Book of the Week #3: Ikko Narahara, The Sky in My Hands

Ikko Narahara is a contemporary of Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe and Kikuji Kawada (with he who formed the short-lived but influential VIVO agency in Tokyo in 1960). He is probably the least well-known of the four in the West, although his book Europe: Where Time Has Stopped has become highly collectible. This is an exhibition catalogue from his recent retrospective at the Shimane Art Museum. The catalogue is as 'traditional' as they come, covering his entire career in great detail, with no less than 48 pages (!) of bio (including several pages of personal photos from throughout his life) and a pretty extensive (complete?) bibliography. Although the book isn't a particularly exciting object in itself, it is a wonderfully detailed resource and a great reminder of how incredibly diverse that work was.

Ikko Narahara, The Sky in My Hands (Soft cover, 308 pages, B&W and colour plates, Japanese text only).

Update: Book of the week is moving to eyecurious books etc. Look out for new picks there!

Some things I bought this year

I've seen quite a few end of year lists popping up over the last week. There are the best books of 2009 lists, the more eclectic lists of "stuff I liked this year", the lists of books acquired in 2009 and many more. I think you need to be a breakfast-lunch-and-dinner kind of consumer of photo-books to post a best books of 2009 list and having just discovered a great many fantastic-looking ones through the future of photo-books discussion, I am not going to stick my neck out on that one.  Instead in order to jump onto the list-mania bandwagon, I am going to go with a list of a few of the photo items that I bought in 2009 (these weren't necessarily made in 2009). Looking back over the year, I think this is an interesting way of seeing trends in the things that you gravitate to and also seeing how much money you wasted on things that you spend no time with at all.

Some photographic things that I bought in 2009

(Note: I am in a fortunate position where a number of books that come into my possession I don't actually have to pay for, so there are a number of terrific books that I discovered this year that won't make it on to this list)

Anders Petersen & J.H. Engström, From Back Home (Bokförlaget Max Ström, 2009)

This won the Author Book Award at Arles 2009. I posted a review a while back.

Akihide Tamura, Afternoon (M Light label No.1, 2009)

Although I just got this and have already posted about it, I get the feeling this is one that I will keep coming back to.

Ryuji Miyamoto, Cardboard Houses (signed, Bearlin, 2003)

Beierle + Keijser's "Becher box": Jogurtbecher

I have already spent the best part of an evening with E deciding what images we are going to use in our Jogurtbecher grid. And I actually hate yoghurt.

Michio Yamauchi, Stadt (Sokyu-sha, 1992)

Naoya Hatakeyama, A Bird (Taka Ishii, 2006)

OK I cheated, I didn't actually buy this, but this is probably the book that I have gone back to most frequently this year so it had to be included. Check out Jeff Ladd's review here to get an idea why.

Ikko Narahara, Pocket Tokyo (Creo, 1997)

Eikoh Hosoe, A Butterfly Dream (signed, Seigensha, 2006)

The extragavance of the year. This book was produced as a companion to the first edition of Kamaitachi. Hosoe presented it to Kazuo Ohno for his 100th birthday, shortly before his death. (As Michael rightly pointed out, Ohno is still around!)

Japan: A Self-Portrait opening in Tokyo

I have been a bit quiet over the past few days as I have been busy working on two exhibition projects. Last week I went to Sweden to meet with a museum who will be holding the exhibition, Tokyo Stories, which I curated last year and was shown during Paris Photo 2008 at Artcurial. The details still need to be confirmed, but I'll be posting on this again soon I'm sure.

The exhibition that has been keeping me really busy these past few weeks (going on years) is Japan: A Self-Portrait, based on my first major project in the field of Japanese photography, the book published by Flammarion in 2004. The exhibition brings together work by the leading photographers of the postwar years, a time of radical and disruptive change for Japan and to my mind one of the richest photographic periods in the country's history. The photographers included in the show are: Ken Domon, Hiroshi Hamaya, Tadahiko Hayashi, Eikoh Hosoe, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Kikuji Kawada, Ihee Kimura, Shigeichi Nagano, Ikko Narahara, Takeyoshi Tanuma and Shomei Tomatsu. You can find out more on the show on the Studio Equis website or on the excellent Tokyo Art Beat. The exhibition opens at the Setagaya Art Museum from 2 May to 21 June and will then travel to other venues in Japan. I hope that some of you will get a chance to see it.

Update: I just did an interview with the blog on Japanese photography, Japan Exposures.