Aperture's Blog, page 157

If You Came Here to Have Fun…

Photogram and letterpress card from the In the Dark and Behind a Wall event at Dexter Sinister, New York, March 26, 2011—the second installment of The Mushroom Collection after the Amsterdam storefront. Visitors passed small objects through a slot in the wall. The objects were converted into light and passed back through the slot.

Jason Fulford is known not only for his work as a photographer and publisher of J&L Books, but also for going beyond the standard format of a book talk or signing and creating, instead, live performances or happenings that are playful and memorable. Denise Wolff, an editor in Aperture’s books program, has worked with Fulford on two recent books: The Photographer’s Playbook and This Equals That, both Aperture, 2014. Over the course of a year, Fulford and Wolff organized a series of events that involved activities, games, merchandise, flags, a live show, pancakes, and even a debate—all to bring new dimensions to the books themselves. If you ever receive a packet of mushrooms, a letter from the past (or future), or a ticket in the mail with no other explanation, it probably has Fulford’s telltale Scranton, Pennsylvania, return address. Do not discard it; event information will follow. Fulford has a letterpress in his basement and makes much of the ephemera and mailings himself, and with his wife, Tamara Shopsin. These are all part of the experience. For the new issue of The PhotoBook Review 008, Spring 2015, Fulford and Wolff discussed the parallel lives of a book through its events, and the event as intersection of artist and viewer. This article also appears in Issue 7 of the Aperture Photography App, a new biweekly publication from Aperture: click here to download the free app.

Denise Wolff: I’ve never known you to do a standard artist talk or panel. Have you?

Jason Fulford: I give talks at universities about four times a year. I don’t like panels though. My talks are scripted so I can put in a lot of information. Then we do Q&As after. I want the audience to get their money’s worth. When I’ve been on panels in the past, I’ve left thinking the audience got cheated somehow. I’ve seen a few good panels though, where personalities clashed, and that is good content.

Hotel Oracle key tags from the New York City event at the New Yorker Hotel, October 2013. The event took place in the Tesla Room, number 3327 on the thirty-third floor, where Nikola Tesla—an inventor, electrical and mechanical engineer, and futurist—lived for the last ten years of his life.

DW: Maybe we should talk about a few of your favorite events. These are the ones I remember: the J&L variety show, the Mushroom Collector darkroom with Dexter Sinister, the Hotel Oracle world tour, the This Equals That pancakes and game, and of course, the Photographer’s Playdate festival of assignments. Are there one or two you can walk us through in particular?

JF: When my book The Mushroom Collector came out in 2010, Lorenzo de Rita, my editor and publisher of the Soon Institute, rented a storefront space in Amsterdam for one month. Our idea was to transform the book into four dimensions, bringing it into time. The space became a cross between a store and a period room. We channeled the anonymous mushroom collector who took the vintage pictures that appear in the book, and imagined what his or her workspace would feel like. Every night something in the room changed, similar to the way mushrooms appear overnight. Over the course of the month, we programmed talks and screenings and music events with different artists.

Engraved translucent plexiglass triangles that appeared overnight in the Mushroom Collection storefront space in Amsterdam, 2010. Each triangle is an optical illusion. Most people read this arrangement of words as “I love Paris in the springtime.” Look again.

Back in New York, Dexter Sinister invited me to present the book in their basement space on Ludlow Street. We turned the basement into a one-day darkroom, and built a Malevich-inspired wall. Visitors were invited to bring an object and pass it through the wall, where I converted it into light and removed one dimension by making a photogram. Each visitor received the object back in its new form: a matte barite print. I made about 150 prints that afternoon. We were really sweating behind the wall, listening to Mississippi Records and eating Clif bars.

Around the time Hotel Oracle came out in 2013, Lorenzo and I were having a conversation about the French writer Georges Perec. He wrote an essay describing the perfect Parisian apartment. Each room was in a different neighborhood, in a different type of building, on a different floor, etc.—each location well-suited to the function of the room. It occurred to us that the Hotel Oracle exists all over the world, in pieces, like Perec’s apartment: the room in New York, terrace in Paris, game room in Tokyo, bar in Krakow, laundry in San Francisco, pool in Los Angeles, shuttle van in Philadelphia, and wine cellar in Milan.

Button worn by the eighty-year-old “Future Jason” at the Hotel Oracle pool event in Los Angeles, February 2014. Participants were sent on a self-guided tour through time and asked to find Fulford three times in the historic, ten-floor Los Angeles Athletic Club. The three Jasons were different ages—ten, forty, and eighty—and each signed the book with a different date: 1983, 2014, and 2053.

DW: These events and happenings take a lot of planning, work, and imagination. Why do a book event this way? It seems to be about more than selling and promoting the book. Is it about creating a live experience of the book for an audience? Is it more of an excuse to have a good time? How did the event madness begin?

JF: The Mushroom and Oracle events began as book parties. But wine and cheese and stacks of books are boring. I want the events to be custom-made for the books—to take ideas from the books, and turn them into experiences. In this way the events become supplementary to the books. They’re like appendixes. They’re parallel to the book. They feel like the book. They’re also an excuse for me to play with other materials—architecture, sound, objects. They’re a chance for me to meet my readers one-on-one, which hardly ever happens otherwise.

DW: I really like the idea of the author and reader meeting each other. What was really odd is that, even though I know you, when I “met” you at the Hotel Oracle events in New York and San Francisco, I felt it was an encounter with—well, not quite a stranger, but someone else: the oracle. Did you feel you became an oracle for the event?

JF: That’s great. I’m glad it felt that way. One thing I learned about being an oracle is that equal work is done by the people who receive the message. They are the ones who bring meaning to it. I think that’s also the ideal situation when someone reads one of my books. I want the readers to think about their own lives—not mine.

Hotel Oracle drink coaster from the bar event in Krakow, Poland, June 2014. The Hotel Oracle is a phantom building that appeared in various parts of the world between October 2013 to June 2014—as a room in New York, a bar in Krakow, a terrace in Paris. The events in each location explored themes from the book (such as myth, time, travel, existence, and the supernatural) through performance and interaction. As of June 2014, the hotel is closed.

DW: Do you have a good story or two about meeting your readers? Were there tears? Laughter?

JF: During the San Francisco Oracle event, I met visitors one-on-one in a dark room lit with a red bulb. I asked each person to think of something that was happening in their life at that moment, then to pick from a pile of cards. The message on the card would then relate to the thing they were thinking about. Almost all of the exchanges were intense. Some people left happy, and others more somber. In New York and Paris we did a similar exchange, but with a slide image instead of a card. The slide related to their thoughts. I’ve seen some of the people a year later, and they still remember their fortune.

DW: I remember my slide fortune was about a place called Taco Land. I do feel it was perfect for me and fit well for the whole of 2014. Long live Taco Land! What the hell was that a picture of any way? Can you reveal?

JF: That’s a teletype machine I shot at the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting outside Minneapolis.

