Silence and Image ─ Essays On Japanese Photographers ─
Mariko Takeuchi
The first book of essays（bilingual：Japanese and English） by the major critic Mariko Takeuchi. The text of Silence and Image discusses the works of 11 Japanese photographers including Ken Domon, Risaku Suzuki, and Lieko Shiga. All of the essays have been translated into English, and the beautiful illustrations serve as portals to the text. What does it mean to look at photographs? What does it mean to draw near to people in pain? These questions underlie all of the essays. The book also considers gender as it relates to art and photography.
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Silence and Image
The Other, Distance, and Image ― Ryudai Takano
The White of Photographs, the White of Risaku Suzuki
Ryuichiro Suzuki's Odyssey
Absence ― Maki Umaba
Toward a Life of Photography ― Lieko Shiga
Between Two Extremes― Bishin Jumonji
Visible and Invisible Scars: Ken Domon's Hiroshima and
Portraying the Suffering of Others
The Experience of Architecture ― Ryo Suzuki
Here, She Says― Lieko Shiga
Things the Darkness Reveals ― Osamu James Nakagawa
'Place Names,' is a series that consciously focuses on the distortions and disruptions of meaning that occurred when place names shifted from their original Ainu names to being written syllabically in Japanese katakana script at the end of the feudal period in the mid-nineteenth century to their subsequent renaming in logographic kanji characters, and thus attempts through images to intervene in the character or identity of the place. As the poet Paul Celan once wrote, the individual things within a name are related to the world while also belonging to us: when a place (Ort) is included in a word (Wort), that place name is often something that aspires for a place that is nowhere, as opposed to a particular place. We can also interpret Tsuyuguchi's photographs, which are shot as what he calls"fragments peeled off the landscape"while ascribing both proximity and distance in between incident and place, as"nowhere places," ungraspable and disconnected from a particular incident or location. And when there appear concatenated meanings of places encompassed in words forcibly separated from their former terrains and communities, the"nowhere place"is once again evoked within the mind of the viewer.
While also exposing the arbitrary translations involved in the formation of Hokkaido's place names, this unparalleled masterpiece induces "cracks in the landscape" and Pose the question: What does it mean to "place names" ? What does it signify when that place names continues to shift and change? What does it bring to the landscape?
Artist Information
露口啓二
1950年 徳島県生まれ
1989年 フレメン写真製作所設立
1990年代末より、北海道のアイヌ語地名に基づく「地名」を開始
2002年 「地名」始めての個展をLIGHT WORKS(横浜市)にて開催
同年、「地名」を「現代日本の写真 Black Out展」に出品(日本文化会館・パリ、ローマ)(国際交流基金フォーラム・東京)
2004年「ノンセクト・ラディカル- 現代の写真III-展に「地名」を出品(横浜美術館・横浜)
2009年「東川賞国際写真フェスティバル受賞作家展」(東川町ギャラリー・東川町)
2009年「ICANOF2009 Blinks of Blots and Blanks(八戸市美術館・八戸市)
