ICP/Bard MFA Class of 2012 Making Book, Making Not-Book

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The ICP/Bard MFA artists have increasingly been embracing the hand-made book as a format, and even toppling it over in favor of making what I call “not-books:” small, interactive items that may be multiples, but are decidedly vessels for the artist’s thinking and desire to control their distribution.

They find in it a great way to “workshop” projects, share them with peers, and present them at venues like the Printed Matter New York Art Book Fair [they have been the only MFAs to have their own table there for the past 2 years] and Camera Club of New York Zine Fair.

Brian Paumier’s work is in the shape of a book, but seems too tactile and intimate to be a book. It has absolutely no text, and is more a devotional sculpture.

Libby Pratt also plays with form, returning to the scroll, or is it a ribbon?

Among the not-books received, Nandita Raman played with the conceptual nature of the Library of Congress classification system by creating a game of chance that generates random encounters with the library, changing with every book added to a shelf.

Rony Maltz’s call number zines also refer back to the library, and ask the reader to assemble in their preferred order.

Nica Ross’s work is three memory sticks titled Mine, Not and Yours…a video of her is “Mine,” and found video that seems to echo it is “Not,” and “Yours” is blank, so that the library patron can add their own, and participate in the work.

Daniel Temkin’s work is a floppy disk, and the work that results from slipping it into a Commodore 64.

There is something authentic, democratic and playful in all of this craft that represents a real trend at ICP thoroughly consistent with its curatorial and pedagogical emphasis on how images communicate, from its roots in LIFE magazine to the production of so many objects of this kind.

It is a practice we celebrate here with a small selection of items, some of which were made for classes, and others that the library acquired at the New York Art Book Fair.

Please come in and take a look at the books in the window and throughout the library.

Artists:

Sina Haghani + Michelette Jigarjian + Teresa Lojacono + Rony Maltz + Brian Paumier + Jorge Alberto Perez + Libby Pratt + Nandita Raman + Nica Ross + Stephen Schuster + Peter Snadik + Daniel Temkin

David Lundbye’s books are hanging in the exhibition [from the ceiling on strings!], just to the East of the library entrance.

Kiyoshi Suzuki –It’s All About the Photobooks

Earlier this year the International Center of Photography’s Library received a generous donation of several books by Dutch photographer, curator and bookmaker Machiel Botman and his New York gallerist Tom Gitterman. In addition to the beautiful monographs of Botman’s highly personal and emotional work was a 2008 retrospective catalogue for Kiyoshi Suzuki: Soul and Soul: 1969-1999, a show that Botman guest curated at the Noorderlict Photogallery in Groningen, The Netherlands. Marginally known in the west at the time of this Dutch retrospective, Japanese photographer Kiyoshi Suzuki, who died in 2000 at the age of 57, is often grouped as a member of the postwar Kompora (contemporary) photography movement. Upon the closer inspection afforded by Botman’s exceptionally well-conceived show and catalogue, Suzuki proves to be a refreshingly unique and multi-layered photographer who defies such an easy classification. With an unflinching commitment to a distinctly personal cinematic visual aesthetic, Suzuki who supported his art and family through his job as a commercial sign painter and photography teacher at the Tokyo College of Photography, is all about time. But not a time that mimics film, rather a time that takes film as a jumping board as it mines a space distinctive to photography and its considered placement in the sequencing of a photobook. Influenced by his longtime friend, American photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, Suzuki is a master of “process” and the unfolding of a slow and expanded narrativity grounded both in the real and the dream-like. As Botman’s respective catalogue so beautifully illustrates, it is the path traveled as much as the end result that shapes Suzuki’s thoughtful balance of word and image in the eight mostly self-published books he produced between 1972 and 1998.
Bookmaking played a central role in Kiyoshi Suzuki’s development as a photographer. To say that his photography is “mostly about the book” is not a light generalization. The process of conceiving a book – determining scale and design, sequencing the images, and deciding if and how to include text — inspired and shaped Suzuki’s entire photographic approach. In the booklet that accompanies Kiyoshi Suzuki: Soul and Soul: 1969-1999, Yoko Suzuki, his widow recounts an anecdote of her husband always carrying around his book dummies, along with a knife and extra paper in his camera bag. She tells how he would enjoy a glass of beer as he sat with an in-progress book dummy open on the living room table. He would also pull out his book dummies for all the neighborhood merchants as a way to engage in a dialogue and solicit feedback on the books’ evolving design and content.  After his death, Yoko visited the local cake shop and tells how the baker vividly remembered looking forward to Suzuki’s book dummies as a way to see a world beyond his shop doors. It is this ability to imbue his books with a very personal and intimate view of the world that speaks to Suzuki’s unique narrative approach – one that emphasizes a universally shared consciousness at the intersection of reality and the unknown – and his dedication to the “objectness” of his books.