The Mushroom Collector mailing that went out in advance of the book’s release in 2010. The Mushroom Collection project began with a set of photographs of wild mushrooms found at a flea market.

DW: Do you want to say anything about the mail? This seems to be part of the fun, and is a bit mysterious (kind of like the events themselves). Do you have more to say on this?

JF: I think we’re OK, but maybe you could mention getting the ticket in the mail?

DW: I received the ticket, which said, “If you came here to have fun, you will!! If not, you won’t!!!”, along with a single sheet of Hotel Oracle stationary. I don’t think it said what it was for or who it was from, but I knew you were behind it and that the information would follow. It was inevitable that I would go to something involving a mysterious ticket received in the mail. Who could resist? The rest is Taco Land history. Maybe I should also ask: what do you think makes a great event?

JF: It’s fun and it makes you think. Maybe you go away with something (physically). And maybe it doesn’t fully make sense until the next day or later.

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Tokyo Aperture #219 – Editors’ Note

The following note first appeared in Aperture magazine #219, Summer 2015. Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online.

Takashi Homma, Tokyo, 2015

Tokyo conjures a distinctive, if familiar, image: hyper-modern and kaleidoscopic, a mutating urbanscape that is more Blade Runner than picturesque capital. Like any iconic city, Tokyo also exists in our mind’s eye as an idea. But Noi Sawaragi, one of Japan’s most influential art critics, speaking of the capital in these pages, punctures the idea that this ever-changing place can be neatly encapsulated. “Is Tokyo even a city at all?” he challenges, before reflecting on its diverse culture of image making. “There is very likely a connection between this lack of substance in Tokyo as
a city and the scarcity of any single overarching theme
or style that might define its photographic expression.”

That diversity of expression is felt across this issue, Aperture’s second to focus on photography through the lens of a global city. While interest in Japanese photography is always strong, a number of major exhibitions on the subject are now being staged internationally (or will be in the near future). Once again, it is a photo-zeitgeist. To create this issue we spent three weeks last December working in Tokyo with editor and publisher Ivan Vartanian, our consultant and guide. We met with photographers, curators, editors, booksellers, and historians to glean a sense of what people in Tokyo’s photography community were talking and thinking about, and what kinds of research and curatorial work were under way. The geography of the city is not simply depicted in these pages but is present as a central character in narratives of photography. As Vartanian commented in a conversation while we finalized the issue, “You might say that Tokyo infuses every body of work coming out of Japan.”

We have tried to characterize the photographic enterprise of the city by reflecting a range of work—some is explicitly connected to the city itself, other projects take us further afield, and a significant offering takes us into the past. We take a deep look at the work of Takuma Nakahira, the Provoke-era photographer and writer who is key to grasping Japanese postwar photography; we consider the role of the medium in Tokyo’s avant-garde scene that emerged amid the social turbulence of the 1960s; we revisit the mass-market, and at times lowbrow, glossy magazines that for decades were the platform for serious photographers. And then we turn to younger generations of image makers, such as newcomers Daisuke Yokota and Mayumi Hosokura, as well as midcareer figures like Rinko Kawauchi and Takashi Homma, both of whom display their evolving curiosity with their most recent projects—published here for the first time—which, for each of them, mark a departure from earlier series. Homma, featured on our cover, now makes foreboding images of Tokyo’s urbanscape using a camera obscura.

Like the city itself, the photography world in Tokyo is 
a vast and shifting landscape. A single issue can only hope to scratch the surface. Our concurrent edition of The PhotoBook Review, also dedicated to photography from Japan, helps 
us expand the conversation, and addresses the key role
 that books play in Japanese photographic culture—including 
a look at the crop of publications made in response to the 
2011 Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster. Additional articles will appear on Aperture.org and on the Aperture Photography App—among them an introduction 
to the thriving scene of alternative spaces that are helping 
to shape photography in Tokyo today, as well as other related stories and images from our archive. As writer Hideo Furukawa observes of Tokyo in this issue: “the city [is] formed…from
 an accumulation of tiny, fascinating details.”

—The Editors

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Aperture #219 – Editors’ Note appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

On Chance and Photography

By Robin Kelsey and Samuel Ewing

 

William Henry Fox Talbot, The Open Door, 1844. Courtesy Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York

To what degree is photography dependent on chance? If photography is a chance operation, are the intentions of the photographer undermined? Robin Kelsey, Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography at Harvard, and a regular contributor to Aperture magazine, tackles these and other questions in his new book, Photography and the Art of Chance (Harvard, 2015). Here he speaks with Samuel Ewing, a graduate student in art history at Harvard, about chance in relation to the work of Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, John Baldessari, and others, as well as on how chance itself led him to write a book on the subject. This article also appears in Issue 7 of the Aperture Photography App, a new biweekly publication from Aperture: click here to download the free app.

Samuel Ewing: You raise the point in the introduction that chance and its history have remained neglected issues within most photographic scholarship. I understand that a desire to fill in and understand these blind spots drives research, but it so often happens that chance, luck, or serendipity play a major role in even locating the blind spots to begin with. How did you initially “chance upon” this subject?

Robin Kelsey: Back in 2000, I was finishing up my dissertation on the survey photography of Timothy O’Sullivan and wrestling with how the photographs related to other survey modes of grasping the American West graphically—topographic sketching or cartography or verbal description. I thought Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (1844) might help, because Talbot had to locate his newly invented photographic process in relationship to other modes of representing things. As often happens with great texts or works of art, however, I went looking for one thing and found another. As I read Talbot, it occurred to me that he was struggling brilliantly with an issue to which I had never given much thought, namely, the role of chance in making photographs. Is stumbling on a pleasing arrangement in the world the same as composing one from the imagination? Do the unintended details of a photograph speak on their own behalf? These questions troubled Talbot and, as I later discovered, some other great practitioners as well. So even before I had finished my first book-length project, the second had begun.

William Henry Fox Talbot, Loch Katrine, 1844. Courtesy Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York

SE: The principal photographers in the book—William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, Frederick Sommer, and John Baldessari—all have a rather substantial amount of scholarship already dedicated to them. Do you think your argument that chance plays a constitutive and often ambivalent role in photography would change had you focused on lesser-known subjects?

RK: What binds the figures featured in the book is their self-conscious grappling with the relationship of photography to art. For each of them, this grappling required addressing the troublesome role of chance in photography, and each addressed this role in terms responsive to his or her day and circumstances. When Cameron practiced, Victorians were very concerned that modern markets were making investment akin to gambling, and she treated photography as a kind of aesthetic speculation. Stieglitz was more interested in the spontaneous accidental forms of vapors and clouds and scenes on the urban street.

Anthony Weston Dimock, “I Took My Camera Shot from a Distance of Forty Feet,” 1887, from Wall Street and the Wilds. Courtesy Widener Library, Harvard University

SE:Since you mentioned Stieglitz, maybe we can talk about his image taken during the winter of 1892–93, Impression, which I assume to be one you consider really good since you write about it at length. The scene it depicts seems resolutely foreign today—a boy feeding wood into an asphalt paver’s stove—and yet you make the case that the image is redolent with “the alchemy of modern life.”

