room of the exhibit holds work from Sugimoto’s Diorama series. Here the monocular vision of the camera compresses the scene into a more realistic image. Included were Earliest Human Relatives, 1994 and Neanderthal, 1994 in which Sugimoto shows us what it might have been like to photograph pre-history.

The theme of photography in pre-photographic times continues in the next room with Sugimoto’s portraits of Henry VIII and his wives. Again he is working with wax figures which only really becomes evident when you examine the joints between the fingers and other such minute details. But, for all its polish, Sugimoto’s work isn’t just about cool conceptualism. In a wry commentary on the issue of royal succession, he places a lone portrait of Hirohito, the deceased emperor of Japan, on the wall opposite Henry and his many wives. The issue being that until last year there was no male heir to the throne causing many to speculate whether the laws would have to be changed to allow for the current emperor’s daughter to take the throne.

Is there a way to show this idea of pre-history by photographing something other than dioramas and wax figures?

Baltic Sea, Rügen, 1996, Hiroshi Sugimoto

As you approach the darkened room you can see one glowing seascape, no frame, illuminated by a square of light just the size of the photograph. The lighting is a reminder that the whole exhibition makes reference to different aspects of the camera. Once in the room you see nine more on the slightly concave wall that stretches down the long hall. The overall feeling is one of a point of land stretching out into a bay. The curved wall was apparently an artifact of the Hirshhorn exhibit where Sugimoto was faced with curved gallery walls and ended up liking the effect. Sugimoto began photographing this series as another way to show a kind of pre-history, but he also had a very specific point in mind. In a podcast from the Hirshhorn show (here) he says it is the point where people gained consciousness and language and began naming things. He would choose which sea to photograph based on whether or not he found the name interesting. My immediate thought was, which name? Their English name? Japanese name? Which made me think, are the projects conceptualized in Japanese? Are there Japanese titles to the work that differ in some way from the English titles, like some movie titles?

Sea of Buddha, 1995, Hiroshi Sugimoto

The first part of the show also included Pine Trees, Sugimoto’s riff on traditional Japanese screen painting, and Sea of Buddha, an image of the 1001 statues at Sanjusangendo (a temple in Kyoto). Pine Trees is the inverse of his Seascapes series. Rather than finding something unchanging like the sea, Sugimoto had to track down something that is vanishing. He searched all over Japan for these prototypical Japanese pines and found them only on the grounds of the Imperial Palace, a place largely untouched by the development of the rest of Japan. Sea of Buddha is a result of Sugimoto’s desire to show the statues as they were meant to be seen during the Heian Period (794-1185). Or at least how he imagined they were meant to be seen. Another example of the representation on the artist’s inner vision. Sugimoto isn’t showing us the world in a different way, he is showing us his internal vision and using the world as his materials.

<to be continued>