Aperture's Blog, page 153

A Recap of Aperture’s Summer Soirée

Aperture Foundation creative director Lesley A. Martin introduces photographer Matthew Pillsbury to Summer Soirée guests. Photo by Max Mikulecky.

On July 22, photographers and friends of Aperture, as well as Aperture’s executive director, Chris Boot, and creative director, Lesley A. Martin, gathered to celebrate summer and photography at the Aperture Summer Soirée. Aperture trustees Jessica Nagle and Roland Hartley-Urquhart hosted a party with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres on the terrace of their Manhattan home, where guests had the opportunity to speak with Matthew Pillsbury, whose monograph City Stages was published by Aperture in 2013. Other Aperture photographers in attendance included Hannah Whitaker (Photography Is Magic, forthcoming in September 2015), Richard Renaldi (Touching Strangers, 2014), and Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao (Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao: New York, 2014).

Pillsbury presented recent work (courtesy of Benrubi Gallery) that he made on a trip to Japan. He discussed his early photographs and his turn to color. “It challenged me to work in a completely different way,” he said. “I felt like I had this freedom given to me.”

Of one photograph on view, depicting a ramen museum, he noted, “I saw this one room and said, ‘It has to be in color.’” Known for his black-and-white studies of modern urban environments, Pillsbury discussed this new approach. “Suddenly, in Tokyo, there were so many things that needed to be in color. . . . It’s a whole new language.”

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Matthew Pillsbury speaks about the process of making Cup Noodles Museum, Yokohama, Tokyo, 2014 (courtesy of Benrubi Gallery), on a trip to Japan.

Jessica Levy with Joshua Greenberg of U.S. Trust, Bank of America, Andrew Craven, Aperture Foundation executive director Chris Boot, Aperture Foundation trustee Jessica Nagle, and Rodger Hicks

Aperture Foundation creative director Lesley A. Martin and Christiane Fischer

 

Jeffrey Peabody of Matthew Marks Gallery, with Aperture trustees Jessica Nagle and Melissa and James O’Shaughnessy

Tony White, Doug Friedlander, and guest

 

Erika Basave, Whit Williams, Jr., and Matthew Pillsbury

 

All photographs © Max Mikulecky. 

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Issue 13 of the Aperture Photography App is Now Available

The new issue of the Aperture Photography App is now available to download on your iOS device. Here’s a look inside Issue 13:

● An excerpt from Edward Weston’s Flame of Recognition.

● A report from Krakow Photomonth 2015.

● Highlights from From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola.

● Aperture staff picks for summer exhibitions.

● From the archive: an interview with Richard Learoyd.

Every issue of the Aperture Photography App is free– subscribers have new issues delivered to their device automatically. Select articles later appear here, on the Aperture blog. Click here to download the app today! 

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Excerpt from Mary Ellen Mark on the Portrait and the Moment

One of the last projects by Mary Ellen Mark (1940–2015), Mary Ellen Mark on the Portrait and the Moment, the latest book in Aperture’s Workshop Series gathers some of the acclaimed documentary photographer’s favorite portraits alongside her commentary about where she found her subjects and how the now-recognizable images came to be. Mark passed away in May of this year, after the completion of this book and Tiny: Streetwise Revisited, to be released this fall. From her early magazine assignments to the series Streetwise and Prom, she reflected in the book, excerpted below, on decades of iconic photographs of everything from everyday life to the bizarre, taken around the world.

This article originally appeared in Issue 12 of the Aperture Photography App.

Craig Scarmardo and Cheyloh Mather at the Boerne Rodeo, Texas, 1991

Let Things Happen

This photograph was shot in the early ’90s on assignment to photograph small-town rodeos for Texas Monthly magazine. It was a great assignment for me (given by a wonderful art director, D. J. Stout), and we found six or seven towns with rodeos. We timed things to shoot seven rodeos in about three weeks. I had never been to a rodeo before. Everything about it was fascinating, and very Texan.

These boys look a little bit like brothers, but they aren’t. They’re close friends and were bull riders. It’s one of the most dangerous sports in the world, really terrifying. I saw countless men and boys being thrown and stomped on by bulls.