RK: It’s a great photograph, at least in my view. With Winter, Fifth Avenue (1893) and The Terminal (1893) receiving so much attention over the years, it puzzles me that Stieglitz’s grittier street photographs from that same winter have received so little. To understand the modernism of these pictures you have to remember that rustic labor was a favorite subject of pictorialists at the time. Haying, washing by the stream, that sort of thing. Often taken in a misty setting to give the picture a poetic feeling. Stieglitz knew that such rustic scenes just couldn’t be done in America the way they were done in Europe. So he turned his camera on urban labor, substituting the smoke and steam of machines for the vapors of brooks and fens. Asphalt paving was a perfect subject, because the bicycle craze was underway, and smoother roads were all the rage. With Stieglitz using a new hand-held camera, the picture was all about mobility and change. The result was a radically new pictorialism, one more open to spontaneity and chance.

Experiencing these modern dimensions of the picture today requires bringing all this to mind. It also requires remembering that Impression was primarily shown in the 1890s as a projected lantern slide. Although I have looked long and avidly at the slide of Impression in the George Eastman House on a light table, where it looks much more radiant and atmospheric than it does when reproduced on a page, I have never seen it projected. So, like everyone else, I must use my imagination!

Julia Margaret Cameron, Vivien and Merlin (from Idylls of the King), 1874. Courtesy Houghton Library, Harvard University

SE: You use the word glitch to describe the imperfections found in Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs. I associate glitch more often with computers and digital images—corrupted jpg files, for example—than with the wet photographic chemistry used by Cameron. Were you thinking at all about contemporary digital chance while writing about these earlier figures?

RK: In a sense, yes. Glitch is, as you say, associated with electronics and seems to date from the 1960s. Using it in the context of Cameron was a conscious anachronism. I wanted a word that could grab the diverse and unpredictable process-based irregularities in her work—irregularities of focus, of emulsion application, of printing. What I liked about glitch was its suggestion of a systemic irregularity with a mysterious or autonomous origin. Words such as error or defect or mistake just didn’t do the trick. The ambiguity about origin—that is, whether Cameron was simply technically deficient or whether she cultivated the spontaneous flaw—is crucial to the power of her work. Her photography aims for ideals, while insisting that they will never be reached. A quintessential Victorian contradiction! Because what Cameron was fighting was a notion that photography was too mechanical to be an art, a word associated with mechanical breakdown seemed appropriate.

SE: It seems that mechanical breakdowns, though, pose less of a problem when camera technologies become more commercialized, regularized, and refined, especially when your story progresses into the twentieth century.

RK: That’s right. Cameron portrayed herself as an experimentalist, reinventing the medium in a messy, makeshift fashion. By the end of the nineteenth century, after Kodak has arrived, the game changes. Much of the role of chance migrates from the processing phase to the moment of exposure. That moment was always prone to chance—in the long exposures of early photography, a dog might wander in a street scene, or a young portrait subject might sneeze and blur the image. But with fast shutters and films, the so-called instantaneous photograph arrives, and chance takes on a new prominence in composition—to the point that even the word composition seems questionable. In the book, I spend some time discussing a remarkable example of that: Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima, the beautiful appearance of which came as a complete surprise to him. Most every snap-shooter has experienced something similar. What happens when chance plays a key role in determining the specifics of pictures? Have we honestly dealt with the implications? Or do we like to imagine some kind of mysterious intentions or meaning behind the accidents of everyday form?

Robin Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance, (Harvard, 2015). The cover features an image by John Baldessari

SE: The final figure in your book, John Baldessari, seems to build chance directly into the production of his pictures, often in the form of a game—a new photographic gambit. In the book, you write: “Just as Talbot, Cameron, Stieglitz, and Sommer had done before him, Baldessari found aesthetic possibility in a new historical meaning of chance.” What kinds of historical meanings are found at the intersection of chance, games, and photography in the 1970s?

RK: The changing meaning of chance over the past two centuries is crucial to the book. During the Cold War, chance became a tool of research. Specialists in the military-industrial complex used randomization to grapple with systems too complex to reduce to precise calculation. Games and simulations enabled designers of hydrogen bombs and conflict analysts of the RAND Corporation to grapple with an increasingly complex world. Many schoolchildren of the period, including me, spent many hours playing educational games modeling urban development, global diplomacy, or what have you. This surge of interest in gaming and simulation around 1970 is a largely forgotten chapter of history.

What does this have to do with photography? In the case of Baldessari, lots. He was interested in photography as a system, and he used games and randomization (e.g., throwing balls up in the air) to model it. In doing so, he was evidently taking on not only the everyday practice of photography but what we might call the Cold War “knowledge system.” The more time I spend with his work from that period, the more brilliant I think it is.

Nicholas Hughes, Untitled #16 (2012), from the series Aspects of Cosmological Indifferrence. Courtesy the Nailya Alexander Gallery, New York, and the Photographers’ Gallery, London

SE:What do you think are some of the contemporary meanings we ascribe to chance and photography?

RK: We are in a different era now. In some ways, the computational power of the digital age has fostered a return to determinism and a retreat of chance. Chaos theory, which is oddly named, posits that many things that seem random are actually determined by causal chains that are sensitive to initial conditions. In photography, we now have such a profusion of images that chance no longer seems to offer much of a pathway to the new. We have so many easy ways to digitally alter our images that chance seems to have given way almost wholly to the “chance effect.” But I wouldn’t dig the grave of chance and photography just yet. As I note in the conclusion, there are today still practitioners, such as Nicholas Hughes, doing interesting work that combines them.

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Where in the World is Aperture?

Aperture exhibitions are currently on three continents, from Asia to Europe to the Americas. How does it come together? Aperture’s exhibitions manager Annette Booth takes us inside the many shows currently traveling the globe, from The Chinese Photobook presentations in both London and Beijing, to Martin Parr’s Life’s a Beach in Savannah, Georgia, to the exhibitions currently in the making at Aperture’s gallery space in New York City.

Installation view of The Chinese Photobook at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

The Chinese Photobook, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, April 4–May 31, 2015

Installation view of The Chinese Photobook at The Photographers’ Gallery, London. Courtesy The Photographers’ Gallery. Photograph by Kate Elliott

 

The Chinese Photobook, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, April 17–July 5, 2015

The London and Beijing shows opened within two weeks of the exhibition closing at Aperture’s gallery. The books and framed portfolios in London are the same materials that were in New York, but the difference between the two shows is the size of the galleries and the layout of the walls. At Rencontres d’Arles, where the exhibition was first on view in 2014, each chapter of the exhibition was in a different room and viewed under flashlight, which definitely influenced your experience. At Aperture, we have an open space that can be partitioned with temporary internal walls, so each chapter had a space of its own but was in view of the next section.

