As promised last week, and given that I am in Tokyo this weekend, I wanted to have a quick look at my two book purchases from the Obscura Festival in Georgetown; Masako Tomiya’s ‘Tsugara’ and Hajime Kimura’s ‘Tokyo Etude’. These are very different books both physically and stylistically and they provide a very interesting contrast on contempory Japanese photography. First up Masako and her debut book ‘Tsugara’.

Tsugara

Before I start to speak about the book itself a quick cautionary note about the illustrative shots that I take to give some flavour of the content and style, these are simple shots taken with my small point and shoot and saved down to lower resolution for the blog. I have neither the capability or patience to reproduce the shots exactly as they appear and its difficult to show the delicacy of Masako’s printing in her book so please bear that in mind and it might be best to go to her website to see the photos reproduced there or better still, buy the book and see the quality for yourself.

Now that I have that off my chest, on to the book itself. What I like about the book pairing reviewed this week is that they are both books by young, emerging Japanese photographers yet they show a contemporary view and development of more traditional Japanese styles and themes. They also to my mind have a very male and female orientation and that again makes for an interesting contrast. Masako’s book was shot over eleven years and Tsugaru is the place where she was born and raised and I believe that connection is extremely important to the delicate and for me, very feminine style of the book.

Something that really stands out about the book to me is its pacing and the sense of memory and passing time that Masako has created here. I don’t think that you can do that in short projects or controlled concepts, it takes time and lots of shooting over repeated visits to achieve that feel. Masako does of course use the vehicle of seasons to support that effect and that is I believe entirely appropriate and I am encouraged that the book ends on a new beginning and traditional blossom rebirth for its last photo. Throughout the book though is the sense of closeness to the land and its contours and movements shown with a light and delicate touch.

I think its the delicacy and lack of volume in the photographs that enchants me about the book as a whole. There are no attention seeking shots in here that disrupt or don’t play their part in creating the overall mood and timeless sensibility of the book. I read Vanessa WInship say somewhere that she didn’t like ‘shouty’ shots and I get a similar sense of flow and lulling quietness from this book because of that.

As you can tell, this is a book that I have enjoyed and I really appreciated seeing the large scale prints in Masako’s exhibition which were very impressive. There is something wondrous to me about large, nicely printed square photographs and I visited the show several times because of that.
There are also unfortunately for me some short passages and a number of individual shots in the book that in my opinion fall well below the standard of her best work and thats a shame but I can imagine that Masako had a big challenge on her hands to try not to duplicate or overdo themes and they don’t block the flow or spoil the overall effect so I think it would be churlish to dwell on them rather than focus on what works well in the book.

I hope this short look at Tsugara gives at least a little insight into the book and I wish I had spoken more to Misako about the book when I met her but it takes me a while to absorb things and I had to read the book and visit the show a number of times to be able to form my own views on it.

All in all then a very nice book and a great debut for Masako, her development and, in a way modernising, of some more traditional Japanese themes creates a delicate and sensitive relationship with the land, nature and of course its people through her vision. I am interested to see what else she is up to and I hope we don’t have to wait another eleven years for her next book.

Now to the second book in the review this week and it’s Hajime Kimura’s Tokyo Etude.

Tokyo Etude

As I said at the introduction, the lovely thing about the two books reviewed this week is how different they are in construction, pace, mood and purpose.
Tokyo Etude’s creator Hajime is also a young emerging Japanese photographer and he is developing a reputation for his delightful and very personal handmade books of which Tokyo Etude is a very fine example. I first came across him and his work at last years excellent IPA organised photo book fair and I could kick myself for not immediately buying some of the work that Hajime had on show, by the time I got around to it they were sold out. It goes without saying that a handmade book by its very nature is going to be more personal and intimate and I am going to try to explain why I like this particular one so much.

Before I start looking at the book more closely and trying to explain why I am so attracted to it I want to come out first and say that I have a very strong personal dislike for ‘concept’ or ‘clever’ books where the packaging and presentation structure dominate. This is almost always to mask the weakness of the content and lack of original thought in the photographs themselves. The reason I am saying this is that an awful lot of the handmade books I come across and indeed many of the books I saw at Obscura fall into that category. With that skeptical thought in mind I am delighted to say that for me that is not the case with Hajime’s book and, as you would hope for in a good photo book whether handmade or not, the structure and content combine sympathetically to create what I think is a very nice, original and intriguing book.

There is no shortage of books on Tokyo around, that is for sure, and many of Hajime’s shots are borderline cliche but what elevates this work for me is something that I value very much in a book, I can extrapolate my own experiences and memories onto the framework that he creates. How this works personally for me with this book is inherent in its structure which, if I understand properly, is based on Hajime’s very early experiences as a photographer trying to find his way and wandering around with his little box of prints. The book itself is actually a box of individual prints with a personalised sketch on the back of each one and I found that I was able to mix and sequence the prints in infinite ways creating new textures and stories for myself each time. This sounds stupefyingly simple but I found that it worked delightfully well and I enjoyed messing around with different edits and flows much in the way that I like to imagine Hajime himself may have done at some point and I know that I do myself with my own work and little box of prints. I have no idea if this was part of Hajime’s intention behind the design of the book and maybe there are other ways to enjoy it but this is what intrigued me about it.

As I never tire of saying, I am new to photography and it only became serious to me in the last two or three years, and its only in the last year or so that my passion for collecting photo books has emerged so this idea might not be as original to others as it is to me. What I would say though is that one of my primary reasons behind buying the books that I like (and indeed writing these reviews) is to speed up and deepen my own learning and development experience and maybe thats one of the reasons that I like what Hajime has done here so much, I almost get the same sense of living with these shots and showing them to friends for feedback.

Going back to the handmade nature of the book for a moment, I can’t help but feel an enormous sense of value from the work that has gone into designing and creating each of these individual copies. I might be a bit of a sentimentalist but I don’t think there are many pieces of art that are as complex, usable and enduring as this that can be so easily come by at this almost ridiculously low price. I think its a huge tribute to Hajime that he produces these books in sensible volumes and sticks by the principles and originality that goes with the handcrafting, and I must say that I feel very proud to be the owner of this piece of Hajime’s creativity.

As I said, two very different and diverse looks at contemporary Japanese photography that I think are full of intriguing contrasts. I hope that what I have written here makes sense to you and I am sure that some of you will want to look more closely at both of these artists work and maybe even buy their books for yourselves and that would be a nice outcome for me. I should say that I am always a bit conscious that all of the reviews that I write are pretty positive about the books being looked at but please remember that the very simple reason for that is that I always buy only books that I have looked at and liked or that are recommended to me by other people whose views I respect and trust. My objective here is a bit selfish in that it helps me to understand photography better by writing about work that I like and also to perhaps create some interest in lesser know photographers work.

I will leave you this week with my best wishes from Tokyo and the end cover of Hajime’s book.

Colin Steel, Tokyo, Sunday 24th August 2014