Tomoko Sawada

1977, Japan

“The only materials I have used in my works is my self-portrait and when I started considering how and why this style and theme had come out, I set out to create this series School Days. Looking back to my school days, it was vital how much I could express my own personality in a group photo among the girls who were wearing the same uniforms with similar hairstyles. I suppose that spending six years only with girls has had a great effect on me.” TOMOKO SAWADA

http://www.ivorypress.com/cphoto/en/photographer/tomoko

Expo Line Unveils Work by Legendary L.A. Photographer

By Suzanne Wu

April 24, 2012

On Saturday mornings, USC professor Robbert Flick, a titan in the world of documentary photography, likes to go for long drives around Los Angeles, down streets like Normandie Avenue and Jefferson Boulevard, San Pedro Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, past old craftsman homes and studio lots and the sun-bleached stucco walls of the best produce markets in the city.

These are working joyrides: Flick, who has taught photography at the USC Roski School of Fine Arts since 1976, commutes by train and shoots much of his work from an innocuous moving minivan, capturing the rhythms of street life through streams of images taken from a motorized tripod, allowing him to keep his eyes on the road.

The resulting images, arranged in a grid like a long moving strip, are familiar terrain for the residents in Los Angeles, the daily backdrop of living in this city. But they also are irretrievably lost moments, fragments of another day – the constantly changing skyline and glimpses of people heading to somewhere else, mimicking the experience of gazing out of a train window.

So it could not be more fitting that the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) commissioned Flick to provide the artwork for a major stop on the new Exposition Line opening this Saturday, a historic light rail expansion that will finally connect the city’s downtown core to its most populous neighborhood, South Los Angeles.

Flick’s new piece, On Saturdays, will grace the Expo Park/USC stop at an entrance to the main USC campus near the USC Fisher Museum of Art, just across the street from the Natural History Museum, the California Science Center and the Californian African American Museum.

http://www.usc.edu/

John Chiara, Echo Lake at Meyers Grade (Far Left),
50” x 78”, Dye Destruction Process, Unique Photograph, 2010

South Gallery, In Conversation: June Schwarcz and John Chiara presents a landscape of inscrutable sculpture and metallic photography, full of mystery and alchemical beauty. Curated by Muriel Maffre, this unique pairing of two artists who transform their material with such mastery leaves us wondering what genre of art it is: Sculpture? Photography? Painting? Yes. June Schwarcz’ non-utilitarian vessels seem to be ceramic, but are actually painted metal — inexplicably weighty and yet ethereally weightless. John Chiara uses a camera obscura to produce his epic photography, developing his simple landscape images on large sheets of thin metal that he then frames to hang on the wall. The effect of the conversation between the two artists is revolutionary in its elegance and mysteriously simple beauty.

The Richmond Arts Center

The Fog of Time

An Interview with Hara Hisaji

Hisaji Hara

A Photographic Portrayal of the Paintings of Balthus

ROSEGALLERY is pleased to announce the American debut of Hisaji Hara’s “A photographic portrayal of the paintings of Balthus.”  Black and white prints from this acclaimed series will be on view 19 May through 07 July, 2012.  An opening reception will be held Saturday, 19 May, 2012 from five to seven pm.

Using medium-format film and meticulous in-camera methods, Hisaji Hara reinvents the legendary and provocative paintings of highly revered 20^th century figurative painter, Balthus (1908-2001).  In his staged tableaux, Hara appropriates the adolescent subjects featured in Balthus’ canvases, paying particular attention to details in posture and expression.  The setting as well as the costuming, however, are uniquely Japanese.  Thus, the artist culls from the suggestive vocabulary of the originals – paintings simultaneously youthful and erotic – while playing with strict architectural formalism and Lolitaesque obsessions that anchor the work in Japanese cultural traditions.

Hara’s technique involves creating multiple exposures in-camera without computer manipulation, coupled with the use of smoke machines and cinematic lighting.  The result is a highly enchanting and singular print quality that reinforces the poignant longing and adolescent reverie that his subjects embody.

Hisaji Hara was born in Tokyo, Japan, and graduated from the Musashino University of Art and Design in 1986.  In 1993 he emigrated to the United States and worked as a director of photography for television and documentary film before returning to Japan in 2001.  “A photographic portrayal of the paintings of Balthus” was made over a period of five years beginning in 2006.  In 2010 he received first prize at the Yokohama Photo Festival for the work.