Installation view of The Chinese Photobook at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

Now in London, the show has been edited; the space is smaller and no internal walls are set up. The result is that books from the early 1900s are just across the wall from contemporary volumes. The work at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing is a different set of material, geared specifically for a Chinese audienceThis version doesn’t include the few books on Tiananmen Square, but it includes many more from the other historical chapters. Those books will now travel throughout China so more people will get the opportunity to see their history through the photobook. We were lucky that Martin Parr had a set of books in Bristol, England, and Ruben Lundgren another set in Beijing—it made the simultaneous exhibitions possible.

Martin Parr, Japan. Miyazaki. The Ocean Dome, 1996. © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Martin Parr: Life’s a Beach, Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia, May 15–July 30, 2015

Parr’s show started at Aperture’s gallery in New York in 2013, and is now in Savannah, Georgia, a small metropolitan city with a distinctly Southern vibe. The Telfair Museum will be the fourth venue in this exhibition tour, which began in 2013. The works are unframed and pinned to the wall, so the shipping is a breeze, which is one of the hardest parts about traveling exhibitions. And Martin Parr’s photographs are just a lot of fun: the last venue, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida, paired Life’s a Beach with Monet to Matisse: On the French Coast. You had the very traditional Matisse paintings alongside Parr’s witty, color-saturated photographs—the old and the new. Next year, the show will continue to the Australian Centre for Photography, Paddington.

Richard Renaldi, Vincent and Charles, 2012 © Richard Renaldi

Richard Renaldi: Touching Strangers, at Loyola Marymount University Museum of Art, May 23–August 2, 2015

I love what this show is about and the public really relates to it, that’s why it has done well as a touring exhibition. It’s about people letting go of preconceived stereotypes and relating to each other with an open spirit. I saw that as a kind of Jesuit ideal and so approached Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago (LUMA), and Laband Art Gallery, Los Angeles, both associated with the Loyola Marymount Universities, which are Jesuit. LUMA Chicago is presenting the exhibition in connection with the one-hundredth anniversary of their School of Social Work. They’ve asked students and alumni from the school to pick a photograph in the exhibition and write up to fifty words in response. Their essays will be presented next to the piece in the gallery.

Paul Strand, Woman and Boy, Tenancingo, Mexico, 1933 © 2014 Paul Strand Archive/Aperture Foundation, Inc

Aperture: Photographs, 1285 Avenue of the Americas Gallery, New York, June 29–September 18, 2015

Aperture: Photographs tells the history of Aperture Foundation through our limited-edition print and fundraising programs from over fifty years. The Founders and Friends portfolio, which includes work by Minor White, Edward Weston, and Dorothea Lange, is followed by Paul Strand’s Mexican Portfolio, the first portfolio that Aperture published in 1967. The viewer will stroll chronologically through a who’s-who list of photography greats: Lisette Model, William Christenberry, Bruce Davidson, and David Wojnarowicz, just to name a few. Then it goes to the present: there’s a commission by John Chiara, for which we asked him to respond to an assignment from The Photographer’s Playbook (Aperture, 2014), and it ends with David Benjamin Sherry’s print from our newly launched, limited-edition subscription series for the magazine. It’s a really diverse display of photography from some of the best Aperture publications.

 

James, Mollison, Hull Trinity House School, Hull, UK © James Mollison

James Mollison: Playground, Aperture Gallery, New York, April 16–June 25, 2015

LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Bottom (Talbot Towers, Allegheny County Housing Projects), 2009 © LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Selected Works, Aperture Gallery, New York City, May 14–July 9, 2015

What the Playground exhibition has that the book doesn’t is scale. Mollison’s work is detailed, and seeing his photographs large in the gallery encourages you to spend time with them. You can look at the same piece numerous times and then on the tenth time see something you didn’t see previously. There is also an immersive audio component of children playing in all these different languages. With schools from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East represented in the photographs, there’s an international perspective that makes it an ideal touring show. Also on view, starting on May 14, will be a selection of works by LaToya Ruby Frazier, in celebration of the Infinity Award for best publication awarded to The Notion of Family (Aperture, 2014).

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James Mollison and Jon Ronson on “Playground”

Photographer James Mollison and writer Jon Ronson recall their playground memories with Aperture Executive Director Chris Boot preceding the opening reception of the “Playground” exhibition at Aperture Gallery in New York.  Mollison photographs children at play in their school playgrounds, inspired by memories of his own childhood and how we all learn to negotiate relationships and our place in the world through play. Established writer and documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson wrote the foreword to “Playground”. With photographs from schools in countries including Argentina, Bhutan, Bolivia, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Nepal, Norway, Sierra Leone, the United Kingdom, and the U.S., Mollison also gives access for readers of all ages to issues of global diversity and inequality.

See the exhibition at Aperture Gallery through June 25th

 

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LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Curriculum

Growing up in Braddock, Pennsylvania, photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier saw firsthand the economic and environmental decline and racism that affected her industrial hometown, subjects she explores through a personal documentary approach. For twelve years, she photographed her mother, grandmother, and herself in the series of deeply evocative images contained in her book The Notion of Family, published by Aperture in 2014. Also a lecturer and professor, Frazier is among the most compelling new voices working within and expanding the tradition of documentary photography today. For Aperture‘s Summer 2015 issue, the editors asked Frazier to contribute to the magazine’s regular Curriculum column, where photographers discuss readings and works of art that have informed their thinking. On May 14, Aperture’s gallery in New York City will open an exhibition of Frazier’s, culled from The Notion of Family, which just received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography. This article also appears in Issue 7 of the Aperture Photography App, a new biweekly publication from Aperture: click here to download the free app.

Eve Arnold, Gordon Parks, 1964 © Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos

Gordon Parks, A Choice of Weapons, 1966

Gordon Parks’s memoir taught me the best reason to pick up a camera: “My deepest instincts told me that I would not perish. Poverty and bigotry would still be around, but at last I could fight them on even terms.” It is a story of strength, courage, honor—a will to survive and make a mark on history. His ability to express his disdain for poverty, racism, and discrimination in America through eloquent, beautiful, and dignified photographs is timeless. Any student struggling to understand why some photographers document humanity will gain insight from this autobiography.

Fred W. McDarrah, Jamaica Kincaid, New York, 1974 © The Estate of Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place, 1988

I’ve been fascinated by literature’s freedom to render the complexities of dark childhood memories and abject realities. Kincaid’s fictions, semiautobiographies, and multiple points of view are intensely rich and unapologetically evocative. Her ability to take on themes of patriarchal oppression, colonialism, race, gender, loss, adolescence, and ambivalence between mothers and daughters inspires me. Any reader who wants descriptions of familial relationships or a sense of human relationships to homeland, economy, and education could certainly glean universal themes from Kincaid.

