Review: Araki @ Daniel Templon

Daniel Templon is currently exhibiting a recent series of Araki's bondage photographs, work which has been doing the rounds for some time now with shows in Tokyo, Berlin, Oslo and London. The Paris show includes 15 large-format (150 x 120cm) colour digital prints of images taken in the past couple of years.

For anyone who was at last year's edition of Paris Photo (Japan was the 'guest' country), this work will be familiar. Araki is one of the very few Japanese photographers to have succeeded in building himself a global reputation, and you will always come across a few of his prints at any major photography fair. However at Paris Photo it really felt like overkill to me: his large-format bondage images popped up on so many booths that I kept getting confused about where I was.

This Paris exhibition, Bondages, is trademark Araki: kimonos, plastic godzillas, bondage rope, flowers, the odd dildo, and as much female flesh as possible. The images are undeniably striking and, although this is far from new ground for Araki, the move to large-format colour may even succeed in accentuating their provocative impact. During my visit to the show a group of Parisian thirty-somethings fresh from the squash court giggled their way around the room, faces pressed up against these life-size sexual fantasies, while an elder couple of apparently regular collectors (she clearly unimpressed, he secretly enjoying himself) asked one of the staff for an explanation as to why on earth these images were even worth looking at.

However, I can't help wondering whether Araki is actually playing it a bit safe here. He is undoubtedly a diverse photographer, from his early Satchin and Mabo series to his photographs of Tokyo and, my personal favourite, the work that he did on his wife (Sentimental Journey and Winter Journey). But recently he has been in danger of becoming something of a one-trick pony. I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing to continue returning to an idea, concept or even an aesthetic over a long period of time. The thing that bothers me is that it feels like Araki keeps coming back to bondage because that is what the market is asking him for. The intimacy of his early bondage photographs has gone and it is being replaced with something more akin to performance. The problem I have with many of these images is that they seem to be playing up to a Western fantasy of an exotic Japanese sexual sub-culture and, given how ubiquitous Araki has become, contributing to the myth that this is what all Japanese photography looks like. These images leave me feeling that, instead of being introduced to a strange private world, I am being duped.

Rating: Worth a look

Further reading: Vice magazine interview with Araki which is refreshingly unlike every other photographer interview you have ever read. (via mcvmcv)

"Virtual Collection #1"

This is a smart idea from Olef Wolberger (Horses Think): start a virtual collection of photographs. Provided you don't go overboard and start 'acquiring' dozens of images each week, this seems like an interesting way of getting into the collecting mind-set. I think it could also help to think about why you want a particular image, and to live with it a bit to see if it really is something you would want for your real collection.

Photo-journalism: leaving Nachtwey behind

The excellent dispatches magazine recently organized a debate at Brooklyn's VII Gallery with Gary Knight, one of the magazine's co-founders, and Tim Hetherington, a young photo-journalist (and 'thinker') who has made some interesting attempts to break out of the dark corner in which photo-journalism finds itself. The debate is available in its entirety on the dispatches website and is well worth a look.

At the conversation I attended earlier this week one of the panellists, a former journalist for the NY Times, kept steering the discussion towards his experience of photo-journalism, blurring the lines between it and photography. I found that there was a palpable feeling of discomfort in the air each time that he drew this parallel: as if  'photo-journalism' has become a dirty word which is not really supposed to be mentioned in a discussion of Photography with a capital 'P'. The fence (or is it barbed wire?) between these two fields has always seemed a little artificial to me and thankfully up-and-comers like Hetherington are contributing to tearing holes in it (see Sleeping Soldiers for a good example of this). I have been wondering whether the recent turmoil that is hitting newspapers and magazines (the traditional homes of photo-journalism) so hard is going to further contribute to blurring this distinction. In the dispatches debate the Knight explained his concern that the only images of war that get distributed are overly legible, presenting the extremities of war (tragedy, suffering, violence) and not the body of it. This used to be precisely what photo-journalists searched for in conflict photographs—James Nachtwey still seems to think that by presenting the most dramatic forms of these images that he can single-handedly change the course of history—but thankfully this is changing. Maybe that, as photo-journalists are forced to find new ways of distributing their images, we will start to see a less selective picture and one which will be a lot harder to categorise as unrelated to 'fine art photography'.

Gursky goes small

Having just seen a Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition of large format prints it feels like the world has been turned on its head this week. Andreas Gursky currently has a retrospective on at the Vancouver Art Gallery in which he is showing 70 prints in "a small format that has not been used by the artist since the early 1980s." From the godfather of super-size prints, this is worthy of note. I am curious to know what a small format means for Gursky though... is he scaling down to 40 x 50" or does he really mean small? I am generally not a fan of the large print as they are too often used to disguise uninteresting images behind monumentality, but with Gursky I can't help but wonder whether his imagery will work in small sizes. From looking at images on the web, I find that a number of them become illegible or confused at on-screen sizes. If anyone sees the show in Vancouver, I would be interested to hear your thoughts.

Further Reading: Horses Think Syndrome Stockholm

Review: Henri Cartier-Bresson @ MAM

HCB would have been 100 in 2008. For some reason his centenary is still being celebrated with two exhibitions which recently opened in Paris at the Maison Européene de la Photographie and today at the Musée d'Art Moderne (MAM). I was reminded of the Robert Frank exhibitions that were recently held in honour of the 50th anniversary of his seminal book, The Americans. I didn't see the exhibition at the NGA in Washington, Looking In, but judging by the catalogue this was a really impressive show in which the curators used this anniversary to take a fresh look at Frank's work for this series, uncovering new material and contributing a meaningful new perspective on the place of that series in photographic history. The exhibition that I saw at the Jeu de Paume was the polar opposite: it was essentially the book hung, in order, on the wall. There seemed to be no attempt to use this opportunity to do something different with the series, to uncover new details, present it in a new light, even develop a new scenography. As I walked around on the opening weekend with the hundreds of other people, waiting 2 or 3 minutes to see each image, this felt very much like an attempt to get as many people through the door with as little effort as possible.

Unfortunately, the current Cartier-Bresson mini-retrospective at the MAM, L'imaginaire d'après nature, falls into the latter category. The exhibition contains 69 large-format prints made in the 1970s, and donated to the museum in 1982 following two exhibitions of his photographs and drawings. This exhibition brings these donated prints out of storage after 27 years and I was curious to see what they would add to our understanding of HCB. Apparently one of the reasons why this is not "just another HCB exhibition" is that this is a unique opportunity to see appreciate his prints in a large format (they are around 50 x 70 cm, dry-mounted on board and unframed), and to "interact with the print as object", not just to appreciate the quality of his imagery in a small format behind a pane of glass. However, HCB didn't make the prints himself and I find that the images are not suited to these large formats. So maybe the value of the exhibition is in the choice of images, perhaps focusing on some lesser-known aspect of his work? The genius of HCB is indisputable, and many of these images still manage to retain their impact despite being so well-known, but while there are a handful of rarities, 95% of what is on show here has been seen everywhere and by everyone.

Seeing this exhibition at a National Museum of Modern Art in 1982 would have been a revelation and a bold statement on the place of photography within art. Seeing it today, it feels precisely like "just another Cartier-Bresson exhibition", and one which is attempting to cash in cheaply on an anniversary.

Rating: Worth looking elsewhere