I got to a point where I couldn’t watch anymore and began photographing people on the sidelines. This was shot on 4-by-5, so I definitely directed them to look at me. I probably did a Polaroid test-shot first, but that’s how they decided to stand on their own. They were excellent bull riders; you can tell by their attitude that they knew it too. They were macho beyond their years.

Samantha Monte and Khalil Samad, Staten Island, New York, 2006

Take Control

I was looking for another project to do with the 20-by-24 Polaroid camera, like Twins, which I finished in 2002. I feel sort of let down after I finish a big series—I firmly believe that I’m only as good as the next thing I do. I’m not interested in going back but in going forward. I miss the excitement—that amazing excitement—of starting a new project, which is why I am a photographer. The prom seemed right for my next project because I was interested in the costumes, the rituals, the choice of partner. I felt the need to look at them closely. I knew it would be a good idea. . . .

With the 20-by-24 Polaroid camera, I didn’t have the luxury of shooting lots of frames. The film costs a fortune, and there’s no postproduction. The picture comes out of the camera finished, so the lighting, the set up, everything, has to be perfect during the shot. You have to take into account all the details. I used the same backdrop and setup for each picture. I had to make a decision before the shot and stick to it: I’ll shoot from this distance, and have this idea for the photograph. I couldn’t take lots of pictures and then decide because I had so few frames to shoot.

Ram Prakash Singh with His Elephant Shyama, Great Golden Circus, Ahmedabad, India, 1990

Look for Mystery

Fiction writers are lucky in the sense that they can imagine anything. I am not good at imagining things; I’m most interested in finding the strangeness and irony in reality. That’s my forte.

This picture of the elephant and his trainer is one of my most well-known pictures from the Indian circus. It has a strong composition, with the trunk making a circle around the trainer. He had the elephant perform that for me (I think he was showing off). But what makes the portrait work so well is the elephant’s expression. I took several pictures of this act, so much so that the elephant got fed up. He looked at me from the side as if to say, “Ugh, Mary Ellen, that’s enough. This is your last frame.”

Sometimes it’s better to go for a subtle image rather than a sensational one. Simple and direct images can work, but look for what has some mystery to it. I couldn’t have planned such a sly look from the elephant and how it would contrast with the seriousness of the trainer. Afterward, the trainer insisted that I get my picture taken with the elephant’s trunk around me. It was very heavy!

Amanda and Her Cousin Amy, Valdese, North Carolina, 1990 © Mary Ellen Mark

Build the Frame

There was a school for problem children in Valdese, North Carolina, and I went there on assignment for LIFE magazine. I thought all the kids were great. Nine-year-old Amanda was very intelligent and very naughty. She was, of course, my favorite. I took a lot of pictures of her, and one day I rode the school bus home with her. I was curious about where she lived. She got off the bus in front of her house but ran into the woods. I ran after her and found her sitting there in an old chair smoking a cigarette. What could I do? She was nine and smoking a cigarette. If I had asked her to stop, she would have just laughed at me.

I met Amanda’s mother and arranged to come back the following Sunday to spend a day photographing. I always recommend sticking with a subject you like to photograph. You don’t have to be on a magazine assignment to follow your interests and instincts. Following one subject can be an assignment in and of itself.

Amanda got really excited that I was coming. She put on her mother’s makeup, and even got fake fingernails. So I spent the day with the family, mainly Amanda and her cousin, Amy. I was a little disappointed because Amanda was so into being photographed that it was hard to catch an authentic moment. Sometimes, the hardest thing is to get people to stop mugging for the camera. Also, with children, if they are playing too much to you, it’s not real (they’re too involved with you). Treat them like adults. Sometimes I’ll say, “If you smile, I won’t take your picture.”

Toward the end of the day, as I was about to leave, Amanda’s mother said, “Amanda’s back in the kiddy pool if you want to say good-bye.” So I went back to the pool, and there she was smoking a cigarette. I had my Leica with me. I composed the picture quickly with the round pool filling a lot of the frame. Amanda commands the foreground with her attitude and her cigarette. You can see that she’s totally relaxed in front of the camera after a day of shooting. She’s not performing anymore. I shot two frames, maybe three.