Charles Burnett, film still from Killer of Sheep, 1977 © Charles Burnett and courtesy Milestone Film & Video

Charles Burnett, Killer of Sheep, 1977

My understanding of how to create atmosphere, mood, and narrative largely comes from my love of film and cinema—from Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, and Charles Burnett to Wong Kar-wai. I love showing my students the relationship between these filmmakers’ visual language and that of classic photographers, like Eugène Atget, August Sander, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, and Parks. With its soundtrack and lyrical visual language, Killer of Sheep is the ultimate masterpiece. Set in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, a portrait of American life is rendered as the protagonist Stan struggles with social class and disillusionment while working long hours at a slaughterhouse; the stress to generate financial stability strains relationships with his wife and close friends. The film is an incredible depiction of how we negotiate intimacy and how we are restricted by landscapes and labor.

Jason Moran, “Artists Ought to Be Writing,” from the album Artist in Residence, 2006

Sometimes when I’m editing in the studio, I play music by jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran. I was brought deeper into his music when I heard artist Adrian Piper’s voice in his song “Artists Ought to Be Writing.” While writing the text to accompany my photographs in my first book, I followed Piper’s instructions: “Artists ought to be writing about what they do and what kinds of procedures they go through to realize a work. . . . If artists’ intentions and ideas were more accessible to the general public, I think it might break down some of the barriers of misunderstanding between the art world and artists and the general public.”

Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, 1955

DeCarava and Hughes’s collaboration is a perfect example of how history can be reclaimed and redirected through storytelling and imagination. Hughes’s words take us through the eyes of a fictitious grandmother to reveal a representation and memory of Harlem that is at odds with the unloved depictions reported by mainstream media in the 1950s. Hughes’s last book, Black Misery (1969), is seldom discussed or quoted, but this line resonates with my work: “Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.”

Emory Douglas, Untitled, from Black Panther, February 17, 1970 © Emory Douglas and Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

New Museum survey, Emory Douglas: Black Panther, 2009

Though I speak primarily through photography, I am not limited to it. Occasionally, I work in video and performance. When I look at the artwork, illustrations, prints, and roles of Emory Douglas as a revolutionary artist and minister of culture for his community, I am reminded of Bertolt Brecht’s The Popular and the Realistic (1938): “There is only one ally against growing barbarism—the people, who suffer so greatly from it. It is only from them that one can expect anything. . . . .Anyone who is not a victim of formalistic prejudices knows that the truth can be suppressed in many ways and must be expressed in many ways.”

August Wilson, The Piano Lesson, 1990

I watch this play to understand the great migration from the South, self-worth, and how to put my cultural legacy to use creatively.

Albert and David Maysles, film still from Grey Gardens, 1975 © Maysles Films Inc., via Portrait Releasing Inc.

Albert and David Maysles, Grey Gardens, 1975

This is the film that helped guide me into my collaborations with my mother. Full of compassion and without judgment, this brilliant documentary takes cinema verité and psychological space to another dimension. Shot over a six-week period of time, the Maysles brothers’ encounters with Edie and Edith Beale are not shown in chronological order. This destabilizes the viewer’s sense of time and heightens the complexity of the Beales’ relationship. The passage of time is indicated through a gradual collapse of a dilapidated wall; at the beginning it’s a hole in the plaster, toward the middle the hole expands, and by the end it falls completely as a raccoon crawls out. This is a great example of how time can be used as metaphor and to build tension in a set of relationships.

Aperture magazine #219, “Tokyo,” Summer 2015, is coming soon. Tap here to subscribe.

The post LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Curriculum appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Issue 7 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. Inside Issue 7 our readers can find:

● Where in the World is Aperture? an interview with Aperture’s exhibitions manager, Annette Booth.

● From the upcoming Summer 2015 issue of Aperture magazine: LaToya Ruby Frazier’s favorite anythings

● An interview from The PhotoBook Review on Jason Fulford’s madcap book events

● An archival interview with Daido Moriyama

● A Q&A on Chance and Photography, a new book from Robin Kelsey that explores the accident and the camera

Every issue of the Aperture Photography App is free: select articles later appear here on the Aperture Blog. Click here to download the app today! 

The post Issue 7 of the Aperture Photography App is Now Available appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

David Wojnarowicz and Nan Goldin

In September of 1990, AIDS activist, writer, and artist David Wojnarowicz and photographer Nan Goldin, longtime friends, sat down for a three-hour conversation on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Their conversation was originally commissioned by Interview magazine and Brant Publications, and excerpts were originally published in Interview’s February 1991 issue. The following excerpt was published in Aperture #137, from the fall of 1994, in an issue solely dedicated to the work of Wojnarowicz. In 1991, Wojnarowicz had been in talks with Aperture’s editors to publish a book of his work but he died of AIDS in July 1992 before the project was completed; the editors then posthumously published Brush Fires in the Social Landscape, as both a book and as a monographic issue of the magazine. “Not since Aperture’s earliest years—before there was a book publishing program—has an issue of the magazine been entirely devoted to the work of one contemporary artist,” the editors wrote in that issue. This year, on the twentieth anniversary of its publication, Aperture is releasing a new edition of Brush Fires in the Social Landscape. This excerpt also appeared in Issue 6 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app.

Spreads from Aperture magazine #137. Photographs by Thomas Bollier

David Wojnarowicz: Nan is kvetching about the size of her calamari.

Nan Goldin: It’s tiny.

DW: They yank these squids out of the deep blue sea and . . .

NG: They’re like your sperm sculptures!

DW: Little mutant sperms! Nan’s eating mutant sperm at a fashionable Lower East Side restaurant.

NG: How old are you now? Thirty-six?

DW: I’m turning thirty-six tomorrow.

NG: Happy Birthday! My birthday’s the day after—I didn’t know we were born so close together. And now you have a new book, Close to the Knives. Tell me about the epilogue. You’ve said it’s your favorite piece of writing.

DW: Yeah. A few months ago, I went to Mexico and I was really sick. It was just after I found out that [the Reverend Donald] Wildmon had sent out that piece of appropriationist sex literature saying that it was mine—but I had to leave the next morning, I didn’t have a chance to see it. I was in the Yucatan. I was feeling as sick as a dog, and I was with Tom and we found a poster for a bullfight in some dive neighborhood. He wanted to go and I was like, “Ohhh.” I felt really sick, and I was lying in his hotel room with Walt Disney Mexican Mouse cartoons playing in Spanish, which really unnerved me. I really thought I was gonna lose my mind. And I was feeling unbelievably horny—in a sense that I did way in the past, in terms of something like a teenager . . . you know that kind of bottom-line, sidewalk lust? So I went for a walk and found this pool hall and watching some believably beautiful guy unload a truck. And if you know the scene, you can go in and see this old guy in the back who gives out the pool cues—and for zero money you can rent out a little chamber. It’s right next to the park, so that’s ideally where you meet the boys, none of whom can afford condoms, so it’s this major death scene waiting to happen.

