Innehållsförteckning för Summer 2015 från Aperture

Tokyo conjures a distinctive, if familiar, image: hypermodern and kaleidoscopic, a mutating urbanscape that is more Blade Runner than picturesque capital. Like any iconic city, Tokyo also exists in our mind’s eye as an idea. But Noi Sawaragi, one of Japan’s most influential art critics, speaking of the capital in these pages, punctures the idea that this ever-changing place can be neatly encapsulated. “Is Tokyo even a city at all?” he challenges, before reflecting on its diverse culture of image making. “There is very likely a connection between this lack of substance in Tokyo as a city and the scarcity of any single overarching theme or style that might define its photographic expression.” That diversity of expression is felt across this issue, Aperture’s second to focus on photography through the…

Growing up in Braddock, Pennsylvania, LaToya Ruby Frazier saw firsthand the economic and environmental decline and racism that affected her industrial hometown, subjects she explores through a personal documentary approach. For twelve years, she photographed her mother, grandmother, and herself in a series of deeply evocative images contained in her book The Notion of Family, published by Aperture in 2014. Also a lecturer and professor, Frazier is among the most compelling new voices working within and expanding the tradition of documentary photography today. Gordon Parks, A Choice of Weapons, 1966 Gordon Parks’s memoir taught me the best reason to pick up a camera: “My deepest instincts told me that I would not perish. Poverty and bigotry would still be around, but at last I could fight them on even terms.”…

In 1950, in the midst of Japan’s postwar economic recovery, the Ricohflex III premiered on the market. The world’s first mass-produced twin-lens reflex camera was met with phenomenal sales and catalyzed what would become a prolonged boom market for cameras. Magazines like Asahi Camera (1949–present) and Camera Mainichi (1954–85) emerged to educate this new demographic of photo-enthusiasts. While the bulk of content consisted of articles on technique, equipment reviews, and pictures submitted by amateur snappers, these magazines also published some of the most important photography of postwar Japan. Editorial stories by Shomei Tomatsu, Kishin Shinoyama, Daido Moriyama, Yutaka Takanashi, and Issei Suda may not have driven sales, but these photographers effectively challenged established ideas about the nature of the medium. Through their work, they argued that photography had the power…

Takashi Homma emerged in the 1990s as one of the leading photographers of his generation. After living in London, where he worked for the groundbreaking style and culture magazine i-D, Homma embarked on a number of projects of his own, resulting in a sequence of photobooks that engaged Japan’s capital, including Tokyo Suburbia (1998), Tokyo Children (2001), Tokyo and My Daughter (2006), and Tokyo (2008). He became known for his elegantly restrained compositions and understated color, and an aesthetic that seemed to have more in common with that of the American photographers Stephen Shore and Robert Adams than it did with previous generations of Japanese photographers, like Daido Moriyama, whose pictures looked intentionally blurry and distressed. Recently, however, in a radical departure from his earlier work, Homma has begun working…

Known for combining technical precision with intellectual rigor, Naoya Hatakeyama is one of the most distinctive voices in Japanese photography today, equally comfortable referencing Isaac Newton, Gustave Flaubert, or Jean-Paul Sartre while discussing his work as he is mentioning photographic precedents such as the San Francisco–based Group f/64. Whereas a previous generation in Japan used snapshot photography to explore subjectivity, Hatakeyama’s photographs, which are often shot with a large-format 4-by-5 camera, are characterized by an investigation into the nature of the medium itself. This does not mean his work is lacking in dynamism. Begun in 1995, the long-running series Blast is perhaps Hatakeyama’s most well-known. Made in collaboration with technicians and using a remotecontrolled camera, these photographs capture detonations at limestone quarries, freezing rocks and other debris as they are…

Baritone singer in his collegiate glee club. Developer of the cathode ray tube used for television. Part of the team appointed to separate uranium isotopes for the top-secret Manhattan Project. Consummate cruise-ship traveler. Acquaintance of Anaïs Nin, Gertrude Stein, and Allen Ginsberg. Thief. Photographer. Sculptor. Newspaperman. Waiter. Writer of advertising copy. High-school teacher. Literary avantgardist. Inventor of SciArt (a theoretical union of science and art). Resident, briefly, at a mental institution. Publisher of Henry Miller. Gallerist. Cultural entrepreneur. Author of more than eighty books. Subject of an extensive FBI file. Graphic designer. Pioneer of mail art. Would-be politician. Performance poet. Environmental campaigner. Cantankerous, cranky genius. No, this list is not a neo-Dada composite portrait, or an example of cut-up poetry. It is a brief summary of the episodic life of…