I often tell students, “Don’t put away your camera. Keep it out at all times even when you think you have the shot already.” Something can always happen. I had packed up all of my other equipment but luckily I had the Leica on me.

Click here to find Mary Ellen Mark on the Portrait and the Moment on the Aperture Foundation website.

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Altered Images at the Bronx Documentary Center

Unknown photographer, Valencia, Venezuela, February, 2014

On April 27, 2015, FOX13 Memphis posted a picture to their Facebook page of what appeared to be Baltimore engulfed in flames. While Baltimore was overrun with riots that night, the photograph was taken in Venezuela a year prior. The photographer remains unknown.

Distributed by the Revolutionary Guard, Iran
July, 2008

Numerous American news outlets published this image of an Iranian missile launch on their front page. The image showed four missiles streaking into the air. It was released by Sepah News, the official online news site of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Only three of the missiles successfully launched; the fourth was Photoshopped in to hide the missile that failed to launch. Little Green Footballs, an American political blog, discovered the manipulation the day of the photo's publication, calling it a "Photoshop fake." The Associated Press released the original photo the next day with the fourth missile unlaunched in the center; both Sepah News and Agence France-Presse (AFP) rescinded the photograph.

Adnan Hajj, Beirut, Lebanon, August 5, 2006

Adnan Hajj, the photographer, was found to have used Photoshop to clone and darken the smoke in this photo to exaggerate the bombing damage. This photograph was distributed throughout the media before the manipulation was caught by a blogger. Reuters news agency, who worked with the freelance photographer, immediately fired him. Reuters then withdrew all 920 photographs by Hajj from its database after it was discovered that he had manipulated a second photo.

Arthur Rothstein, South Dakota Badlands, 1936

Arthur Rothstein, a photographer for the Farm Security Administration, moved and photographed a steer skull at several locations in South Dakota during a severe drought in the region. Several frames of this exist, all showing different backgrounds. After one of the photos was distributed by the Associated Press, Republican opponents of President Roosevelt seized on the opportunity and articles about the staging of this photo were published in conservative newspapers around the country.

Eugene Smith, Deleitosa, Spain, 1951

Eugene Smith's photo essay Spanish Village was published in LIFE magazine in 1951 and was received with national acclaim among both readers and photographers. The iamge series depicts a small rural village in Spain under the rule of dictator Francisco Franco. In this photograph, an intimate scene of the wake of a Deleitosa villager, Smith retouched the wife and daughter's eyes. Originally the two women had been looking toward the photographer, but in the darkroom he printed their eyes much darker and then applied bleach with a fine-tipped brush to create new whites, thereby redirecting their gazes downward and to the side.

Giovanni Troilo, Charleroi, Belgium, 2014

This was part of a winning photo essay in the 2015 World Press Photo awards. The image, of the photographer's cousin and a woman having sex in a car, and lit by the photographer's remote flash inside the car, was set up. WPP judges eventually rescinded the award after numerous other complaints surfaced and an uproar ensued from the photojournalism community; another photo in the series was found to be taken in Brussels, not Charleroi, as the caption claimed. Charleroi's mayor and others complained that other photos from the series were staged.

Yevgeny Khaldei, German Reichstag building, Berlin, May 2, 1945

This iconic photograph from World War II shows a triumphant Red Army soldier waving a Soviet flag over the Reichstag building in Berlin, signifying communist conquest over Nazi Germany. Khaldei scaled the Reichstag with his own Soviet flag in tow, one that had been made by his uncle out of tablecloths for this purpose. He asked the soldiers to pose with the flag. Before the photo's first publication in Ogoniok, a Russian magazine, the watches on the soldiers' wrists were scratched out on the negative, concealing that the Soviets had been looting. Dark clouds of smoke were added in a later version on the photograph.

Brian Walski, Basra, Iraq, March 30, 2003

The photograph is a composite of two images taken seconds apart. After the Hartford Courant published the image, an employee noticed a duplication of civilians in the background. The Los Angeles Times confronted Walski, who confessed to having digitally merged the two photographs to improve the composition.

