DATE: 6/11/2013 | BY ERIN C. DUNIGAN

Rinko Kawauchi: Playing with Fire

Featured image, by rising Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi, is reproduced from her recently released photobook, Ametsuchi, published by Aperture. This powerful image captures the centuries-old Japanese tradition of farming with fire, or yakihata. Fittingly, themes of regeneration and rebirth, and the transcendence of time and memory, play an important role in Kawauchi’s new book. As with her previous publication, Illuminance, Kawauchi presents intensely moving images, lushly colored fragments of everyday life. In this gorgeous new volume the reader is at once transported to the heavens, earth, stars and mountains; the result is a moving meditation on the beauty and ephemerality of existence. This balance is further enhanced by the publication’s stunning design. According to the book’s designer, Hans Gremmen, an unusual variation on Japanese binding “introduces a ‘parallel world’ on the inside of the pages… By inverting the images, the existential and poetic nature of Kawauchi’s work is enlarged: fire turns into water, night turns into day.”
For more on Ametsuchi’s unique design, see Brian Sholis’ interview withHans Gremmen on the Aperture blog.

Text courtesy of artbook.

Rinko Kawauchi – Ametsuchi

Fields of fire: Rinko Kawauchi’s photographs

For her latest project the Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi observed the 1,300-year-old tradition of burning farmland, an idea that came to her in a dream

By Florence Waters

Untitled, from Ametsuchi by Rinko Kawauchi

28 JUIN AU 8 SEPTEMBRE 2013

Le Château d’Eau à Toulouse et les éditions Contrejour rendront un hommage à cet auteur subversif à travers TRANSRÉALITES, un ouvrage et une exposition. De ses images documentaires de jeunesse dont la plupart n’ont jamais été exposées, aux compositions étranges et surréalisantes qui ont fait sa réputation, ce projet donne un éclairage singulier sur une oeuvre dont la richesse est étonnamment encore très peu connue en France.

Depuis 1974 et la présentation remarquée de sa série « Le collectionneur de rêves » aux Rencontres d’Arles par Alain Tournier, l’oeuvre d’Arthur Tress s’est imposée dans le monde entier à travers de nombreux livres et expositions.
Avec Diane Arbus, Lee Fredlander, Duane Michals, Leslie Krims et Ralph Gibson, il fit partie de la génération de ces photographes américains qui dans les années 70 balayèrent les stéréotypes. Ils mirent leur talent au service d’une esthétique inventive et subversive dont on peut encore aujourd’hui mesurer l’emprise sur la conception post-moderne de la photographie.

Contrairement aux autres photographes de sa génération qui renouvelèrent une seule approche de la photographie, Arthur Tress lui, a fait voler en éclats les genres classiques.
En introduisant une bonne part de fiction dans ce qui normalement ne devait être qu’un point de vue documentaire il a opéré une subversion dans le reportage.
Cette exposition et ce livre mettent en tension différents ensembles de cet auteur à l’énergie créatrice rare. Regroupant une sélection de ses meilleures photographies depuis celles qu’il prit dans les années cinquante dans les rues de New York et de Brooklyn jusqu’aux images oniriques et fantasmées qui le rendirent célèbre, ce projet met en lumière une œuvre à la richesse encore peu connue en France. L’exposition compte notamment quelques unes de ses images de reportage réalisées à San Francisco durant l’été 64, perles d’insolite et d’humour, qui n’ont jusqu’ici jamais été exposées.
C’est dans les années soixante qu’ Arthur Tress s’engage petit à petit, se fait défenseur d’une certaine idée de l’Amérique où les particularismes ne doi- vent rien céder ; il se fait aussi défenseur de la cause homosexuelle et des droits civiques.
Le choix des images insiste pour la première fois sur l’influence cinématographique et plus particulièrement néoréaliste des débuts de l’auteur ainsi que sur sa vision radicale rompant avec la « street photographie » conventionnelle de l’époque

Text Courtesy of Le Château d’Eau.

Through the Lens of Eggleston

The selection of William Eggleston’s photographs, “At War with the Obvious,” currently on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, reminds us why he an American master. For the June issue of WSJ. Magazine, to be included with this Saturday’s issue of the The Wall Street Journal, the legendary photographer agreed to shoot part of his extensive collection of Leica and Canon cameras. Though Mr. Eggleston admits he’s not a fan of digital photography, this image was captured on a Fuji X-Pro 1. Earlier this year, Mr. Eggleston participated in an exhibition of famous photographers using Fujifilm X-Series cameras, called “Photography.” (See related article).

Commissioning Mr. Eggleston to shoot for the June issue was entirely the result of the persistence of WSJ. Magazine’s photography director, Jennifer Pastore. “I just kept calling and calling, then one day, the photograph is in my inbox.” Ms. Pastore also credits Mr. Eggleston’s son, Winston Eggleston, who manages the photographer’s affairs and estate, with making the shoot happen.

The photograph taken by William Eggleston for WSJ. Magazine of some of his Leica and Canon cameras.

