Seven Samurai

Artists like Hiroshi Sugimoto, Daido Moriyama or Nuboyoshi Akari are no strangers to no one, in fact these three were the main and only Japanese names in the contemporary art circuit until the early 90´s, they have become beacons and are regarded as the highest incarnations of Japanese art photography. During the last few decades Japan has produced a huge amount of talented artist that the west has come to embrace only recently. Takashi Homma, Rinko Kawauchi or HIROMIX just to name a few, are now well known artist not only in Asia, but in Europe and America.

Due to cultural and linguistic barriers, Japanese photography has historically been hard to digest from a western perspective, but with the geographical and cultural barriers becoming increasingly thinner the art landscape is becoming drastically different.

Unlike other countries that have had specific photographic approaches through history, or even “schools” pushing artist in one way or other, the main appeal of Japanese photography is the wide variety of approaches. A huge spectrum of works from the classic black and white pictorialism to the new digital possibilities of imaging and exploring the new medium can be found in contemporary Japanese photography.

Now a small sample of seven active Japanese artists who I consider to be a vivid example of the rebirth of the photographic medium in the land of the rising sun.

Kenji Hirasawa
Hirasawa is a quite young Japanese photographer who has been based in London since 2008.
In his series “Celebrity” Hirasawa comments on the absurdity of the idolization of celebrities in contemporary culture. The photographs are taken with a thermal camera in the Madame Tussauds wax museum in London. The lack of thermal emissions from the “dead-like” statues opposed to the living people works as a perfect conceptual metaphor for the banality of the idol culture.

Masato Seto
Masato´s Work tends to revolve around what could be called psychology of space. With a strange mixture of Tableu ads documentary photography, the photographs speak in a subtle yet powerful way about the relationship between a given space and the subject´s inner mind.

 

keiko Sasaoka
Through beautiful color landscapes Keiko Sasaoka approaches the idea of time and transitivity. Multiple times and the different speeds that flow through physical places, but cannot be seen with the eye. the immortality of nature opposed to the limited transitivity of human beings.

Maiko Haruki

Maiko Haruki works in a very minimalistic way, highlighting the few elements in her photographs by eliminating all secondary visual information. “More with less.”  In her latest work “View for a Moment” the artist focuses on the futility of time, the ambiguity between the subject’s actions and the act of photographing it.

Tomoko Yoneda
By the usage of two fundamental aspects of photography: observation, and recording, Yoneda creates bodies of work of immense historical and social power. Her work consists mainly on landscapes of places that once held historical or social significance but have now became victims of collective social amnesia.

Toshio Shibata.
Working with a large format camera, much in the way of Robert Adams, Shibata photographs landscapes that have been modified by men. One could describe his photographs as abstract collages made out of sky, grass, metal and concrete. Shibata coming from a background of oil painting and printmaking feels his work is more about esthetic and formal issues than cultural or social critique.

Hiroshi Yamazaki
One of the front runners of the Japanese conceptual photography of the 70´s, Hiroshi Yamazaki prohibited himself the process of selecting an arbitrary subject for his work instead he decided to explore the limits of the medium with what was visible through his window. His most important bodies of work show the sun moving through seascapes, in some ways his work quotes the infamous Sugimoto seascapes.

Miguel Angel Garcia.

 Upon hearing the term “emerging artist” one tends to imagine talented young people fresh out of their MFA´s and looking for gallery representation. This is not the case of Miguel Angel Garcia. At the age of 60 Garcia is becoming one of the most sought after “new talents” in the photo art world after only 6 years of work.

In 2010 Garcia unveiled his first solid body of work entitled In-dependencias. I had become aware of this project earlier this year, but it wasn’t until a few weeks ago in Paris Photo 2012 were I had the chance to see it at the Laurence Miller Gallery stand that I realized the magnitude and power of this work. This project, that took several years to accomplish, consists of 29 “main” photographs and several dozen “support” pieces included in the book. -Which I strongly regret not buying. - In-Dependencias is about the dichotomy of the concepts of dependence and independence in the XXI century. “People today perceive great amount of freedom in their individual lives, but a few meters above them one can notice the amount of common, dependencies of today’s European citizen.”¹ at first glance the images are simply stunning, digitally intervened urban landscapes from Europe´s 27 capitals, but upon further reading one can see that the engaging aesthetic quality does not come by its self. Parallel to the “main” pieces the project also contains a rigorous documental aspect, in which the artist searched each city for written examples of the word “independence”. Therefore documenting the specific idiosyncratic vestiges of the concept of independence inherent to each country´s unique culture and history. 

¹Paraphrased and translated from the artist statement.

LastThursday night Miguel Angel Garcia inaugurated his new exhibition High Energy at Galeria Cero in Madrid.  Much in the same way of his previous work Garcia relies on both great aesthetic quality and deep conceptualization. The photographs were taken in the Uyuni desert in Bolivia several years ago but only recently he decided to re work on them after an extensive period of research. Garcia came to know that this beautiful salt desert contains the world’s biggest lithium deposit and is therefore condemned to brutal environmental exploitation within the next few decades as the world´s need for energy evolves. The artist who comes from a graphic design background decided to digitally paint huge battery deposits and other visual references of lithium power over these idyllic landscapes.  The project proposes a deep reflection on the unethical and arbitrary ways we relate to nature and space.