How—and why—do photojournalists change their photographs? A new exhibition, Altered Images: 150 Years of Posed and Manipulated Documentary Photography, on view at the Bronx Documentary Center through August 2, posits that the history of altered news pictures might provide an alternative history of photojournalism itself. In the 1850s and 1860s, war photographers such as Roger Fenton (in Crimea) and Alexander Gardner (during the Civil War) rearranged cannon balls and bodies to make the image more true to life, since action photography was impossible. By the 1930s, Robert Capa used film and Leicas, which allowed him to capture action but brought different sorts of problems. How did Capa manage to capture a Spanish soldier dying from a bullet wound? The unforgettable picture first appeared on September 23, 1936 in France’s VU, and modern researchers still debate whether Capa was at the place identified in the caption.

Altered Images was born out of such questions, and from director (and award-winning photojournalist) Mark Kamber’s desire to reinforce a code of journalist ethics that he perceives to be at risk, largely because of the economic and technical crises that now threaten news media.

The show includes over one hundred cases of alteration, from the 1850s to the present, each accompanied by informative captions. We see the image as originally published, what the show calls the “Representation,” in the form of front pages of newspapers, pages of magazines, and screen shots. A text describing the “Reality” identifies the alteration and the reason behind it, in numerous cases including quotes from the photographer.

Alteration in photojournalism is not a new story, but it has become simpler to do with the rise of digital journalism, confirmed here by the fact that the majority of examples from this exhibition date from recently. The most recent front-page story dates from January 11, 2015 when world leaders joined a Paris demonstration for the slain journalists of French humor magazine Charlie Hebdo. The Orthodox Israeli paper HaMevaser, altered a photograph of the march taken by Haim Zach, removing German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, and President of Switzerland Simonetta Sommaruga. Their presence, as women, violated religious beliefs of publisher, editors and readers —a reminder that such censors always believe in the justice of their work.

We are left prompted to ask different kinds of questions: what kind of information remains immune to alteration? What kind of photographic evidence cannot be altered? This exhibition, refreshingly, does not pretend to offer answers.

–Mary Panzer

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Nobuyoshi Araki’s Polaroids

Nobuyoshi Araki’s portfolio of Polaroid collages of nudes juxtaposed with flora is one of the Tokyo-based photographer’s latest projects, which appeared in Aperture magazine #219, Summer 2015, “Tokyo,”  with the following editors’ note. Araki’s latest exhibition, Eros Diary, is currently on view at Anton Kern Gallery, New York, through August 7. 

All photographs from the series Kekkai, 2014 © Nobuyoshi Araki and Eyesencia, Tokyo

At his retrospective in London a decade ago, Nobuyoshi Araki’s presence was likened to a tornado. Indeed, as photographers go, Araki is something of a storm. His voluminous output now forms a library unto itself: more than five hundred books of his photographs have been published since the 1960s. Over the course of his career, Araki’s sharp and libidinous eye has garnered a global cult following; he has incited controversy for his signature kinbaku (a Japanese form of bondage) images of kimono-draped models bound with rope. A tension between Eros and Thanatos is at the center of his work—the weight shifting to the latter as Araki ages. He is seventy-four and recently lost sight in his right eye, but in his work he shows no sign of slowing down. For Araki, photography and living are mutually dependent. An unfortunate fate becomes an area of creative exploration. His series Love on the Left Eye (2013–14) features photographs half-obscured with marker, and last December he presented the works seen on these pages, a new series of Polaroid collages titled Kekkai (2014), at Tokyo’s Art Space AM. The title invokes the Buddhist concept of a barrier cordoning off a sanctum. Araki splices together nudes and flowers, reanimating two of his long-standing preoccupations. “When you lose something, you gain something else,” Araki recently remarked about his reduced vision. “I say to myself that I believe I should be able to see things differently.”

–The Editors

Click here to find Aperture magazine on the Aperture Foundation website.

