Maki: (A) Japan Somewhere

    Maki’s images in Japan Somewhere (Zen Foto Gallery), produced over a fourteen-year period feel anxious and compressed. Though specific to one country, the Frenchman’s images feel anything but declarative. They feel ambulatory, intrepid,  and often chaotic as if shot in a constant state of momentum and high velocity. The frames are heavily compressed […]

Mayumi Hosokura’s New Skin

  “This ‘gendering’ includes everything from one’s awareness of their own individual body, to global political and social issues (the feminine pose, the masculine blue colour, the ‘masculinity’ of war)”     Mayumi Hosokura’s New Skin begins with a single quote on its inside cover. It is a quote by Donna Haraway, from her 1988 […]

Kenta Cobayashi: CHROMATIC ANGULAR CACOPHONY

Professional photographers are typically trained to hide the mutability of digital images, covering up their handiwork to make their subjects look perfect, moreso than reality itself. Cobayashi toys with this mutability.   Swirled up buildings, highways and hair all come together in an ecstatic mix of street fashion-shoot, slice-of-life and cityscape. You can trace the […]

Daisuke Morishita:A Raking Trilogy of Indexical Shadows

  “Many photographers will know that moment when they cross the path of the sun beaming down from a fifth story window-some will not even see it, they will feel the change of luminescence on their cheek, their hair will feel warmer as they pace”     The is a debilitating moment for many photographers […]

Guillaume Simoneau: Murder as Legacy

“Guillaume Simoneau is a not a cannibal, but his book Murder (MACK), is an ode to Fukase’s legendary status and particularly his book Karasu/Ravens. Murder is a devotional hymn, or a phantom limb added to the mythology of the Japanese artist”     Inherent or Mythological Propagandas   One of photography’s less considered functions is […]

Martin Stöbich: Beirut / Tokyo 東京 and one picture of Mt. Fuji / Happy in the U.A.E.

“The way a photographer “sees” and commits to an image is through experience. These experiences have very little to do with the camera and are built up over years of living-these experiences and the years that sponsor them are not always the glorious nostalgic highlights that we remember in their honey-dipped form, but are also formed of tragedy, comedy and a resistance to our inside force of direction”.

Masahisa Fukase: Family Enshrined

  “Times change, we orchestrate ourselves to different locations and yet with nostalgia nothing need be lost. It can be found again. We can consider the death of an idea as being flexible to finality, but that is a different conversation”.     We tend to enshrine people and ideas with a certain sense of […]

Interview with Kazuyoshi Usui: Projecting Showa

“These poor cities are nevertheless radiating vivid colours, as if bolstering up daily lives with significant visual appeal. I see their desperation to live, to the point of feeling pains. I find it enormously beautiful.”

‘Daido Tokyo’ at Fondation Cartier (2016)

Moriyama admits that repetition is his way of working, and that his impulse to reproduce his surroundings today is much the same as it was when he got his first camera, in junior high.