With the acknowledgement that the book dummies are an essential component to understanding Suzuki as a photographer, Botman fills the Noorderlicht catalogue with reproductions from the seven dummies for Suzuki’s self-published books. Not included is Ship of Fools (1991), which is his only book to be published by IPC, a commercial publisher. The sense of his working process is palpable as the catalogue unfolds visually, without the distraction of text. (Essays are found in an accompanying booklet.) Starting and ending with his first book, Soul and Soul / Nagare No Uta (1972), the catalogue pages reveal Suzuki’s evolution as a photographer and bookmaker. Crop marks, measurements, and editorial notations fill the margins and shed light on Suzuki’s creative decisions and thought process. Through taped additions, soiled pages, and the layering of ideas, each book is slowly revealed.

Soul and Soul pays homage to his childhood home, Iwaki City in Fukushima prefecture. There is a quiet sense of place, both past and present, in the book’s 4 chapters. Unencumbered by text, Suzuki’s images expose the daily lives of the local miners, summer amusements, traveling kabuki actors, and after hour bars and clubs. The Light that has Lighted the World / Brahman No Hikari (1976), his second self-published book, for the most part continues the quiet, and rather minimal design approach initiated in Soul and Soul. Although text is included in the form of captions on the empty left-hand pages, which sit opposite mysterious and dramatic photographs of Hindu spirituality shot in India. The integration of textual elements as a strong design consideration is introduced with Mind Games / Tenmaku No Machi (1982), his third book. The black and white images in this book feel like a bizarre Japanese road trip peopled by circus performers and drifters.  Wrapped in a silver printed rice paper dust-jacket, Mind Games showcases Suzuki’s masterful typographic design sensibility. Images are presented on several pages as either full bleeds or a collage; text anchors the back section as it spreads across several ochre pages; and a gate-folded insert foreshadows the future color work of his next book, S Street Shuffle / Yume No Hashiri (1988), as it combines text with four-color images.

From this point forward in Suzuki’s photo-bookmaking, the placement of text and the choice of paper break free from traditional design constraints.  There is a sense of freedom and experimentation: text is cut out and presented as a saved newspaper clipping, images are cropped, and film sprocket holes exposed. Dust-jackets are beautiful textured papers layered with exotic designs that are intentionally disturbed by the remains of the photographic process. Whether S Street Shuffle, Southern Breeze / Tenchi Gijyo (1992), Finish Dying / Shura No Tani (1994) or Durasia /Duras No Ryodo (1998), there is a sense of a journey – one that gathers many interesting and disparate elements along the way. In Southern Breeze, for example, Suzuki includes Polaroids of old erotic photos with snippets of time-stamped blurred color images cut by typographic abstractions. There is a sense that all his worlds are now unified: combined in a complex whole are all the fluid parts that include the husband/father, commercial sign painter, traveler, photographer, bookmaker and teacher. Like his last book, Durasia, which filters a vision of Asia through a literary construct based on the writings of Marguerite Duras, Suzuki is continually exploring, excavating and layering that which he finds around him – and then through his books he generously shares it all.

In 2010, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo mounted a Suzuki retrospective entitled Suzuki Kiyoshi: Hundred Steps and Thousand Stories. And once again Machiel Botman was associated with the development of the exhibition—this time through a very insightful catalogue essay, which champions Suzuki as “one of the best-kept secrets in Japanese photography.”  Focusing on the photobooks and the design process revealed in his book dummies, both the museum catalogue and Botman’s essay reinforce Suzuki’s distinctive position as a photographer who divulges his dream-like vision through a non-linear and surreal narrativity that is composed from a pastiche of seemingly disparate parts. Again exploring Suzuki’s visual sensibility through a chronology based on his books, this retrospective catalogue is unique for its scale and design. Similar to a hardcover novel, the book is not what one expects for a museum catalogue. Rather, it feels like a diary full of mysteries and secrets. Suzuki would have liked this small volume and the way it suggests a sense of time unfolding. I can easily envision him carrying it around as a book dummy, just waiting for the right moment to share it with his friends at the local cake shop.