I was feeling this intense lust, just standing on the street corner in a daze, having these thoughts of lustful sex, and . . . and it got very frustrating, so I went back and told Tom, “Okay let’s go to the bullfight.” I figured maybe blood would wake me up, or snap me out of this daze. And during this bullfight I kept this journal which was horrifying. I mean, I’d seen a bullfight before on TV in Mexico City, and there was one guy who killed the bull—I suddenly understood what the sport was. Because it was one of the most unbelievable movements of the male body through space, so extraordinarily beautiful that the death was like a climax. And it made perfect sense in a very profound way. But these guys were like horrendous bullfighters, and they were totally carving up these bulls in the ring. So while I was there I started writing this piece, and it jumps between all the events of my childhood, from my first sexual experience as a six- or seven-year-old kid to the experience of my father, who was completely brutal and sadistic, to all these images of violence that I remember as a child.

My earliest memory is of hearing a police siren go by. And I remember running blocks to follow it and when I got there there was this guy in a white T-shirt on a front lawn with a gun to a woman’s head. So my piece jumps in all these random violent scenes in Jersey, and then sexual scenes, and it’s interspersed with this tense buildup of the bullfight. I sat there and just notated every description and color and smell, all the dust and the heat. I wove in some of the fantasy stuff from the pool hall and the guy unloading the truck, following that through in my imagination and getting the key and going to the room and crawling across the bed at him . . .

NG: Listening to you it seems like there’s no difference for you between then and now; your visual and verbal memories are so acute. I read your story about your trip to the meteor crater and it was like a road movie. I had the best sex after reading it.

DW: Wow, that’s great! My strongest memories are always connected to really powerful images, images that I can drift on, that I can never forget. Years ago, a trucker told me that driving a truck was the one thing in the world that made the most sense for people to do because you’re essentially at rest in the seat of the truck, and you’re alone. You’re encapsulated by the form of the vehicle—but at the same time your landscape is forever changing, so it’s not the same thing as being at home. It’s almost like the perfect state of being, to be floating through a landscape and at rest at the same time. I always love that feeling of riding in a car, except that mental stuff gets very, very intense. Your brain starts chattering away. Plus it gets very sexual, very sensual. You start populating that car with men.

. . .

NG: You write for relief from your own perceptions, but is it also because you think its important to leave a record? I think America is the land of revisionist memory.

DW: Absolutely. My two biggest impulses for writing the book were: if some kid gets a hold of it and would feel less alienated, great. I really suffered as a teenager, because I never had any indication n that there was anything out there that reflected myself. But I also wanted to leave a record. Because once this body drops I’d like some of my experience to live on. It was a total relief to have put words to what I put words to, an enormous relief.

 

NG: How did you go from living on the streets to living on the Lower East Side?

DW: I went to this halfway house for ex-cons. They thought I was so desperate that I’d become a convict if they didn’t take me in. Then I worked in manual labor here in New York and in custodial jobs. I mean, the same shit I’m doing now, you know. [Laughing.] In the art world. Just shifting through society’s garbage.

NG: Were you writing at the time?

DW: Yeah. I’ve been writing since I got off the streets. I started out writing bad poems, and then I started with the monologues in my early twenties. I’ve also made things since I was a kid. I used to make sexual “Archie” comics out of collage and then throw them down the incinerator whenever I’d hear my family coming home.

 

NG: When did you start showing your work publicly?

DW: Around 1982. Some jerk-off in SoHo actually called up Peter Hujar and asked him if he knew who had done these stencils on these abandoned cars on the Lower East Side. When I lived on the Bowery, whenever there was a car wreck, they dragged the wreck right outside my apartment and they’d leave it there for eight or nine months. Then I discovered that if I stenciled these images of war all over the wrecks, they’d tow them overnight. So for a while, I did that, and then I started stenciling on the walls and then I went through SoHo and spray-painted all these gallery doors with burning houses. I was going these action installations, along with Julie Hair, where we took a hundred pounds of bloody cow bones and threw them down the staircase at Leo Castelli’s, and stenciled an empty plate and knife and a fork on the wall, and then we ran off. This was right in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. Nobody raised an eyelash.

Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz at Home, New York City, 1991 © Nan Goldin, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

 

NG: How do you feel about the art world right now?

DW: If the art world was reduced—if conditions in this country increase in the direction they’ve been going, and suddenly all art was made to look like tiny refrigerators, the art world wouldn’t falter for a moment. I think that the real power structure, the money structure, the boards of museums and institutions, 98 percent of these people would be happy to keep a market alive for small refrigerators. And those are the people who should be held accountable for the state of things in this country. They’ve never collected real culture in this country. Their mirror is completely tarnished. The only thing they reflect is their investments and their private collections.

NG: What would you like your work to do?

DW: I want to make somebody feel less alienated—that’s the most meaningful thing to me. I think part of what informs the book is the pain of having grown up for years and years believing I was from some other planet.

NG: A lot of people I know still see you as kind of a moral conscience for our time. How does that make you feel?

DW: I want people to hear me. I want to be understood and acknowledged to a certain extent. But do I think that something I say might have the weight to shift something? I don’t know.

NG: It does for me. It does for a lot of people.

DW: Good, but then you also have that effect on me. We can all affect each other, by being open enough to make each other feel less alienated. We all are able to have a profound effect on each other, a positive effect that sustains us. . . . But I ain’t no Jesus.

Tap here to learn more about the Aperture Magazine Digital Archive.

The post David Wojnarowicz and Nan Goldin appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Archive: David Wojnarowicz and Nan Goldin

In September of 1990, AIDS activist, writer, and artist David Wojnarowicz and photographer Nan Goldin, longtime friends, sat down for a three-hour conversation on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Their conversation was originally commissioned by Interview magazine and Brant Publications, and excerpts were originally published in Interview’s February 1991 issue. The following excerpt was published in Aperture #137, from the fall of 1994, in an issue solely dedicated to the work of Wojnarowicz. In 1991, Wojnarowicz had been in talks with Aperture’s editors to publish a book of his work but he died of AIDS in July 1992 before the project was completed; the editors then posthumously published Brush Fires in the Social Landscape, as both a book and as a monographic issue of the magazine. “Not since Aperture’s earliest years—before there was a book publishing program—has an issue of the magazine been entirely devoted to the work of one contemporary artist,” the editors wrote in that issue. This year, on the twentieth anniversary of its publication, Aperture is releasing a new edition of Brush Fires in the Social Landscape. This excerpt also appeared in Issue 6 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app.

Spreads from Aperture magazine #137. Photographs by Thomas Bollier

David Wojnarowicz: Nan is kvetching about the size of her calamari.

Nan Goldin: It’s tiny.

DW: They yank these squids out of the deep blue sea and . . .

NG: They’re like your sperm sculptures!

DW: Little mutant sperms! Nan’s eating mutant sperm at a fashionable Lower East Side restaurant.

NG: How old are you now? Thirty-six?