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On Press with Aperture Production

Production coordinator Thomas Bollier walks us through the recent printing of the Aperture book Suburban, a collection of Jimmy DeSana’s earlier photographs, made from the 1970s to early 1980s. The production team makes numerous press trips each year to oversee the printing of Aperture’s books and magazine, traveling to places as diverse as Istanbul; Dongguan, China; and Verona, Italy. The DeSana book was printed at Optimal Media in Röbel, Germany, this July. Suburban will be available this fall.

This article originally appeared in Issue 12 of the Aperture Photography App. 

This is the exterior of Optimal’s printing plant and offices. Optimal also produces CDs and vinyl records—it’s one of the few remaining factories still pressing vinyl.

Books are generally printed on sheets of paper about this size, which are later folded down to produce signatures that are bound together. We check and approve the color for the printing on each side of each sheet, matching the color that appears on press with color proofs. For this project, the proofs were made for us by Echelon Color, a Los Angeles-based color separator and repro (reproduction) house we also use for the production of Aperture magazine. Color separators like Echelon convert the RGB files we receive from artists—in this case, drum scans we had made of DeSana’s original 35mm transparencies—to a CMYK color space that can be used for offset printing. They also output color proofs for us using an Epson ink-jet printer that is set up to simulate the color that will be produced when the images are printed in CMYK. This simulation is not exact, but it’s often very close. For most projects, we go through several rounds of proofing, adjusting color and contrast, and spotting and retouching when necessary. We also review the proofs with the artists when possible so they know what to expect, often comparing proofs to the artist’s original print.

Original Jimmy DeSana 35mm transparencies—the source material for the images reproduced in Suburban.

Unfolded printed sheets are left to dry after printing. With this book, the sheets went through the press a second time to apply a layer of varnish to the images. Sometimes, varnish is applied “in-line,” or in the same pass as all the other inks. In this case, we printed the varnish “off-line,” or in a separate pass. This way, the ink is let to dry before the varnish is laid on top, allowing a heavier, more glossy layer of varnish to be printed.

Here we adjust the color on the book’s cover image. The adjacent sheets laid side-by-side show incremental adjustments in the density of certain inks, with the goal of matching the color of the proof, visible in the middle. The cover will later be laminated, before being bound with the book, to add a layer of protection and a gloss finish.

A Heidelberg Speedmaster ten-color press.

The northern German landscape, as viewed from the printing plant.

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William J. Simmons on Josef Astor at Participant Inc.

Writer William J. Simmons reviews Josef Astor’s recent exhibition at Participant Inc., New York, which connects photography, installation, and dance. The show was curated by Astor’s frequent collaborator and subject, the cult musician Antony.

This article originally appeared in Issue 12 of the Aperture Photography App.

Joe-Ho, 1996. All photographs by Josef Astor, courtesy Participant Inc.

 

By William J. Simmons

Josef Astor’s résumé runs the gamut of the art world—an instructor at the School of Visual Arts, an acclaimed director, and a commercial as well as fine art photographer, he has had a varied, decades-long career. Astor received an equally complex treatment in his recent exhibition at Participant Inc., an incisive and long-overdue survey of his work from the 1980s through the 2000s. Lovingly curated by Antony—one of Astor’s longtime models—Displaced Persons exists at the intersection of dance, photography, and documentary, and took a humorously critical eye toward art-historical conventions. Astor’s project is an archive of an era, full of cross-disciplinary communities and collaborations, which no longer exists. Displaced Persons illustrated this unsure mixture of bodies and histories while never coalescing into a flattened narrative. A simultaneously celebratory and sorrowful air filled the space as Astor invited us to a lyrical examination of the unforeseen and, at times, paradoxical possibilities of a photograph.

Peeesseye, 2005

 

Page + Wid, 1999

 

Using rear-screen projections (as in the oft-overlooked series in the same vein by Laurie Simmons and Cindy Sherman) as well as inventive costuming, Astor created an environment rather than purely a show. As a result of his mastery of color manipulation on these archival prints, a sickly pallor was cast over the gallery, broken from time to time by bursts of glamorous purples and reds. In Peeesseye (2005), a figure that appears to don a bondage mask presides over what could be either a fight or an avant-garde performance; the room’s gaudy fluorescence suggests an even stranger version of Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s hustler images. Light cast from a Del Taco sign in Astor’s Ralph Smith, 21 years old, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, $25 (1990­–92) results in a stunningly artificial, yet uncannily real dreamscape. For Astor, the body is always fighting for movement in the fixed field of the photograph. The dancers from Astor’s collaborations with Charles Atlas, such as the combatants in Peeesseye, seem to perpetually struggle against various forms of bondage: a shackled Leigh Bowery is grounded but no less fabulous.

