Rei Sato, "Sun"

I don't have this book, but I want it — check out its microsite with many preview images. It costs 80 bucks here in the states! I'll have to pick it up on my next visit to Japan.

Rei Sato also has a show up in NYC right now through August 8.

Moriyama & Araki

A couple of weeks ago I went on a small binge of photo book-buying. Over the course of a weekend, I bought Nobuyoshi Araki's Subway Love, Daido Moriyama's Shinjuku 19XX-20XX and the latest issue of Hamburger Eyes. I don't have much to say about Hamburger Eyes except that it's the photo magazine San Francisco deserves.

The Araki and Moriyama books provoked a lot more thoughts for me. These two are both two "gods" of Japanese photography. I might be wrong, but I’m pretty sure Moriyama only works in black and white. Araki uses color, but Subway Love is all black and white. The X’s in Shinjuku 19XX-20XX correspond to 67 and 04; the Araki book is from 1963-72.

Subway Love is a collection of photographs that Araki took while riding around on the Tokyo subway after work. He would use a wide-angle lens, and wait until there was a bump in the train to disguise the sound of the shutter. According to his interview at the back of the book, he'd try to wait until people were yawning or picking their nose until shooting them ("it’s the things that people don’t want photographed that are interesting"). He also relates that every so often, people would get mad and take him to the subway police. (They once asked him "why are you taking pictures when there’s nothing special happening?") It was pretty brave of him to shoot people on the subway – pointing a camera at someone isn't the easiest thing to do – but the book gives you a sense of his compulsion to shoot. Some pages show entire contact sheets, others display a few consecutive frames. You can follow his eye.

click for full page view

So while Araki was in people's faces on the subway, the Moriyama book is very much about surface. The first image of the book sums it up: it's taken at night, of a small parking lot with a couple of rain-soaked cars. There's a pool of water that shows up as entirely black, except for the stark white reflection of a sign advertising 100 yen parking. Another image is of shadows on a tiled building, another shows a thin line of daylight running between two buildings. People show up in these pictures, but they're not really the subjects. These pictures aren’t actually from the book but they were shot in Shinjuku anyway. The first and third pictures are very representative of the book.

It's impossible for me to look at Subway Love without thinking of Araki's later photographs. He became famous as a "bad boy" photographer for taking tons of pictures of naked Japanese women, in bondage or otherwise. There’s a link between the gaze on the subway and his later stuff. He became something of a lecherous old man, but I admire the way that he let his will to photograph take precedence above all other things. Both of these guys have been in my head lately: Araki for more so for his attitude towards photography, Moriyama for his style. There are a lot of pictures in his book that are just flat out blurry, or where the contrast is pushed really far. It makes me want to take more risks with processing.

I’m thinking of not taking color pictures for a little while. Black and white is so much easier to control.

Wakaba Noda, "Making a Map"

I received my copy of Wakaba Noda's "Making a Map" a couple of weeks ago. First things first, I like it a lot. It also feels very personal to me. Maybe it's because I'm the same age (born in 84 baby) as Wakaba Noda, and it seems like I understand things visually in the same way that he does, even if I'm not able to represent them as clearly. There's a world-making -- or would that be map-making? -- innocence in what's left out of the frame, which is what will strike me first when I return to this book in five or ten years and consider my experience of looking at it now. Let me see if I can explain this "world-making innocence."

The images in this book are all very carefully composed; in many cases there's just a landscape broken up by something very small. A grove is interrupted by a young couple, an electrical tower perches on a hillside, a black speck of an airplane dots a gray sky. There's rarely any clutter in the frame, so your eye is always directed to the "subject" of the photo, even when it only takes up a tiny part of the frame. These images are quite pastoral, which is where the world-making comes in: there's not much that says "2008" about this book. Even when the subject matter is closer to "home," as it were, there's a clear, abstracting distance: an airport scene looks to have been taken from the terminal, and a cityscape from the observation tower.

These images don't convey notions of technology or progress; they continue the meditation of the other photos. (It makes sense that there's no text presented with the images.) It feels to me like Wakaba Noda put these images together to make as strong an aesthetic statement as possible, which I appreciate, because that's really all I'm trying to work out right now. As a "young internet-savvy person interested in photography," this speaks to me a lot more than the majority of the work by "young internet photographers" out there, i.e. "lifestyle" photography as you call this photography? has named it.

Images from the book are at Wakaba Noda's site

The book provoked some interesting questions for me as an object. In particular, it was strange to have already seen a number of the images from the book posted to various photography blogs before holding it in my hands. You can basically look at the whole book online without buying it. Photography is about surprising; what expectations should I have had as I opened it up? Should I have expected it to present something 'new' to me? Does it take away from the experience of a book (where the photographer controls the presentation) to have already seen some of the images in a blog setting? I think to a certain extent, yes, but on the other hand, I found Farewell Books through the internet.

"A book, any book, is for us a sacred object," says Borges. Are we now in danger of saying: "farewell, books!"? Possibly, but with more honest publications like this, I don't see why books shouldn't continue to fare pretty well indeed.

New cartography

I just ordered a copy of Making a Map by Wakaba Noda from Farewell Books, a small press in Sweden. This is their fifth book, and it costs $26 shipped.

Noda makes a map of a world not defined by geography, but by the possibilities that photography offers.

That sounds good to me, and frankly it looks awesome. You can find a few preview images on Farewell's site, and a whole lot more on the photgrapher's own page. Farewell's last two books sold out, so you might want to jump on this one quickly. (The book just came out today - MCV MCV live on the scene in actual blog-time.)