DW: I’m turning thirty-six tomorrow.

NG: Happy Birthday! My birthday’s the day after—I didn’t know we were born so close together. And now you have a new book, Close to the Knives. Tell me about the epilogue. You’ve said it’s your favorite piece of writing.

DW: Yeah. A few months ago, I went to Mexico and I was really sick. It was just after I found out that [the Reverend Donald] Wildmon had sent out that piece of appropriationist sex literature saying that it was mine—but I had to leave the next morning, I didn’t have a chance to see it. I was in the Yucatan. I was feeling as sick as a dog, and I was with Tom and we found a poster for a bullfight in some dive neighborhood. He wanted to go and I was like, “Ohhh.” I felt really sick, and I was lying in his hotel room with Walt Disney Mexican Mouse cartoons playing in Spanish, which really unnerved me. I really thought I was gonna lose my mind. And I was feeling unbelievably horny—in a sense that I did way in the past, in terms of something like a teenager . . . you know that kind of bottom-line, sidewalk lust? So I went for a walk and found this pool hall and watching some believably beautiful guy unload a truck. And if you know the scene, you can go in and see this old guy in the back who gives out the pool cues—and for zero money you can rent out a little chamber. It’s right next to the park, so that’s ideally where you meet the boys, none of whom can afford condoms, so it’s this major death scene waiting to happen.

I was feeling this intense lust, just standing on the street corner in a daze, having these thoughts of lustful sex, and . . . and it got very frustrating, so I went back and told Tom, “Okay let’s go to the bullfight.” I figured maybe blood would wake me up, or snap me out of this daze. And during this bullfight I kept this journal which was horrifying. I mean, I’d seen a bullfight before on TV in Mexico City, and there was one guy who killed the bull—I suddenly understood what the sport was. Because it was one of the most unbelievable movements of the male body through space, so extraordinarily beautiful that the death was like a climax. And it made perfect sense in a very profound way. But these guys were like horrendous bullfighters, and they were totally carving up these bulls in the ring. So while I was there I started writing this piece, and it jumps between all the events of my childhood, from my first sexual experience as a six- or seven-year-old kid to the experience of my father, who was completely brutal and sadistic, to all these images of violence that I remember as a child.

My earliest memory is of hearing a police siren go by. And I remember running blocks to follow it and when I got there there was this guy in a white T-shirt on a front lawn with a gun to a woman’s head. So my piece jumps in all these random violent scenes in Jersey, and then sexual scenes, and it’s interspersed with this tense buildup of the bullfight. I sat there and just notated every description and color and smell, all the dust and the heat. I wove in some of the fantasy stuff from the pool hall and the guy unloading the truck, following that through in my imagination and getting the key and going to the room and crawling across the bed at him . . .

NG: Listening to you it seems like there’s no difference for you between then and now; your visual and verbal memories are so acute. I read your story about your trip to the meteor crater and it was like a road movie. I had the best sex after reading it.

DW: Wow, that’s great! My strongest memories are always connected to really powerful images, images that I can drift on, that I can never forget. Years ago, a trucker told me that driving a truck was the one thing in the world that made the most sense for people to do because you’re essentially at rest in the seat of the truck, and you’re alone. You’re encapsulated by the form of the vehicle—but at the same time your landscape is forever changing, so it’s not the same thing as being at home. It’s almost like the perfect state of being, to be floating through a landscape and at rest at the same time. I always love that feeling of riding in a car, except that mental stuff gets very, very intense. Your brain starts chattering away. Plus it gets very sexual, very sensual. You start populating that car with men.

. . .

NG: You write for relief from your own perceptions, but is it also because you think its important to leave a record? I think America is the land of revisionist memory.

DW: Absolutely. My two biggest impulses for writing the book were: if some kid gets a hold of it and would feel less alienated, great. I really suffered as a teenager, because I never had any indication n that there was anything out there that reflected myself. But I also wanted to leave a record. Because once this body drops I’d like some of my experience to live on. It was a total relief to have put words to what I put words to, an enormous relief.

 

NG: How did you go from living on the streets to living on the Lower East Side?

DW: I went to this halfway house for ex-cons. They thought I was so desperate that I’d become a convict if they didn’t take me in. Then I worked in manual labor here in New York and in custodial jobs. I mean, the same shit I’m doing now, you know. [Laughing.] In the art world. Just shifting through society’s garbage.

NG: Were you writing at the time?

DW: Yeah. I’ve been writing since I got off the streets. I started out writing bad poems, and then I started with the monologues in my early twenties. I’ve also made things since I was a kid. I used to make sexual “Archie” comics out of collage and then throw them down the incinerator whenever I’d hear my family coming home.

 

NG: When did you start showing your work publicly?

DW: Around 1982. Some jerk-off in SoHo actually called up Peter Hujar and asked him if he knew who had done these stencils on these abandoned cars on the Lower East Side. When I lived on the Bowery, whenever there was a car wreck, they dragged the wreck right outside my apartment and they’d leave it there for eight or nine months. Then I discovered that if I stenciled these images of war all over the wrecks, they’d tow them overnight. So for a while, I did that, and then I started stenciling on the walls and then I went through SoHo and spray-painted all these gallery doors with burning houses. I was going these action installations, along with Julie Hair, where we took a hundred pounds of bloody cow bones and threw them down the staircase at Leo Castelli’s, and stenciled an empty plate and knife and a fork on the wall, and then we ran off. This was right in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. Nobody raised an eyelash.

Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz at Home, New York City, 1991 © Nan Goldin, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

 

NG: How do you feel about the art world right now?

DW: If the art world was reduced—if conditions in this country increase in the direction they’ve been going, and suddenly all art was made to look like tiny refrigerators, the art world wouldn’t falter for a moment. I think that the real power structure, the money structure, the boards of museums and institutions, 98 percent of these people would be happy to keep a market alive for small refrigerators. And those are the people who should be held accountable for the state of things in this country. They’ve never collected real culture in this country. Their mirror is completely tarnished. The only thing they reflect is their investments and their private collections.

NG: What would you like your work to do?

DW: I want to make somebody feel less alienated—that’s the most meaningful thing to me. I think part of what informs the book is the pain of having grown up for years and years believing I was from some other planet.

NG: A lot of people I know still see you as kind of a moral conscience for our time. How does that make you feel?

DW: I want people to hear me. I want to be understood and acknowledged to a certain extent. But do I think that something I say might have the weight to shift something? I don’t know.

NG: It does for me. It does for a lot of people.

DW: Good, but then you also have that effect on me. We can all affect each other, by being open enough to make each other feel less alienated. We all are able to have a profound effect on each other, a positive effect that sustains us. . . . But I ain’t no Jesus.

Tap here to learn more about the Aperture Magazine Digital Archive.

