Review: Voyages @ MCJP

I was contacted a few months ago by the Japan Foundation in Paris to write a short text for their newsletter based on an upcoming exhibition of contemporary Japanese photography. The exhibition, put together by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, has just opened and although I'm not entirely convinced about the theme, voyages, there is some interesting and fresh material here, most of which has probably never been shown in Europe before.

Naoki Ishikawa and Koji Onaka were the only two photographers in the exhibition whose work I already knew. Ishikawa is pretty popular in Japan and his books Polar, New Dimension and Mount Fuji seemed to have pride of place in most bookstores on my last few trips to Tokyo. I had the chance to speak with him briefly at the opening of the exhibition and he explained that he is particularly interested in trying to find a new way of photographing 'icons' like Mount Fuji. When I first came across his work on Fuji-san, it made me realise that I had almost never seen images of the mountain that were taken up close. It is almost always photographed or portrayed at a respectful distance (try doing a Mount Fuji Google Images search), reinforcing its symbolic nature to the point where you have to wonder whether the real mountain actually exists. Ishikawa takes a very different approach, showing the mountain up close, and revealing it as a barren, sometimes dangerous and desolate place.

Koji Onaka was the highlight of the exhibition for me. I have posted about his work before, but this is the first time I have seen his prints. Onaka began shooting in black and white but has since moved on to colour with very interesting results. He was one of Daido Moriyama's students and he shares Moriyama's obsession with dogs. Onaka is more of a wanderer than a traveller and his subject is the old, slightly run-down pockets of the rapidly disappearing 'old' Japan. His colours match these locations, as if they have turned slightly with age. He makes his prints himself in very small formats, and the results are wonderful.

Takeshi Dodo also deserves a mention for his black and white work on the islands of Okinawa. There are a number of images that reminded me of Kazuo Kitai, Issei Suda or Hiromi Tsuchida, in their very 'real', straightforward and unaffected vision of daily life. Dodo is not overly prone to nostalgia and the modern aspects of life on these remote islands rub right up against the more traditional to create an intriguing portrait of a world that is both far removed from and closely connected to the incessant modernisation of the country.

I will put a link to my text (in French) once they upload the newsletter to the MCJP website.

Rating: Recommended

Voyages, Maison de la culture du Japon 14 Octo­ber 2009 - 23 Jan­uary 2010

The Places We Live

A friend of mine at the UN sent me a link to The Places We Live, a photo project by the Norwegian photographer, Jonas Bendiksen, in collaboration with the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo. Bendiksen's series documents life in a series of four slums around the world: Caracas, Venezuela; Nairobi, Kenya; Mumbai, India; and Jakarta, Indonesia.

In addition to the obligatory sweeping views of corrugated iron rooves, in each location Bendiksen photographed four families in their homes to give a human perspective to the project. I think these portraits are the strongest part of the series, giving a straightforward sense of what daily domestic existence is like in these slums while avoiding any sense of pity and condescension. Bendiksen doesn't create a sense of divide between the viewer and the people in these photographs.

The exhibition is currently touring in multi-media form, consisting entirely of HD projections and sound installations. The site that was created for the exhibition is very well put together and does a great job of combining informative texts on ths issues related to the growth of urban slums with interesting images. It also gives a series of links to further reading and organisations that are involved on the issues dealt with here. I found that all of this gives the project an added informational and advocacy dimension that doesn't weaken its emotional resonance... this is no Al Gore Powerpoint presentation. The way the site is built would also enable the project to be expanded and it would be interesting to see Bendiksen (or other photographers for that matter) add additional material to it in the future or to see other projects developed using a similar approach (this could be an interesting idea for the Aftermath Project maybe?).

Jean-Louis Tornato

Mrs Deane's post on Eduardo Serafim reminded me that I have been meaning to post on Jean-Louis Tornato's series, Les photographies du sommeil. The series is made up of self-portraits of Tornato sleeping with his partner throughout the course of the night. The images were made using an automatic timer, infra-red film and a flash that is invisible to the naked eye so they would not be woken up by the camera. The grainy, high-contrast results are reminiscent of the Provoke era aesthetic, but are driven by a desire for "scientific observation" of the many emotional and physical chapters of one night's sleep.

The series will be on show at Masato Seto's gallery in Tokyo, Place M, from December 7th to 13th. (Thanks to Seto-san who introduced me to Tornato's work).