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Kiyoshi Suzuki: Soul and Soul: 1969-1999 (2008)
TR647 .S891 2008

Artist’s Atheneum: An Interview with Nandita Raman

Artist’s Atheneum is a reading room installed in the library by Nandita Raman in conjunction with the ICP-Bard/MFA Thesis Exhibition.  If you haven’t already, stop in and spend some time enjoying it. 

Liz Sales: What inspired Artist’s Atheneum?

Nandita Raman: In my experience, research for projects can become an insular and convergent process. I have benefited from having conversations about my ideas with friends who are writers, filmmakers, scientists or active thinkers, irrespective of their professions. They have introduced me to films, books, music and other research that has helped in opening up my practice. I wanted to bring this conversation/ exchange, which feeds into our life and work, to the foreground, and make it the piece itself. This coupled with the fact that our library at ICP does not have books other than that on art and photography due to constraints of space, inspired me to install a chaise where readers could put their feet up and pull out a book from a selection of about 200 spines of different subjects, shapes and sizes.

LS: What is the role of reading in your personal art practice?

NR: Reading is a part of my everyday. I like to read a variety of subjects and find myself to be a distracted reader, going through two or three books at a time and not finishing any! Its one of those things where I feel the appetite only grows as I read more. So with an extensive list of books recommended by such amazing people for this installation, as a reader, I surely have set myself up for a challenge.  

LS: How did you decide which titles to include?

NR: I chose the recommenders and asked them to select up to 3 books not necessarily related to art, this is where my control ceased. The selection of books was really up to them. I haven’t been able to include rare or expensive books due to budget constraints. It is a self-funded project with support from ICP library that has generously acquired and loaned photography/ art related books.

LS: How does your instillation compare to your original vision?  Are people interacting with the material in a way you expected? If not, what has been surprising?

NR: On the day of the opening, some people asked me if the chaise was for use or for viewing. It made me think about how we distance ourselves from art objects out of reverence or their preciousness. Concerns related to preservation of the object dominate our encounter with it, in a museum or a gallery. I’m thinking about the difference between objects for experience and objects for art while hoping that people actually use this insertion in the library whether or not they consider it art.

LS: As your installation is interactive, how do you hope  it will evolve over the course of the exhibition?

NR: I’m not sure if installation is an appropriate word for this reading corner. I have struggled with that word while using it to describe this project. The word Installation has connotations of stasis in it. I hope the opposite for this project. (How I am avoiding using installation here!) I would love to see what books are pulled out and left on the table or misplaced back into the shelf. There is a notebook for writing/ drawing on the shelves, recommended by Connie Berry, I’m curious about its use. 

LS: Will the Artist’s Atheneum live on after the exhibition closes?

NR: I am making a blog that will have the list of books with annotations and biography of the recommenders. This way not only will it live after the exhibition closes but also be accessible to people regardless of the physical location of the work. Other than this, I am exploring possibilities for this installation to travel or be part of a permanent space with public access.

Roots Music and the Blues in Photography

A recent article on collector/librarian/archivist Jim Linderman encourages a closer look at books in ICP’s stacks that reflect the history of American roots music, and particularly the blues.

Take Me to the Water : Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950 : Photographs from the Collection of Jim Linderman. (2009)
TR23 .T35 2009

Linderman’s collection of river baptism photographs, now a part of ICP’s Permanent Collection, was the subject of last year’s exhibition Take Me to the Water: Photographs of River Baptisms. With Atlanta’s Dust-to-Digital, purveyor of equally excellent recordings and publications, Linderman produced a Grammy-nominated book from the collection accompanied by gospel and folk recordings. The book is a gorgeous compilation of sepia-toned vintage photographs and essays on the subject as well as song lyrics and biographical information on the recording artists, which couldn’t have been easy to track down. As a contrast to the many unknown photographers included, it’s refreshing to see such close attention paid to the identifies of these performers, whether well-known or obscure.

Govenar, Alan B. Living Texas Blues. (1985)
TR681.M86 G68 1985

I can remember clearly the first time that I heard some blues and folk musicians, like Woody Guthrie (beyond the ubiquitous, worth-a-closer-listen “This Land Is Your Land”) and Son House (beyond Jack White’s worth-many-listens cover versions). The buzz and crackle of those older recordings strikes an interesting balance between distance, as if the voices are struggling to span the decades since they were recorded, and intimacy, as if they’re private recordings meant just for the player’s friends and neighbors. This latter sense of “the local” is particularly evident in Alan Govenar’s Living Texas Blues, which narrows its focus to a single state and quickly proves that the diversity of the blues is still too great: suffice to say that there is mention of someone who “can describe and demonstrate subtle distinctions between pianists in Houston’s Fourth ward and those in the Fifth ward.” The book is a fascinating mixture of history and vintage images, tracing the history of Texas blues up from slave and labor songs to Lightnin’ Hopkins and other more famous practitioners, even including an immersion baptism image along the way.