The post Archive: David Wojnarowicz and Nan Goldin appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Collecting the Japanese Photobook

Ryuichi Kaneko interviewed by Ivan Vartanian

Ryuichi Kaneko is a leading historian of Japanese photobooks, and over the course of four decades he has amassed a formidable collection of twenty thousand volumes, including magazines and catalogues. In his role as curator at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, from its nascency up until this year, he oversaw the development of the institution’s public collection. As a scholar, Kaneko has been an important figure in supporting and extending scholarship surrounding Japanese photography and photobooks. Ivan Vartanian, who guest edited the latest issue of The PhotoBook Review , spoke to him about how he became one of the first and most enduring champions of the Japanese photobook, the evolution of the form, and what makes a book irresistible. This article also appeared in Issue 6 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app.

Ivan Vartanian: You began collecting books at a time when no one else had interest in Japanese photobooks. How and why did you start?

Ryuichi Kaneko: It started in high school and university, when I was taking photographs and realized I possessed absolutely no talent for it. But I loved photography. My father was an amateur photographer, and after the war he worked as an editor at a fashion magazine, which influenced me too, with all the exposure to material it provided. Since I couldn’t make images, I thought intensely about what I could do that would connect me with the world of photography, and started to just consume and absorb whatever materials I could get my hands on. Photobooks were a vehicle for that.

The first Japanese photobook I ever purchased was Otoko to onna [Man and Woman, 1961] by Eikoh Hosoe. And the first book I purchased by a foreign photographer, in 1967 or ’68, was William Klein’s New York [1956]. Around that time, 1967 or ’68, I started to become acquainted with a lot of photographers, and by 1974 or ’75 I started to buy books actively.

Kazuhiko Motomura is a publisher and editor who made Robert Frank’s The Lines of My Hand [1972] with Yugensha. When I ordered a copy of the book, Motomura delivered it by hand to my door. And from there started a long friendship and a sort of mentorship. He introduced me to a slew of photographers, bookstores, and bookstore owners, particularly in the Kanda area of Tokyo. After that, Kanda became my library, where books and magazines could be bought. My passion became my mission.

And it was just about this time that independent galleries were operating in Tokyo. To the photographers in these places— which were hangouts as much as they were noncommercial exhibition spaces—I became known as the guy who had all these photobooks from Japan and the West. It was an opportunity, or excuse, if you like, to talk to photographers and be connected to the medium that I loved so much. For example, at Photo Gallery Prism, I met photographers Hitoshi Tsukiji, Kineo Kuwabara, and Hiroshi Yamazaki. At Image Shop Camp, I met Keizo Kitajima. These photographers were of the same generation as me. That was an important point because they had an antiestablishment way of thinking.

IV: So what was the experience of buying photobooks at that time?

RK: It wasn’t simple. There weren’t a lot of photobooks by Japanese photographers. And of those that were in existence, only a handful were worth buying, like Shomei Tomatsu’s Taiyo no empitsu [The pencil of the sun, 1975] or Kikuji Kawada’s Sacré Atavism [1971]. But there were several gems from the West: Lee Friedlander’s Photographs [1978], Garry Winogrand, Nathan Lyons, and Bruce Davidson, as well as Aperture’s Paul Strand and Walker Evans retrospectives. There was also Dorothy Norman’s book on Stieglitz, An American Seer [1973], which I went around and showed to everyone, and it changed our impression of Stieglitz. It was this process that led me to become interested in the history of photography, too.

IV: After the mid-1970s, with the proliferation of photobooks, were you able to keep up?

RK: I bought pretty much ninety percent of everything that was published then. I don’t think you can imagine this: I would go to Kanda twice a week, and then Waseda, to visit used bookstores. And of course Shinjuku’s Kinokuniya bookstore. Unlike now, when there is a surplus of books, at that time there weren’t many Japanese photobooks to buy. How could I use the ¥10,000 I had in my hand? There were days when I couldn’t find a single book to buy and would go home feeling dejected.

IV: Were there any other people buying photobooks at that time?

RK: No! There was no one else.

IV: So how did this culture of collecting books grow in Japan?

RK: It’s thanks to me and Kotaro Iizawa. He, too, was studying Japanese photo history, and when we eventually met we realized we were both doing pretty much the same thing at the same time. Iizawa often said that we needed to change the culture from the enjoyment of taking photographs to the enjoyment of looking at photographs. That was in the first half of the 1980s, just before I started working at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. But the culture of actually enjoying reading Japanese photobooks didn’t evolve until after the 1990s. The 1980s were about foreign photobooks, but I was a cheerleader for Japanese photobooks.

IV: Were there any dramatic shifts in the form of Japanese photobooks between the 1960s and the ’80s?

RK: No, except for the dramatic improvements in printing technique. It was something that became apparent later. There was gravure printing in the beginning, after the war, and then after the 1970s it was all offset printing. But there still wasn’t this sense that a photobook was a function of its printing. That would be entirely the influence of the American photobook, which was recognized in Japan in the 1980s.

IV: Japanese photobooks have special value as the vehicles by which a lot of Japanese photography has been seen by the West. Do you think some distortion has resulted from this, by not seeing the prints themselves and only seeing the work in the form of photobooks?

RK: In Japan the photobook has had special significance for photographers from the 1930s onward; from the 1950s to the 1970s, there was a widely accepted understanding that there were certain modes of expression that could only be achieved in the form of a photobook. The print was forgotten to a certain degree. And when it came to academic matters of collecting, which is what I did as a curator for the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the first selection of images was often based on what was in photobooks. Quite frankly, many Japanese photographers are quite unconcerned with how work is shown in a gallery setting because the photobook is already out in the world and circulating among people.

It is precisely because of this imbalance that Japanese photobooks have their unique sensibility and can achieve new levels of expression. A great example of this would be the 1963 version of Eikoh Hosoe’s Barakei, which was printed in gravure. You could cut those pages out of the book and frame them. One shot of Yukio Mishima staring into the camera at close range has not only become a symbol of that body of work, it has become iconic. So when the prints from that series are sold, that image gets prominence over the other images, and the book’s context and complexity get lost.

IV: So how about contemporary photobooks? Are you actively collecting those too?

RK: [laughs] To be totally frank, it’s no different from the situation I was facing back in the 1970s. It’s very difficult to find a book I feel I must own. There are a lot of books out there now, which is like a dream come true, but sadly only a few make it into my collection. There are few books that communicate an innate need to exist, or to even be a photobook to begin with. Then there are the books that you just take one look at and know, “I must own this.” That’s what I’m looking for when I visit bookstores.

Translation from Japanese by Ivan Vartanian.

Ivan Vartanian is a Tokyo-based independent curator and author as well as the founder of the imprint Goliga.

Ryuichi Kaneko is a critic, historian, and collector of photobooks. He has authored or contributed to numerous publications, including Independent Photographers in Japan 1976–83 (Tokyo Shoseki, 1989),The History of Japanese Photography (Yale University Press and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2003), Japanese Photobooks of

the 1960s and ’70s (Aperture, 2009), and Japan’s Modern Divide (J. Paul Getty Museum)

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