Reading Shortlist 2.13.14

© Issei Suda, GINZAN-ONSEN YAMAGATA (FROM FUSHIKADEN), 1976

The Reading Shortlist is an occasional post with an eclectic listing of recommended sites, readings and links. A recommendation does not necessarily suggest an agreement with the contents of the post. For previous shortlists, please visit the site links page.

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Colors Magazine, All Official Portraiture of North Korea's Reigning Kim Family Is Made by Mansudae Art Studio. A little about how to become an official North Korean painter of Kim Jung-un images, North Korean symbology and Mansudae's (generally disastrous) excursions into African public sculpture projects.

Marc Feustel, Amercian Suburb X, Takashi Homma: Adrift in the City of Superflat. Feustel is one of my favorite online writers. He's obviously very well-informed about East Asian photography and he combines clean text with pinpointing ideas and issues. Here he talks about Homma as one of the photographers in the post-Provoke era who searched for a different photography vocabulary to explore the explosion of suburbs and modernization projects in Tokyo after the 1980s economic boom.

John Foster, The Design Observer Group, The Renewed Art of Embroidered Photographs. Here Foster presents both historic embroidered postcards as well as the work of two contemporary photographers who have revived the practice, Maurizio Anzeri and Hinke Schreuders, whose work is below.

© Hinke Schreuders, 

Fotografía Magazine. “Photography is wandering in the universe by yourself” – From a letter by Sergio Larrain. Larrain gives advice to his nephew, who wants to become a photographer, about where to start.

Interview with Judith Joy Ross. Ross speaking about her beginnings in photography, her experience under the dark cloth, meeting John Szarkowski, her relationship with her subjects and her personal reasons for developing her various projects. The interview was done in connection with her exhibition at Foundation A Stichting.

Video still from Interview with Judith Joy Ross

Pasaporte al Arte. ¿Qué está sucediendo con la fotografía en Colombia? Colombian photographers Jorge Panchoaga, Santiago Escobar-Jaramillo and Federico Rios organized a talk at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Medellín on the contemporary photography landscape in Colombia as a response to the series Alec Soth and I have been running on the question. In Spanish. Better audio quality coming next week.

Louisiana Channel, Dayanita Singh, Stealing in the night. Interview with Singh about her project based on a burglary in which the burglars stole her exposed rolls of film from under her bed.

Issei Suda at Charles A. Hartman Fine Art in Portland, Oregon. Hat tip to Kevin Thrasher - I'm enjoying getting to know Suda's work.

TateShots: Lewis Baltz. Can you tell I'm watching lots of photo videos these days? One more video interview, this time with Baltz about his start in photography and his reasons for photographing, the role of the viewer in art, photography as the only "deductive art" and the world as divided between those who like Matisse and those who like Duchamp.

A Question About: Provoke

The question: What was Provoke magazine and why was it important?

The respondent: Marc Feustel is an independent curator, writer and blogger based in Paris. A specialist in Japanese photography, he is the author of Japan: A Self-Portrait, Photographs 1945-1964 (Flammarion, 2004) and the founder of Studio Equis, an organisation devoted to broadening access to the visual arts between different cultures, with a focus on the relationship between Japan and the West. He writes for several photographic publications including European Photography, Foam, Fantom, Look and VU MAG and blogs at www.eyecurious.com.

The response: Provoke was a magazine founded in Japan in 1968 by the photographer and writer Takuma Nakahira, the poet Takahiko Okada, the photographer Yutaka Takanashi and the art critic Koji Taki (although Daido Moriyama is maybe the name most commonly associated with Provoke, he didn't come on board until the second issue of the magazine). Araki famously said that he was "jealous of Provoke" and wanted to join them but wasn't allowed. Although it was very short-lived, lasting only three issues, it came to define a generation of Japanese photography. The style associated with Provoke was known as are, bure, bokeh (rough, blurry, out-of-focus), a style which lasted far beyond Provoke's short lifetime and which is still used by many photographers today. Beyond the are, bure, bokeh aesthetic, the philosophy of the magazine was based on the same rough, disruptive approach, mirroring the extremely turbulent social and political climate of the late 1960s. Rather than the magazines itself, Provoke is maybe best characterised by two books by Provoke photographers: Moriyama's Shashin yo sayonara (Bye Bye Photography) and Takuma Nakahira's Kitarubeki Kotoba no Tameni (For a Language to Come). Both of these books were an attempt to stretch the limits of the language of vocabulary and to break the existing mould of photography.

Provoke was undoubtedly important, but sometimes I think its importance is overstated as there are many other dynamic periods in Japanese photography (both before and after Provoke), that receive far less attention. For example Shomei Tomatsu, Kikuji Kawada, Ikko Narahara and other photographers of the generation just before Provoke had already rejected the objective associated with documentary photography in the post-war years, creating a "subjective documentary" that laid the ground for the photographers of the Provoke generation. Nonetheless the impact of Provoke on Japanese photography is undeniable. Takashi Homma, one of the most prominent photographers in Japan today, compares the photographic landscape after Provoke to a "burned field," likening it's impact to that of an atomic bomb.