Review: Michael Kenna @ BNF

Last night was the opening of the Michael Kenna retrospective at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (National Library).  The show includes 210 prints of work spanning from the early 1980s until today, 100 of which Kenna is donating to the BNF after the exhibition. I was surprised that he has over 30 years of work behind him and curious to see what a large retrospective show such as this one would say about the development of this artist.

The first thing to mention is the printing. It is clear from the way that he signs and editions his prints that Kenna is nothing if not meticulous and his small, square format prints are quite stunning. When he moved to the US in the late 1970s, Kenna became Ruth Bernhard's assistant and printer, and clearly became very good at his job.

The exhibition is well laid out and the BNF's production values are always high. The work is grouped into a series of themes, from  'The Tree' to 'The Far East' with a healthy dose of 'Melancholy'. The show includes a large amount of work from England and the United States (his native and adopted homes), but also a significant amount of recent work shot all over the world (Dubai, New York, Hong Kong, China, and Kenna's beloved Japan).

Kenna's surgically-precise minimalist compositions, which—in his own words—are akin to haiku poems, have remained remarkably consistent over time. He is driven by a desire for pure images where not a single element is left to chance. This compositional rigour is paired with long exposures taken overnight or at dawn or dusk, playing with both texture and light in order to create a very personal dream-like vision of the world.  Kenna is masterful in his control of all of these elements and this has enabled him to develop an incredibly consistent personal vision.

However, despite all of this virtuosity, I ended up feeling frustratingly indifferent. One of the wall texts in the show claims that Kenna privileges suggestion over description, but I think he goes far beyond suggestion. His personal vision is so strong that his landscapes tend to resemble each other, whether they are taken in Bognor Regis (below) or in Hokkaido.

Kenna's idealised vision of the world seems to iron out the details and imperfections which give each landscape its distinctiveness. There are moments when his eye seems to become more daring, even critical (see the above Dubai skyline), but these are few and far between. Kenna has increasingly ventured into cities with his camera with mixed results. Particularly in cities with iconic monuments or architecture, I found that his imagery comes dangerously close to upmarket postcard territory (his Brooklyn Bridge images for a good example of this).

In some ways Kenna's approach seems to be more painterly than photographic: instead of accepting the camera's all-seeing-eye that reveals everything which appears in the frame, you get the sense that Kenna uses the camera to recreate his interior vision of the world.

Finally, I think that the size of this exhibition is problematic. It is very difficult to compile 210 photographic haikus without suffocating the space that each one of these needs. Instead of the images combining into some form of symphony, I found that repetition sets in about halfway through.

In one of the final wall texts, reference is made to Barthes statement "All of a sudden, I became indifferent to the fact of not being modern."  This seems appropriate for Kenna. He is in search of a particular kind of beauty and is not concerned with the now: none of his images seem to have any link to the time in which they were made. If you can accept this about him, this exhibition has a better chance of resonating with you.

Michael Kenna Bibliothèque nationale de France, Site Richelieu. 13 October 2009 - 24 January 2010.

Rating: Worth a look

The Aftermath Project

I recently received a copy of War is Only Half the Story, Volume II, a publication by The Aftermath Project run by the photographer Sara Terry. The Aftermath Project is a non-profit organization that aims to tell "the other half of the story of conflict" through photographs of post-conflict situations. This latest publication includes work by the winner (Kathryn Cook) and finalists (Natela Grigalashvili, Tinka Dietz, Pep Bonet and Christine Fenzl) of their 2008 grant.

A lot has been written (some on this blog) about the desperate state of photo-journalism as both newspapers and magazines continue their steep decline. A number of reports from the recent Visa pour l'image festival in Perpignan stopped just short of saying that photo-journalism is a dying profession. The situation is bad in many ways—photographers have fewer and fewer outlets for in-depth stories—but I think that it is precisely because it is so dire that initiatives like the Aftermath Project are sprouting out from within the cracks. Dispatches magazine is another great example of an initiative that produces in-depth and in-context stories.

Aftermath is focused on post-conflict situations: a subject which is rarely considered to be newsworthy and may not have the immediate photographic gratification of the extremes of conflict. But if initiatives like these can survive, and even thrive, we won't be burying photo-journalism quite yet.

The book is on sale here. The Aftermath Project also holds a yearly grant competition open to working photographers worldwide covering the aftermath of conflict. The next deadline for applications is 2 November 2009.