Annie + Puppet, 1994.

 

These issues—history, embodiment, and performance—reach an apex in Skewed Halo (1999), a portrait of Antony himself. The makeshift studio walls and single pale disc on the floor, reminiscent of an ersatz minimalist sculpture, provide a hiding place for a crouching figure clad entirely in white save for his blood-red lips. However, the most interesting detail is the most obvious: Astor has dressed his model in an enormous condom, separating Antony’s body from the surroundings with a tenuously protective layer. In Astor’s elegant combination of photography and performance, we are presented with the specter of the AIDS crisis—at once a tribute and an opportunity for a cross-generational reckoning with this tragedy. Astor confronts us with our own permeability, and the possibility of the body’s decay, just as various artistic disciplines become permeable in his hands.

Skewed Halo, 1999.

 

Displaced Persons was equal parts memorial and art exhibition—Leigh Bowery, a muse for many, lost his life to AIDS-related illness—and, as a result, Astor produced a space for reflection on a bygone New York City, even as he posed crucial aesthetic questions running the gamut of normative and non-normative art histories.

Displaced Persons was on view at Participant Inc., New York, from May 31 to July 12.

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Recap: 2015 Aperture Summer Open Opening Reception

On Thursday, July 16, Aperture held the opening reception of the 2015 Aperture Summer Open exhibition, an annual open-submission exhibition about the character of photography now, to which all photographers are invited to submit work. The exhibition will be on view at Aperture Gallery through August 13.

The theme of this year’s Summer Open is “Black Mirror.” The title Black Mirror is borrowed from the 2011 British television series of the same name, which imagines a dystopian near future—a Twilight Zone for the age of the smartphone. More than 500 photographers applied to this year’s call for entries, and 24 were selected by Aperture magazine editor Michael Famighetti. Before the opening, Michael Famighetti invited the participating photographers to talk about their work in the Aperture gallery.

See the full list of photographers included in the exhibition here.

 

Aperture deputy director Sarah McNear welcomes Aperture members to the Summer Open walkthrough before the opening

Artist Felix R. Cid talks about his piece Untitled (Detroit),2014

 

Artist Sarah Meyohas talks about the process behind her work from the series BitchCoin, 2014

Artist Balarama Heller explains the work from his series, Sparrow Mountain, 2010–14

Artist Farah Al Qasim talks about her Dubai-based series, The World is Sinking, 2013–14

Artist Ben Freedman talks about his work from the series Dark Matter, 2014

Artist Emmanuelle Andrianjafy stands by her work from the series We’re Moving to Kounoune, 2015

Artist Emmanuelle Andrianjafy talks with a guest at the reception for the Summer Open

Artists Emmanuelle Andrianjafy, Philippe Branquenier, Ben Freedman, and Brandon Nichols

Artist Balarama Heller with guests

More than 300 guests attended the opening reception Thursday night at Aperture Gallery in New York

All images © Max Mikulecky and Nahshon Outten

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Issue 12 of the Aperture Photography App is Now Available

The new issue of the Aperture Photography App is now available to download on your iOS device. Here’s a look inside Issue 12:

● An excerpt from one of Mary Ellen Mark’s last projects Mary Ellen Mark on the Portrait and the Moment

● Letters from Sally Mann on process that originally appeared in Aperture magazine #138, from 1995.

● A portfolio of Polaroids by Nobuyoshi Araki that appeared in Aperture #219, Summer 2015, “Tokyo.”

● An inside look at the printing of Jimmy DeSana’s Suburban, out this fall from Aperture

● A review of Josef Astor at Participant Inc. by William J. Simmons

Every issue of the Aperture Photography App is free– subscribers have new issues delivered to their device automatically. Select articles later appear here, on the Aperture blog. Click here to download the app today! 