Text courtesy of The Wall Street Journal

Vevey, Switzerland, 2009

Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide began to work as a photographer in the early 1960s, and was for a time Manual Álvarez Bravo’s pupil and assistant. One of the most important and prolific figures in Mexican photography, Iturbide is best known for her photographs of the country’s indigenous peoples living in small villages. Her portraits emphasize Mexicans’ connection to pre-Hispanic culture, and tell the story of a country and a culture in constant transition—from premodern to modern ways of working and socializing, and from rural to urban life. At the same time, however, she has made stunning pictures of the landscape in Mexico and beyond. This photograph, made in Switzerland in 2009, is evidence that Iturbide’s talent for capturing striking aspects of her environment transcends her initial focus on Mexico. Two gnarled branches sprout a fretwork of thinner stems that slash the pale-gray sky. Iturbide’s talent for black-and-white printing is emphasized by the leaves clinging intermittently to them: some are dark silhouettes, while others are picked out in detail by the light.

Graciela Iturbide’s work is included in museum collections the world over. She has won the W. Eugene Smith award, Grand Prize at Le Mois de la Photo, the Recontres d’Arles Award, and the Hasselblad Award and has been featured in numerous photobooks, including Mexican Portraits(Aperture, 2013).

Text courtesy of Aperture.

The Prevailing Wind: Todd Hido’s Excerpts from Silver Meadows

By Conor Risch

Click here to view additional images from the series

In a lecture at the International Center of Photography in 1977, Robert Adams recalled reading a “suggestion” about the role of photographers written by Dorothea Lange. “She had called for the building of a file about ‘the life of the American people in the 1960s, with a particular emphasis on urban and suburban life,’” Adams explained. He noted that Lange said the file should “be concentrated on what exists and prevails.”

This assertion from Lange, passed down through Adams, resonated with Todd Hido. It has informed his work, partly because he grew up in the America that existed and prevailed in Adams’s photographs of suburbs in Denver and Colorado Springs. “He captured a real specific thing that was happening all over America at a specific time,” Hido says. “I definitely grew up in a Robert Adams suburb.” Rather than Denver, however, Hido’s version of suburban America was Silver Meadows, Ohio.

His new exhibition and book, “Excerpts from Silver Meadows,” which is showing at the newly opened Transformer Station in Cleveland and was recently published by Nazraeli Press, is a semi-autobiographical story of “a loose, fictitious place based on inadequate memory,” Hido says. It’s the story of a fallen suburb, after generations have come and gone, a “psychological take,” Hido says, on “those things that exist and prevail in modern America.”

The book can also be viewed as a story about Hido’s work as an artist until now, about the images and details that fill in the before and after portions of the narratives he’s alluded to in his photographs of house exteriors at night, of foreclosed homes and grimy motels, of women who appear to exist at the margins of society.

In his most conceptually complex book to date, found, archival and fabricated photographs surround Hido’s recent images. Experimental ‘zines, portions of smaller books and an editorial Hido created previously appear on massive, double-gatefolds. Spreads often show several images. Objects, like a note with a man’s handwritten body measurements, a clipping from the newspaper about Hido’s father’s football successes and a snapshot of a woman laying on a bed that looks like it’s been torn in half then taped back together, add layers to the narrative.

Portraits of nude or partially clothed women in shabby rooms allude to turbulent encounters with disreputable men. In Hido’s images we often see the women through the eyes of these men, making the viewer complicit. The women appear beautiful and fragile, sexually assertive, out of control and in danger; they seem trapped by circumstance. In one sequence we see a girl in the back seat of a car on Lover’s Lane with a bottle pressed to her lips; then a black-and-white snapshot of a head-on collision; then a series of portraits of a grown woman who may or may not be the girl from the car. Or maybe she’s just the wife of the car’s owner?

Hido’s interest in marginalized women comes from his upbringing. “You write what you know,” he says. “I grew up at the margins of society … those were the kind of people that I was around and so that’s what I make my work about. Plus, the queen isn’t as interesting.” He also draws ideas for his work from TV news, which he often leaves on in his studio as white noise. “There are definitely things that have happened in the world in the last year or so that have infiltrated their way into my work,” he says.

Among Hido’s images are views of desolate roads on dreary nights; an overturned tricycle left out to rust; an apartment building exterior strewn with trash; and a baby in a stroller whose closed eyes and oddly cocked head suggest it’s sleeping uncomfortably or worse.

Previous monographs from Hido have been more traditional and clean—one image to a page or spread. Yet the methodology that begat “Excerpts from Silver Meadows” has always been present in Hido’s studio. “I’ve always had these images of people that went with my places, I just never published them … these little stories have been brewing, and they’ve been in my head the whole time … you just hadn’t seen [them] yet.”

Working on ‘zines and side projects with publishers like Super Labo and Paul Schiek’s TBW Books, Hido was able to sketch out how he might tell those stories visually. “Those were important books,” Hido says. “When it came time to make another monograph I decided to incorporate the best parts of those.”

Fittingly, Hido drew from his archive, which includes family photos and found images, in addition to his artistic work, to create this tale of what exists and prevails. “I feel like it’s basically a source that you can pick and pull from,” he says, in an explanation that recalls Lange’s suggestion that a photographer “build a file” about the American people. “I work with where I came from, and it always repeats itself. The way life is set up is that you repeat things over and over again, and sometimes even when you think you’ve got it figured out, lo and behold you don’t.”

Text courtesy of Photo District News.

Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, from the series Ametsuchi, 2012

Click here to view additional images

RINKO KAWAUCHI

Text courtesy of Paris Photo.