Image:
Hisaji Hara
A Study of “Le Passage du Commerce – Saint Andre”, 2009.
Courtesy of the artist, MEM Gallery, Tokyo and ROSEGALLERY, Los Angeles

2F Exhibition Gallery

Untitled, from the series of Ametsuchi 2012

Kawauchi Rinko:
Illuminance , Ametsuchi , Seeing Shadow

May 12 (Sat) – July 16 (Mon)

The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography is delighted to present the solo exhibition entitled Kawauchi Rinko: Illuminance, Ametsuchi, Seeing Shadow, devoted to the work of Kawauchi Rinko, a photographer who has exemplified the period from 2000 on, winning support largely from the younger generation, and has also achieved renown on the international stage.

This exhibition, Kawauchi Rinko’s first solo exhibition at a museum in the Tokyo area, will introduce Illuminance, which mainly consists of recent work in the 6 x 6 cm format, the style of photography that is almost synonymous with this artist, as well as her latest work, Ametsuchi and Seeing Shadow, series being exhibited for the first time.

Kawauchi Rinko has spent nearly 15 years shooting the photographs that make up the Illuminance series, in which we see a deepening of themes that first appeared in her Utatane series, for which she won the 2002 Kimura Ihee Award. Here again we see, with a greater depth of style, everyday private scenes shot in a way that illuminates the universal brilliance of life. The artist’s unique world of images develops spatially, mingling light and dark, life and death, beauty and sadness in a large number of momentary scenes. The new Ametsuchi and Seeing Shadow series, which include both large prints and video works, create intuitive depictions of the cosmic order, the connection between heaven and earth, primitive scenes, through a variety of earthly phenomena, including the burning off of the fields around Mt. Aso in early spring. A group of photographs photographed with a large-format 4 x 5 inch camera and presented as large-scale prints, about two meters wide, combined with an experiential video presentation on a large screen reflect a view of the world on a huge scale not seen in Kawauchi’s earlier work.

The exhibition consists of approximately 80 works that present the essence and fascination of Kawauchi Rinko’s creative cosmos and draws close to new developments.

Untitled, from the series of Illuminance　2007

Untitled, from the series of Illuminance　2009

Please see more at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography website

Aug 4, 2009

Exposures

On Hollywood

By LISE SARFATI

Published: March 24, 2012

I began with the concept of psychogeographical dérive, an approach analyzed by the French writer Guy Debord.

He defined psychogeography as the study of the precise effects of geographical surroundings on the emotions and behavior of individuals.

This dérive is the process I used to experience brief stays in a variety of atmospheres. In Los Angeles I drifted through Hollywood, staying several months. I did not scout locations like a director of photography or an artist hungry for new surroundings. I strove to find places where I would feel good physically, places that would affect me emotionally.

These places were street corners, sidewalk strips, recesses. Nothing extraordinary; on the contrary, very often quite banal.

My series “On Hollywood” shows women who really live in Los Angeles. They probably came to project themselves in the Hollywood landscape and to take advantage of the possibilities of success in this landscape. Hollywood interested me more for the concept of landscape as fantasy.

They are very real, and in different ways they seem to be the targets of a strange fatality. They shine in a very peculiar way. Like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s fireflies.

Lise Sarfati is a French-born photographer who lives in the United States. Her upcoming exhibitions “On Hollywood” and “She” will be at the Rose Gallery in Los Angeles.

To see a slideshow of more images from SHE series please visit the New York Times website

LISE SARFATI
SHE

Text by Lise Sarfati

Lise Sarfati. Christine #10 Hollywood, CA, She Series, 2006.

