The exhibition includes ca. 30 photographers from the USA and Europe from the 1960s until today.
“Photography Calling!” is a great title, but based on the title I guess Asian photography and especially Japanese photography didn’t make enough noise, because it wasn’t heard by the curators of the show.
The exhibition PHOTOGRAPHY CALLING! conducts in a contrapuntal dialogue with the works of younger photographers a discussion on the documentary in photography. The exhibition poses questions concerning traditions, relationships and differences: how, for example, does Diane Arbus formulate her question about the middle of American society in New York towards the end of the 1960s, and how does Boris Mikhailov answer this question in Germany of 2008? How do Robert Adams and John Gossage depict the changes in the American landscape under the effect of civilization – And what is the contemporary answer to the male voyeuristic gaze in Winogrand’s photographs of New York women? Is there an Eastern European answer, albeit from a different time and tradition, to the self-portraits of Lee Friedlander of the 1960s and 1970s? [Quote: Sprengel Museum]
The exhibition which wants to “conduct in a contrapuntal dialogue on the documentary in photography” follows the old world view until the end of the 1990’s that ignored Asian photography, and especially Japanese photography, completely. The above formulated questions show, that American photographers are being seen almost exclusively as the primary inventors of new positions in documentary photography.
Of course Arbus, Adams, e.g., are major photographers whose work was extremely influential, but to talk about documentary photography while ignoring ‘game changers’ like Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Daido Moriyama, Yutaka Takanashi and Nobuyoshi Araki is in my opinion an outdated view on the history of photography.
Lecture on Japanese photography and the atomic bomb @Le Bal, Paris
On Saturday, April 30, I will have lecture at Le Bal:
Beyond description - Japanese photography and the Atomic bomb. Remarks on the series “11:02 Nagasaki” by Shomei Tomatsu, “Kamaitachi” by Eikoh Hosoe and “The Map” by Kikuji Kawada.
Symposion: “JAPON : REPRÉSENTER LA CATASTROPHE” April 30 - May 1, 2011 @ Le Bal, Paris
Pendant deux jours, LE BAL invite historiens, anthropologues, critiques et créateurs à s’interroger sur la représentation par les artistes japonais et les media des catastrophes naturelles, technologiques, politiques qui ont marqué l’histoire du Japon.
Shomei Tomatsu: “Atomic Bomb Damage: Wristwatch Stopped at 11:02, August 9, 1945”, 1961
Was John Szarkowski the most influential person in 20th-century photography?
This question headlines an article by Sean O’Hagan in the Guardian. O’Hagan writes:
An insightful critic as well as a visionary curator, Szarkowski filled New York’s Museum of Modern Art with the colour photography of William Eggleston, and championed the transgressive work of Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander. Everyone who cares about photography is in his debt. …. As a writer, Szarkowski was innovative; as a curator, he was revolutionary. In 1967, during the so-called Summer of Love, he curated a show called New Documents at Moma. It featured the work of three relatively unknown photographers: Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand. … At Moma, Szarkowski also hosted challenging shows by pioneering European photographers like Lartigue, Brassai and Cartier-Bresson. … @guardian.co.uk
O’Hagan of course mentiones the famous controversy in regard to the first William Eggleston exhibition at the MOMA (the New York Times declared it the worst show of the year), but those who follow my writings know that my angle is not on Western photography.
And in this case I just would like to remind of the fact that John Szarkovski also curated the seminal exhibition “New Japanese Photography” in 1974. In my opinion the qualitity of the selected artists/works - among others Ken Domon, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Shomei Tomatsu, Kikuji Kawada, Hiromi Tsuchida, Masahisa Fukase, Ikko Narahara, Eikoh Hosoe and Daido Moriyama - and the essays by Szarkowski and his co-curator Shôji Yamagishi set the benchmark for all Western exhibitions and writings on Japanese photography to follow.
Masahisa Fukase: Yoko Fukase at the MoMA opening of “New Japanese Photography”, 1974
Essay on Shomei Tomatsu by Minoru Shimizu
We have just finished our Shomei Tomatsu exhibition and working for some weeks amongst and with some of the icons of the history of world photography was a fantastic experience.
The last two weeks I was so busy with our new show on Yutaka Takanashi (the works will be online soon) and the current Art Cologne fair that I forgot to post this three part essay on Shomei Tomatsu by the critic Minoru Shimizu published in ART-iT:
Minoru Shimizu: Shomei Tomatsu: Hues and Textures of Nagasaki exhibition
