A compact anthology of essential writings on Japanese photography.
|
|
By Ivan Vartanian, Akihiro Hatanaka, Yutaka Kanbayashi
Published in 2005
Hardcover, 224 pages
8.7 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
ISBN-10: 1931788839
Published by Aperture Foundation
|
Buy online from Amazon.com
|
External links
Aperture Foundation |
|
The recent popularity in the West of Japanese photography makes Setting Sun a crucial document. The first anthology of its kind to appear in English, this book collects key texts written from the 1950s to the present by the country's most celebrated and controversial photographers, and illuminates a set of ideas, rules, and aesthetics that are specific to Japanese culture, but often little known elsewhere.
Contributors include Takuma Nakahira and Daido Moriyama, in whose landmark late-60s magazine Provoke a radically new direction in Japanese photography was set; Nobuyoshi Araki, the provocative and prolific chronicler of bound girls (among other subjects); and Eikoh Hosoe, whose collaborations with the Butoh dance master Hijikata and the novelist Mishima made him prominent as an intellectual figure as well as a photographer. In addition, there are selections from modern masters such as Masahisa Fukase, Takashi Homma, Takuma Nakahira, and Hiroshi Sugimoto.
Each chapter in the book is devoted to a central theme that is particular to Japanese photography, such as the role of nostalgia in a culture that has often sought to jettison its past amid the shadows of a war lost. The writings vary in form from diary entry to scholarly treatise, but all reflect a clear connection between word and image, one so essential that no comprehensive consideration of Japanese photography can be complete without it.
|
|
|
About the author
Ivan Vartanian is the President of Goliga Books. He has authored and edited numerous volumes on photography, contemporary art, and design, which have been published internationally. He works and resides in Tokyo, Japan.
|
|