Documentary photography, or the new document, is that which not only
lays bare the record of the real world, but also creates a unique
photographic narrative where photography, its theme and the viewer all
coexist.
My work touches on reality but a human reality.  I often find myself in a
banal situation, but my aim is to surpass it, to transcend it, in order to
discover the core of an existence that can be explained by the solitude of
the character in her domestic intimacy, even in the hermetic space of a
street or any other desert:  the woman is ever alone in a crowd.
She consists of moments of a brilliant history where the combined
fragments ultimately form no more than a rather homogenous tale.  It is a
matter of compositional logic and also a wild ballad in the life of these
four women.
My interest in working on this theme arises from the fact that I come from
a family of four sisters, and mainly to the constant bitterness caused by the
dissolution of family ties between mother, sister, and aunt.  I have wanted
to explore the feelings of melancholy transmitted from the mother and the
aunt to Christine’s two daughters: Sloane and Sasha. The latter
systematically refuses to be photographed since the idea of reuniting her
mother, aunt and sister in the same series seems to her absurd.  There is
also the play of identities between two generations that is preserved as an
animal instinct.
A series of photographs made over an extended time-period in California,
Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix between
2005 and 2009.
Moments borrowed from four women: Christine, the mother; her sister
Gina; Sloane, Christine’s daughter, and Sasha, Sloane’s sister.
Christine’s instability, Sasha’s melancholy, Sloane’s repeated
transformations, Gina’s feminine-masculine ambiguity…
She describes a complex aesthetic experience fraught with history, feelings,
and ghosts.
The direction of the project, framed in an extended time-period, allows
following its erratic development.  It leaves lots of room for the autonomous
construction of narrative fictions for the viewer, scenarios that are merely
suggested by the images: a play of identities between Sloane and her
mother- and vice versa- between Gina and her sister- or conversely-
between Sasha and her mother…women who share a singular intimacy
before the imminence of disaster, the discovery or premonition of it.
Compressing time and mixing years, these images chosen in isolation of
these four women comprise a single story.
These women had no need to be photographed and it is their refusal, their
resistance, which attracts us to them.  Because of She, I’ve discovered the
interior of a Victorian home in the Oakland ghetto, but also the urban
environment of small Californian cities.

Translated by Dena Ellen Cowan

Lise Sarfati. Christine #11 San Francisco, CA, She Series, 2005.

Lise Sarfati. Gina #8 Oakland,, CA, She Series, 2005.

Lise Sarfati. Sloane #66 San Francisco, CA, She Series, 2009.

All images courtesy of the artist, Brancolini Grimaldi Gallery, London,
and ROSEGALLERY, Los Angeles.

Emily, 2860 Sunset Blvd, 2010 © Lise Sarfati, Courtesy Lise Sarfati, ROSEGALLERY, los angeles

Rosegallery, Los Angeles is presenting back to back exhibitions of On Hollywood and She, confirming Lise Sarfati’s talent and status among the small circle of French artists who have succesfully exported their work.

Lise Sarfati arrives in New York in 2003. She leaves for New Orleans to start her series The New Life (Twin Palms, Publisher 2005). She travels through several small towns in Texas, Arizona, California and Oregon. She returns to Los Angeles in 2009 and 2010 to photograph the women she crossed paths with on Hollywood’s boulevards.

While She is an intimate and complex game of mirrors between four women, two times two sisters, On Hollywood focuses on the landscape. The two series follow one another but are not alike. They are part of a puzzle Lise Sarfati is patiently, endlessly creating. The female characters share certain traits : they are both fragile and strong, they live on the fringe of society, they project themselves in a reality only they seem to have the key to. For On Hollywood the encounters took place using a precise approach. The women in this series are vulnerable but they are women who are struggling for their survival : dancers, junkies, actresses looking for a part, out-of-towners. Sarfati chose these women for their personalities, their auras, their marginal lifestyles. “They are real and it is their emotional dimension which attracted me to them.” One has the feeling that these women float through life like ghosts. There is never a direct gaze into the lens. “The viewer is the only one watching and letting his or her eye wander on the surface of the image. This gives the image its own autonomy. The women are as essential as the landscape.” She chooses her locations without a camera, only using her eye, returning numerous times to the same place because she feels comfortable there.

The simplicity of the boulevard amazes her.

For this series, Lise Sarfati used Kodachrome 64 film stock which was used in Hollywood movies of the 1940s. It is the last photographic series made with this stock which ceased being produced in June 2009. The last rolls were processed in December 2010.

This series refers as much to the films of David Lynch and Wim Wenders as to the photographs of William Eggleston (for the color) or Harry Callahan (especially his series of street portraits called : Women Lost in Thought). But Lise Sarfati has completely assimilated these influences. Her strong visual signature, linked to a feeling of interiority, is both modern and identifiable as her own. And the beauty and accuracy of her work make us follow her willingly.

In France, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) is preparing a retrospective of her work for 2014. A book on the series She is due in the spring or summer of 2012 (Twin Palms Publisher).

Christophe Lunn

On Hollywood : from February 25th to March 26th
She : from March 31st to May 8th

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