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The PhotoBook Review: Photobooks After 3/11

By Marc Feustel

Marc Feustel, an independent curator, writer, and editor based in Paris, examines the photobook in the wake of the earthquake and resulting tsunamis that devastated northeast Japan on March 11, 2011. This article appeared in The PhotoBook Review 008, guest edited by Ivan Vartanian and focused on photobooks from Japan.

This article originally appeared in Issue 11 of the Aperture Photography App.

Rinko Kawauchi, Light and Shadow (Tokyo: Rinko Kawauchi Office Co., Ltd., 2012)

 

It has been four years since the Great Tohoku Earthquake unleashed a series of tsunami waves which struck a vast area of Japan’s northeastern coastline, and caused a severe nuclear incident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Japan is no stranger to natural and man-made disasters. However, since the 1960s the nation has, by and large, experienced peace and prosperity. Since the post-bubble years of the 1990s, much of Japanese contemporary art has been driven by self-representation and aesthetics. But the events of March 11, 2011 (referred to in Japan as 3/11), have profoundly impacted the way art is both made and received in Japan, and today the social and documentary concerns that characterized the postwar years have risen back to the surface.

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, photographers from around the country—and indeed the world—flocked to the devastated area. In the following months, book after book was published, seemingly documenting every inch of the devastated coastline. This photographic reaction is both natural and necessary, as if events of this magnitude require images to make it possible for us to begin to comprehend them. However, the sheer volume of these book projects quickly became overwhelming. It was difficult to feel anything but numb when faced with these endless images of devastated landscapes.

It was in this context that projects began to emerge with new approaches to this difficult subject. As early as April 2011, Rinko Kawauchi traveled to the earthquake-devastated towns of Ishinomaki, Onagawa, Kesennuma, and Rikuzentakata. From this journey she created the series Light and Shadow, based on her encounter with a pair of pigeons, one black, one white. This became the project’s theme: the dualism of light and shadow, good and evil. While the photographs depict destruction, Kawauchi’s work does not feel like a document, but rather a transcendence of the disaster, where despair already contains the seeds of hope. Two publications have emerged from the series, both titled Light and Shadow: a short, self-published book in 2012, and an expanded edit of the series published by SUPER LABO in 2014.

Rinko Kawauchi, Light and Shadow (Tokyo: Rinko Kawauchi Office Co., Ltd., 2012)

New approaches were also at work in two projects dealing with the Fukushima nuclear incident that resulted from the earthquake: Katsumi Omori’s Subete wa hajimete okoru (Everything happens for the first time, Match and Company, 2011) and Takashi Homma’s Sono mori no kodomo (Mushrooms from the forest, Blind Gallery, 2011—both of which were reviewed by Ivan Vartanian in The PhotoBook Review 002.) Fukushima is the least likely of photographic subjects as it demands the impossible: to photograph radiation—the invisible. Omori described the compulsion that drove him to Fukushima: “I must go to Fukushima. I must shoot the radiation (though it cannot be shot).” By employing a halation effect throughout his series, he lays bare the limitations of photography in the face of this invisible threat, while also giving that threat a form.

Tomoki Imai, Semicircle Law (Match and Company, Tokyo, 2013)

At first glance, Homma’s images of forests and wild mushrooms seem to bear no relation to the nuclear power plant, but their meaning is transformed by a brief text buried at the end of the book. In it, Homma explains that mushrooms absorb radiation faster than other living organisms; those he collected in the forests of Fukushima Prefecture contain much higher

levels of radiation than elsewhere in Japan. The experience is unsettling, forcing the viewer back through the images with a very different eye. Tomoki Imai’s Semicircle Law (Match and Company, 2013) uses a similar device. His seemingly anodyne forest landscapes are transformed by a diagram at the end of the book revealing that his photographs were taken on either side of the twenty-kilometer security radius established by the Japanese government around the stricken nuclear plant. Imai himself has said that he thinks these images’ significance will depend on which vantage point the future will bring.

