Japanese Photography at a New York Exhibition

Hiroh Kikai - I've always wanted to be different

The International Center of Photography in New York (Avenue of Americas, between 42nd and 43rd Streets) is hosting a show of Japanese contemporary photo. Roberta Smith has the story in today's NY Times. Here are some images, with excerpts from the article of Roberta Smith:

Hiroh Kikai - A Tattoo Artist and His Son

Hiroh Kikai, born in 1945, is a kind of August Sander without a studio. Since 1973 he has roamed the Asakusa district of Tokyo, briefly interviewing and then taking black and white photographs of strangers who pose themselves against the blank walls of the Sensoji Temple.

Masayuki Yoshinaga - Ageha 24 Aoko 23, 2006

Naoki Kajitani - Red Box, 2006

Naoki Kajitani - Nagasaki, 2006

In colorful but deserted images of an entertainment district near Osaka, Naoki Kajitani shows the Japanese love of artifice in society’s tawdrier sectors in neon signs advertising drink or exotic dancers; a display of pornographic magazines or a shot of a lone but red kiosk plastered with posters.

Risaku Suzuki - Kumano, 1997

Risaku Suzuki’s images rarely stress the human presence, although you feel it everywhere, as the images take you along roads and through deserted squares, as if on a kind of journey.

Makoto Aida - Bonsai, 2008

The bonsai shoe drops with Makoto Aida, who specializes in making and photographing sculpture that fuses bonsai gardening with young girls. Described as a maverick, Mr. Aida forgoes the catalog interview for a long, amusing and often touching autobiographical ramble that begins, I am from a yakuza family.

Naoya Hatakeyama - River Series, 1993

Naoya Hatakeyama - Joy of Giving Something, 1996

Naoya Hatakeyama, quietly gives the show its center of gravity, with large color images that push fairly rugged documentary subjects toward artifice. A photograph of a lime quarry blast shows rock fragments hurtling outward in a nearly perfect orb, and images of Tokyo buildings taken from water level in a concrete-walled river qualify as accidental Cubism. A wall covered with 96 views of Tokyo taken from the tops of high-rises over 16 years shows a world carpeted with mostly gray buildings. Changing light seems to be the subject of the images, which sometimes are taken from the same location. But then you realize that the images have been taken years apart and that they also record the city’s changing architecture.

Yukio Nakagawa - Eyelashes, 1976

Yukio Nakagawa - Destiny, 1988

As a master of ikebana, Yukio Nakagawa, who was born in 1918, has a long experience with the tension between natural and artificial, and backed into photography while using it to document his work. His arrangements are Surreal temporary sculpture.


(Contemporary Art)

(New York, New York)