Jörg Colberg: Review: Asakusa Portraits by Hiroh Kikai
These are exciting times for contemporary photography, with vast amounts of new work to be seen, vast numbers of books published, vast numbers of young photographers emerging. Looking back over the past few years, one thing appears to be unchanged, though: Only every so often, one encounters photography that has the ability to stop one in its tracks, that makes everything else disappear for a moment. Those moments are to be cherished, especially since they're so rare, so unpredictable.
I do remember the last such moment very clearly. At the Heavy Light show, ICP's recent survey of contemporary Japanese photography, I discovered the photography of Hiroh Kikai, or actually more accurately his "Asakusa Portraits". I went to see the show twice (something which I almost never do), in part because of the work. The second time, I was with two photographer friends (each with lots of big shows and several books on their respective CVs), and they both reacted to "Asakusa Portraits" the way I did: They were completely mesmerized…
Текст:
http://www.jmcolberg.com/weblog/2008/09 ... .html#more
Ссылка на книгу (и презентацию):
Asakusa Portraits, Hiroh Kikai
by ICP
Steidl
The Asakusa quarter of Tokyo was once home to the city’s historic pleasure palaces, and today embraces a stubbornly independent popular culture that encompasses traditional comedy theater and houses of erotic entertainment. Asakusa attracts outcasts from Japan’s modern consumer society and is also the home of the famous Senso-ji temple, which attracts floods of tourists from around the country. Over the past two decades, Hiroh Kikai has created an extensive and unforgettable series of street portraits from the enormous flow of people passing through
the district. Posed against the bare walls of the Senso-ji temple, these strong, severe, lonely studies radiate a shared sense of hard-won, idiosyncratic individuality. The photographs are accompanied by Kikai’s own pithy, sometimes humorous descriptions of his subjects. Taken together, Kikai’s Asakusa portraits amount to a classic meditation upon the timeless complexities of the human condition.
http://steidlville.com/books/709-Asakus ... Kikai.html
Fugitive Vision: Musings from a trip to Japan (III) Kikai:
How important is it for an artist to stake out new visual territory? Arnold Schoenberg once said that there's a lot of great music left to be written in C major. I would transpose that quote to photography by saying that there are a lot of great portraits left to be taken in black and white.
I bow again to Christopher Phillips for introducing me to the work of Hiroh Kikai (for a really good Kikai overview, go to Wikipedia site - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroh_Kikai ). I was immediately drawn to the work, but I discounted it because it was presented in the nostalgic vernacular of silver/gelatin, black & white prints. I had this argument with myself throughout the Japan trip. I saw many Japanese "versions" of Aaron Siskind, William Klein, Harry Callahan, etc, etc. Certainly Mr. Kikai's work is in, at worst, a strong artistic legacy that starts with August Sander and stretches through Lisette Model to Diane Arbus…
http://fugitivevision.blogspot.com/2007 ... kikai.html
Photography Tour to Japan #2:
Asakusa and Asakusa Portrait by Hiroh Kikai
Hiroh Kikai is a photographer from the Yamagata prefecture in the northern part of Japan. Influenced by a background in philosophy and the works of Diane Arbus, he has been working on this project since 1973. Titled “Asakusa Portrait,” Kikai’s portraits show people with peculiarities and sometimes subtle uniqueness against a simple backdrop of the wall in the Senso-ji.
Right now, Kikai’s images are shown as a part of an exhibition titled “Heavy Light” at International Center of Photography in NY. The exhibition attempts to show a segment of contemporary Japanese photographers whose work is fresh to US. In the show, 16 prints of Kikai’s portraits are featured. In the review of the exhibition by Roberta Smith in the NY Times, she particularly noted the excellence of his images…
( Ссылка на страницу Hiroh Kikai http://fotonoma.jp/photographer/2007_02kikai/index.html )
http://japanphototour.projectbasho.org/ ... roh-kikai/
Википедия (большая статья, ссылки): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroh_Kikai
Hiroo Kikai “Persona”
http://japan-photo.info/blog/2006/06/25 ... i-persona/
Studio Equis: Hiroh Kikai
Kikai studied studied philosophy under Sadayoshi Fukuda at Hosei University in Tokyo. He began to take photographs when the influential editor Shoji Yamagishi showed him photographs by Diane Arbus in 1969. The Hasselblad camera that he bought at the time is the camera that he stlll uses today.
Kikai worked for Doi Technical Photo in Tokyo from 1973 to 1976 in order to improve his darkroom skills. He became a freelance photographer in 1984. Living close to Asakusa in Tokyo, he often spent time there and the area became the location for a series of portraits that he has been shooting for over 30 years. Kikai’s other photographic subjects include working and residential neighbourhoods in and near Tokyo, and street scenes in India and Turkey.
Kikai has had solo exhibitions across Japan, in Kraków, Poland, and in San Francisco. His prints are held by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and the Center for Creative Photography (University of Arizona, Tucson). In 2009 a retrospective of his work will be held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
Презентация:
http://www.studioequis.net/gallery.php? ... tistID=321
http://www.studioequis.net/showArtist.php?artistID=321
Hiroh Kikai ранее:
http://forum.znyata.com/viewtopic.php?p=41685#41685
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