Non-Japanese artists have also been drawn to the affected region. The German photographer Hans-Christian Schink traveled to Japan one year after the quake to photograph the coastline. Tohoku (Hatje Cantz, 2013) provides a complex view of the aftermath of 3/11, in which the tsunami’s impact ranges from the imperceptible to the brutal—a landscape still caught in the midst of a long healing process. More recently, Antoine D’Agata produced a surprising new book on Fukushima. Over the course of six hundred black-and-white plates, Fukushima (SUPER LABO, 2014) presents a typology of those houses abandoned due to their proximity to the stricken nuclear plant. A far cry from D’Agata’s signature work, the uncharacteristic coolness of these images builds to a foreboding emptiness.

Tomoki Imai, Semicircle Law (Match and Company, Tokyo, 2013)

While all the projects mentioned above were created by photographers from outside the Tohoku region, for some the events of 3/11 were of a more personal nature. Iwate-born Kazuma Obara’s Reset Beyond Fukushima (Lars Müller, 2012) goes beyond a documentation of the catastrophe to become a call to action—the book’s subtitle is Will the Nuclear Catastrophe Bring Humanity to Its Senses?—in the grand tradition of the Japanese protest book. Naoya Hatakeyama is also from Iwate, and his book Kesengawa (Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2012; Editions Light Motiv, 2013) is concerned with the destruction of his hometown of Rikuzentakata. Kesengawa has two distinct halves. The first contains photographs that Hatakeyama had been casually producing over the years along the Kesen River, which runs through Rikuzentakata. The book then shifts into the photographs taken in his hometown in the aftermath of the wave. In the book’s afterword he describes his aim to “bring the event closer to people, to compress the physical distance.” Whereas Homma and Imai’s images are altered by the text that follows them, in the case of Kesengawa, the photographs are transformed by the events themselves. Snapshots made only to be tucked away in a small box in Hatakeyama’s studio suddenly gained great significance—a profound illustration of the ever-shifting relationship between photography and the world.

Spreads from Naoya Hatakeyama, Kesengawa (France: Editions Light Motiv La Madeleine, 2013)

Lieko Shiga was directly affected by the tsunami. In 2008 the young artist relocated to the small coastal village of Kitakama in Miyagi Prefecture, where she had been given a home and a studio in exchange for taking on the role of official photographer for this small community. Shiga had been working on an ambitious project about her adoptive home when the tsunami struck, destroying much of the community and her studio with it. She went on to finish the project, which became a book and an exhibition. Rasen Kaigan (Spiral Beach, AKAAKA, 2013—short-listed as PhotoBook of the Year in the 2013 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards) is not a book about the tsunami, but one whose course was profoundly affected by it. Like many of the projects referred to here, Rasen Kaigan is also concerned with bringing the invisible to light: rather than documenting the surface of her adoptive community, Shiga chose to focus on its fantasies, dreams, and memories—its “essence.”

Of all the books that deal with the 3/11 tsunami, Tsunami, Photographs, and Then: Lost and Found Project (AKAAKA, 2014—short-listed as Photography Catalogue of the Year in the 2014 PhotoBook Awards) is perhaps that which says the most about photography’s importance at times like these. The book provides an overview of the work of the Lost and Found Project, a group that was formed to attempt to retrieve photographs that had been scattered by the wave, preserve them, and return them to their owners. Initiatives like this one sprung up all along the Tohoku coast, and are a testament to the vital importance accorded to photographs when all has been lost.

An extraordinary breadth of projects and approaches have emerged around 3/11 in the past four years. The books mentioned here all deal with the subject directly, but there are countless others in which these disasters are a powerful, if indirect, undercurrent; the many projects referred to in this piece only represent a beginning. Looking to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, these events remained key themes for decades after the events. Arguably the two most powerful bodies of work on the atomic bombings, Kikuji Kawada’s Chizu (The Map, 1965) and Shomei Tomatsu’s 11:02 Nagasaki (1966), were not published until twenty years after the fact. Today, the resurgence of social concerns echoes the artistic engagement of those postwar years. Perhaps the greatest photobooks to deal with 3/11 are still to come.

The post The PhotoBook Review: Photobooks After 3/11 appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.