In the last several weeks two bands — U2 and Antony & the Johnsons — have released new studio albums. While the two may not have anything in common musically, both albums use Japanese photography as their cover art. The album The Crying Light (2009), by Antony and the Johnsons, has a CD jacket using a 1977 photograph by Naoya Ikegami of dancer Kazuo Ohno. U2’s No Line on the Horizon (2009) uses a photograph by Hiroshi Sugimoto from his on-going series of seascapes.

Both covers dispense with all other design elements, treating the images like plates in a photobook. There is a marked absence of typography and there aren’t any design flourishes obscuring the photographs. It does help that both images were originally shot in a square format and are arresting images on their own, to say the least. In the case of the U2 album, they’ve gone so far as to put a white border around the image.

The presentation and treatment of photography as such on a CD jacket is interesting on its own. But this is an interesting moment for Japanese photography too, and for its level of popular appreciation.

The study of subtle gradations in black and white is a quintessential hallmark of Japanese photography. In the air about the dancer Kazuo Ohno on the Antony & the Johnsons sleeve there is a nebulous glow. The same ether-like quality is in the foreground of the seascape on the U2 cover. In both these compositions, the photographers mix that subtle tonal gradation with an element of strong contrast: the horizon line and the form of the dancer. Both the line that bisects Sugimoto’s seascape and the dancer of Ikegami’s photograph are gestures that engage the photograph.

The monochromatic square format alone signals an attention to formalism in the photographers’ approach. In the case of U2, I’m not exactly sure what the connection to the music may be beyond, perhaps, a reduction of elements. Their other albums covers have made use of black-and-white photography but the degree of minimalism is particular here. In the case of Antony & the Johnsons, the thematic connection with Ohno is fairly overt. The album is dedicated to the dancer and the music has a thematic connection with the dance.

Either way, it is exciting to see Japanese photography find a resonance across cultural and artistic disciplines. I’m pleased the photographers agreed to let work be used.

Posted by: Ivan

This post is tagged: Antony & the Johnsons, Books, Japanese photobooks, Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s & 70s, Japanese photography, U2, upcoming releases