In the late 1960s, university students led massive protests in Tokyo and other major Japanese cities to try to reverse two internationally anticipated events of 1970. One was the renewal of Anpo, the 1952 U.S.–Japan Security Treaty, which positioned Japan as a strategic ally of the United States in Asia, allowing American troops to be stationed there. The other was the world’s fair, known as Expo ’70, in Osaka, themed “Progress and Harmony for Mankind” and designed to showcase Japan’s advanced economy and technology. Riled by the nation’s strengthening relations with the United States, students vigorously protested the Vietnam War and argued that the Japanese government was trying to cover up problems related to Anpo with the seemingly utopian Expo ’70. In 1970, when Anpo was automatically extended for ten…

Cycles of time and accumulation preoccupy Cozue Takagi, a young photographer based in Nakano, a city in Nagano Prefecture, in central Japan. Takagi begins her photographic practice by observing the world and collecting quotidian details from her daily life, but the real work happens later, when she reconfigures her snapshots—re-creating some and cropping others—to arrive at the vibrant, collaged pieces that have become her signature. The largest of these comprise upward of three hundred individual images. Takagi’s interest in layering through collage is grounded in a specific, if unexpected, point of reference: the ruins of Biwajima, an old castle near Nakano with a convoluted story of being built and overrun, a layering of historical narratives. After participating in an archaeological dig at this location in 2011, Takagi began to consider…

In Japan and internationally, Tokyo-based photographer Mayumi Hosokura is garnering a following for her quiet series that frequently mix nudes (of often androgynous models) with natural forms. As a literature student, Hosokura wrote her thesis on Provoke-era legend Takuma Nakahira before enrolling in the Photography Department at Nihon University College of Art and shifting her focus to the technical side of photography. The images featured on the following pages are from her recent series Transparency Is the New Mystery (2012), whose title is borrowed from a song by American indie musician Marnie Stern. The series builds on earlier projects shot in color that deployed similar tropes, but here Hosokura distills her work to the essentials, choosing to process the images as black and white, for instance, the better to hone…

Kikuji Kawada is one of Japan’s most celebrated postwar photographers. In 1959, Kawada—along with Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Ikko Narahara, Akira Sato, and Akira Tanno—founded the influential VIVO cooperative, which championed an expressive approach to documentary photography. He is perhaps best known for his now-iconic 1965 book The Map (or Chizu in Japanese), a disquieting exploration of the trauma of World War II. The book, designed by Kohei Sugiura, features images of stains burnt into the walls of Hiroshima’s A-Bomb Dome (now the Hiroshima Peace Memorial), as well as images related to the iconography of the American occupation. Kawada’s subsequent projects continued his interest in connecting the present with historical touchstones and shift between realism and abstraction; some observers have aptly described his work as a form of archaeology. Begun…

A mythical figure in the story of Japanese photography, Takuma Nakahira is a founder of Provoke (Purovoku), the short-lived experimental magazine that featured photographers like Daido Moriyama working in the are, bure, boke (grainy, blurry, out-of-focus) style of the late 1960s. His extensive writings explore photography’s capacity to probe the shape-shifting contours of postwar Japanese society. Nakahira destroyed his own negatives in 1973, and he suffered a traumatic loss of memory in 1977, events that have contributed to his relative obscurity outside of Japan. In the following pages, we offer two perspectives on this vital figure: scholar Franz Prichard introduces Nakahira as a photographer and writer; and curator Matthew S. Witkovksy, who is currently planning a major exhibition on Provoke-era photography, unpacks Nakahira’s landmark photo-installation Circulation, staged at the 1971…

At his retrospective in London a decade ago, Nobuyoshi Araki’s presence was likened to a tornado. Indeed, as photographers go, Araki is something of a storm. His voluminous output now forms a library unto itself: more than five hundred books of his photographs have been published since the 1960s. Over the course of his career, Araki’s sharp and libidinous eye has garnered a global cult following; he has incited controversy for his signature kinbaku (a Japanese form of bondage) images of kimonodraped models bound with rope. A tension between Eros and Thanatos is at the center of his work—the weight shifting to the latter as Araki ages. He is seventyfour and recently lost sight in his right eye, but in his work he shows no sign of slowing down. For…

Just a few years ago, Daisuke Yokota was running off zines on the copier at his local 7-Eleven; now, he is a leader of Japanese photography on the international scene. Yokota is best known for his black-andwhite images and their eerie surface effects, which he realizes through a process he developed during an extended period when he was too sick to leave his apartment. He uses intentionally crude processing techniques—overdeveloping his film, holding it up to flame, using overheated water—to produce his signature distortions. The violence that Yokota inflicts on his film has perhaps contributed to his popularity. His process degrades his images, leaving them grainy and high in contrast—an image of a tunnel, for instance, is practically reduced to an abstract composition. Such degradation allows his work to be…