Ugo/photobook
LEAVING SPACE
Please find below my photobook entitled LEAVING SPACE made for the workshop led by Frits Gierstberg at the Nederland Fotomuseum.
PRESENTATION
SPIDER’S STRATEGY
OSAMU KANEMURA
Photographs: Osamu Kanemura, 2001
Text: Arata Isokaki
Book design: Yukimasa Okumura
Separations: Hiroshi Aida
Publisher: Osiris, Tokyo, 2001
Printed in Japan
I choose the book while searching in the library of the museum, I went to the Japanese section and selected a couple of publication, Daido Moryiama, Rinko Kawauchi. Spider’s strategy appeared to be the only photobookthat wasn't a selection of work made by galleries or museum. I was first attracted by the large dark images, and the unconventional breaks with bright white paper and mirror-like sheet.
Front Cover
First Image
The Book:
Title: The spider’s strategy
Typo: Black / Near Aria / High Contrast
Hardcover satin metal ink – silver
102 pages, 80 b/w plates in duotone (2 x types of grey)
232 x 287 mm (9 1/8 x 11 5/16 inches)
Images are 6x7 black and white photographs, same ration negatives / book pages
Metal ink satin
The hard cover feels feels soft, somewhere between fresh cement and a metal paste. There are some some usage marks engraved. The silver aspect refers both to the city of Tokyo materiality and to the silver nitrate used in analogue photography. Maybe a reference to photographic paper.
Small silver headband. We can see the gauze strip glued on the cover.
Metal satin Shiny white Mat satin Mirror sheet
1 metal side 2 shiny white
3 mat white, silk + small title 4 mat white + credit
5 mat Big title + publisher 6 mat white
7 first photo - reflection
The images
High Contrast black and white photographs printed in duotones. They are images of Tokyo. City or architecture photography. The high contrast reinforces the density of the images, the saturation. Saturation of lines, cables and sharp shadows. The materiality of the city, glass, cement, metal. Tokyo is Kanemura’s atmosphere. More work are similar in form, a sort of obsession with the megalopolis of Tokyo. Images are framed by the limits of the paper, as if they will possibly expand, giving importance to what is not in the frame. Space more than time. Lots of images are in focus in the middle, the further part, living the element of first plan lightly out of focus = like a frame = giving depth to th image. The white page gives a break. The mirror-like another perspective.
The montage
The book is best handled flat on a table, one page at the time. White pages and mirror like page break the doulepage structure. One can play with the mirror sheet to distort some of the image. Images are equally displayed, one image covers a one full page. Most of the photographs are facing another photographs that create a kind of double page by the visual correspondences, links, poetry. Images communicate, interact, fused by contact, continuity of perspective, lines and forms. Images are porous. A metaphor and analogy of the contact between light and paper : the photographic.
The juxtaposition of the images can also be seen as a reflection.
“Osamu Kanemura's photography in Spider's Strategy borrows from the tradition of the Becher's juxtapositional comparison and contrast of form, but does so at a much closer perspective.” Parr/Badger, Photobook History Vol.2
The mirror and the reflections
Most of the images possess reflective elements, car, glass, windows. Reflecting the city, photographs as mirror of the chaos. The reflective paper cause distortion to the images, dream like / nightmarish. Here the mirror appears broken, the reality is fragmented between the lines.
The web and the spider
Tokyo. The visual experience of the everyday of the photographer. Kanemura is moving through Tokyo’s web, where people appears stuck between the cables. The photographer as a spider. Shiny objects are reflecting lights like water drops on spider’s web. The city reflection, shiny objects like bait or victim. What is stuck / trap in the web.
The connective tissues, nerves, veins, were the frame and of the photograph acts like a body, a container. Images are interacting, like a metabolism (Metabolism in Japan architecture, Kisho Kurosawa 1970). The information contains in the image make me feel of the map of a spreading organism. Between a map and a labyrinth. How can we experience the city through photography. Once we accept the mess, the chaos one can circulate in the photograph.
The last picture, hybrid.
Random thoughts:
About The solitude of Ravens by Masahisa Fukase “Of those who made photographs from experience lived and felt, only a very few could sustain the intensity of that experience and make it into something larger than an immediate visceral scream”
Expressionistic photography, Fukase, Moriyama, Anders Petersen.
Draft question Umberto Eco states in a conversation with Jean-Claude Carrièrre: "The book is like the spoon, the hammer, the wheel or the scissors. Once they have been invented, they cannot be improved. The book has passed the test of time, maybe its components will evolve, maybe its pages will cease to be of paper, but it will continue to be what it is now."
The book as a medium to show photographs? What is a book?
- A physical object = “fixity” of print = fixity in photography = death / immortality - A digital object = Dynamism?
Is the book telling us something about how we read today? Or how we interact / consume photographs?
How do we preserve print culture ? Historicity and archival techniques
The pre-conception that books are important, need to be respected / tradition because they costs, symbole of knowledge, distinction, power, domination. Photobook inherited this sacred relationship, an object of cult.
Check Eduardo kac relation to text. Dimensions of text. Vs flat page.
Is the book part of any genre? Narrative structure found elsewhere?
The context of the analysis. Is the photography project conceived with the idea of a book as the final result? How many copies?Price Related event, exhibition? Transition of analogue to digital – new aesthetic Book as a physical-commercial object for galleries, to leave a sustainable impression in minds visitor / collector / table.
How is the process of selection made: using digital or physical photographs? Or a relationship between both. Laying photographs of the floor, edititing on the computer.
Type of paper / quality / feel / age Type of print / ink