Street Level Japan

Aya Takada just put up a lot of new photos on her Flickr, here is a small selection. When I said I wanted to post an edit these photos she said, “be careful! these photos are ヤバイ” – using one of the best slang words in Japanese, which can mean “awesome/tight” but also “super rough/sketchy.” You can probably guess which meaning she meant in this case.

When Aya was featured on Japan Exposures, some of the commenters were bummed that she was shooting things in Tokyo’s infamous Kabukicho district [<—awesome link] without the “in your face“ approach that (Western??) audiences have come to expect (or emulate???). Aya shoots at lot in Kabukicho, but she finds the empty spaces there. It’s not that she’s not hardcore, either, because she is…

Check Aya out on Tumblr and Mindfist.

About three years ago it was very hard to look at Flickr without coming across My Little Dead Dick, a photo project between Patrick Tsai and Madi Ju documenting their life together. So many things about that project seemed so right for the time: here were young people shooting film through compact cameras with abandon, taking the material of their own lives and turning it into art, all seemingly without very much effort at all. If they worked “jobs” at all, that didn’t come through in their photos—which seemed born of a will to live and breathe photography at each waking moment. Apart from the obvious/voyeuristic interest people have in observing other people’s lives, I think this seriously unrestrained drive to shoot made the project a breath of fresh air in the internet photo world. It’s hard to speak about “generations” online, because everything moves quickly, but I’m sure My Little Dead Dick will come to be cited as an important reference point for some crop of hotshot photographers coming to your monitor in a few years. Pat and Madi were, for me at least, the first and last real Flickr stars.

from “Hot Water” by Patrick Tsai

I’d read an interview with Pat where he said he was moving to Tokyo, so once I got here I sent him an email to see if he wanted to hang out. I didn’t actually expect to hear from him, but he got right back to me and we met up a couple of days later. We’ve been really good friends since then – Pat is one of the most generous dudes I know, and I’m forever indebted to him for hooking me up with my job here.

Pat has a new exhibit which is opening this coming Saturday, September 4, at Cultivate Gallery in Tokyo. It’s called “Hot Water,” and I don’t want to give away too much but it is definitely worth checking out. There’s an opening party on Saturday from 5-8, I’ll be there and if you mention Street Level Japan (just yell it out if you dont recognize me ok, i prob wont be the only paleface) I’ll get you a beer.

The exhibit is up from September 4 – September 26, only open on Saturdays and Sundays from 2-7pm. GOOG MAP

これからちょっと日本語でブログを書くと思う。去年（２００９）の一月に来てから、日本語が勉強していた。あまり上手じゃなくてけど、これからもっとおそわりたい。当たり前、よくミスします。。。

このブログに質問したい。日本語で、面白い写真についてテキスト読みたいです。漢字はゆっくり電子字書でしらべる。オススメのあるかな？？畠山直哉の言葉が面白そうかもしれない。

ミスする時、いつでも声かけてください！よろしくおねがいします！

i want to use this blog to practice japanese. i’m not any good right now, but i’m learning more, and maybe people could talk back and forth??? anyway for your own entertainment, this is what google says i wrote. i would hope that i come across slightly better to a japanese reader:

I think now a little blog in Japanese. Last year (2009) came a month after, and was studying Japanese. But, not so good, Osowaritai further. Naturally, the common mistakes. . .

Question to this blog. In Japanese, the text to read about funny pictures. Kanji 字書 look it up in slow electron. Recommend you might be? ? Words might be interesting Naoya Hatakeyama.

When you make a mistake, please talk to her anytime! Thank you!

it’s been too long without a post, though certainly not for any lack of activity here. a couple of conversations with some people here, and seeing tavi’s blog a few times, has led me to believe that i should be a little bit more open about what i am doing here in japan. so i will give an update on that soon.

about two years ago i made myself write enough posts so that i could have one go up every weekday. sitting at a desk all day made that easier, and that’s not my situation now, but i think posting 2-3 times a week should be pretty reasonable. marc thought it was better to let posts be infrequent but of a higher quality. i have been in that mode of writing for the last few months, but it’s not very fulfilling for me, blog posts as a rule do not get very much reaction – this is true even of marc’s posts, which are a cut above most of the blog chatter. (hi marc, how ya doin man???) i want to actually be practicing my writing, and to start doing that i have to be posting more.

of course you can expect the same type of posts which continue to bring my millions of visitors back each month, still unsatiated in their desire to consume anti-cynical, pro-revolutionary critique of contemporary japanese photography…

Towards the end of 2009, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art put up two exhibits featuring Japanese photography. The main attraction, “The Provoke Era,” was a straightforward survey of Japanese photography, starting from the immediate postwar period (Shomei Tomatsu, Hosoe Eikoh), moving to the more radical late 60’s (Hiromi Tsuchida, Daido Moriyama, the rest of the “Provoke” gang) and ending with a confused collection of photos from the 80’s and 90’s (cult street snapper Katsumi Watanabe sharing space with landscape photographer Toshio Shibata and art star Hiroshi Sugimoto). All of the photographs in this exhibition were black-and-white, and taken by men.

Having showed all the “old masters”—a few Nobuyoshi Araki prints were up there too, of course—the second exhibit, “Photography Now: China, Japan, Korea“ was meant to give some young guns a chance to shine. But a curious thing happened in the Japan space. After already looking at the work of some 30 different men, all the prints by female Japanese photographers were grouped together, in one corner of the room.

Only so much can be read into this, but I think it may reflect a certain attitude about “female Japanese photographers”—namely, that people are interested in talking about them as “female Japanese photographers.” Ferdinand has given a talk on this topic, but I can’t say if it was any good. There was an exhibit at Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts in NYC, looking at a few conceptual female photographers like Tomoko Sawada who are “often highlighting and questioning stereotypes of traditional female roles in Japanese society.” Without having bothered to research this too deeply—I’m not a scholar yet—my guess is that “female Japanese photographers” are being used to fit some sort of Western critical narrative. (And probably not a very interesting one, at that… waiting for the Brechtian critics to emerge)

But, I digress. As always, I come to celebrate! In this post I want to introduce Mari Sugino, a “female Japanese photographer” who has been participating in the semi-legendary Place M seminar in Tokyo for a couple of years now. I first saw her work at an exhibit at Konica Minolta Gallery with a friend, and we were both really impressed by her ability to capture quick portraits of people on the street in Tokyo. When I talked to Sugino-san she told me that she isn’t particularly interested in “making it” in the art world. She’s shooting for herself, although of course it wouldn’t be bad to find some success. So no critical narratives today, just very nicely done photos.

© Mari Sugino

© Mari Sugino

© Mari Sugino

© Mari Sugino

© Mari Sugino

© Mari Sugino

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