Alan Govenar’s organization Documentary Arts, Inc. is also home to the Texas African American Photography Archive, a portion of which was presented at ICP in the 2010 exhibition Jasper, Texas : The Community Photographs of Alonzo Jordan (2010). (See the Documentary Arts website for an enviable catalog of films and publications, many of which are related to the blues.)

Kennedy, Timothy. Midnight Son: A Tribute to John Lee Hooker. (2005)
TR681.M86 K45 2005

As much as the local plays into blues tradition, it’s also the genre that gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll, and Timothy Kennedy’sMidnight Son presents blues legend John Lee Hooker not as a front-porch enthusiast but as a larger-than-life icon. Shot at close range from the stage itself, the striking images in Kennedy’s book are somehow both personal and heroic, documenting a 1975 performance by Hooker during the Summer Solstice in Anchorage, Alaska. (Almost) literally at the top of the world, the accompanying text notes that in fact this performance occurred before Hooker’s rise to wider public attention in the 1980s, in part as a result of his performance in the film The Blues Brothers. I haven’t heard the live recording, if one exists, but Kennedy’s images certainly show an artist ready to command national attention.

Dunas, Jeff. State of the Blues. (1998)
TR681.M86 .D85 1998

It’s appropriate that Hooker penned the preface for State of the Blues, a sprawling series of portraits of some of the greatest blues musicians in history. Included are Hooker himself, B.B. King, Dr. John, Junior Kimbrough, and many others, along with a series of images from the “blues highway,” as the stretch of Route 61 is known where it runs through the Mississippi Delta region. The legendary Robert Johnson, known as much for selling his soul to the devil as for his remarkable playing and songwriting, is represented by an image of his memorial. (As a photographic side note, there are apparently only two verified portraits of Johnson in existence.)

Dunas’ portraits are formal, though often playful, and represent a different strain in musical history than Take Me to the Water or Living Texas Blues. Dunas and Kennedy focus on the remarkable achievements of singular performers, while the images presented by Linderman and Govenar depict their musical forms as integral elements of history and of community life. Both approaches are excellent entry points to the blues and to other roots genres that are cornerstones of the history of American music.

Jim Linderman’s blogs:
Dull Tool Dim Bulb
Old Time Religion
Vintage Sleaze

Relevant ICP Blogging:
Fans in a Flashbulb post on Take Me to the Water
Fans in a Flashbulb post on Roman Vishniac’s images of Josh White

Atheneum

Last evening we all got to peruse the library within a library created by Nandita Raman, an ICP/Bard MFA graduating this term. Above is the invite that she sent out to her friends, colleagues and mentors a month ago, and the book truck in the library is groaning with the remarkable submissions.

Her cozy reading room was received with great appreciation by one and all, and will remain in the ICP Library until May 20, 2012.

If you cannot visit in person and pick up the reading list…stay tuned for the publication online!

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Children’s Photobooks: Not Just for Children

As an adult, I have always loved children’s books. Before I had kids, I used to position myself close to other people’s children in bookstores as I indulged my picture book habit. The idea was to give the appearance that I was somehow connected to someone else’s unsuspecting child and therefore “vetted” as a children’s book browser. I guess, deep down, I had internalized that official New York City playground rule that prohibits adults except in the company of children.  Finally, a few years later, with my own children in tow, I could freely enter the children’s section at my local bookstore without any fear of my true motives being discovered.

Recently, upon learning of a reprint of Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe and Betty Jean Lifton’s 1967 children’s book Taka-chan and I, I quietly let slip my interest in children’s books to the staff at the International Center of Photography Library. Not surprisingly, I had company. Turns out, they also indulged in children’s books, especially those with a photography focus.  On a shelf, just before the glass enclosed rare book section, sits a nice selection of children’s books by well-known photographers that include Albert Lamorisse’s classic The Red Balloon (1956), Ylla’s animal themed books (1940s-50s), Jill Krementz’s A Very Young Dancer (1976) and photojournalist David Douglas Duncan’s Yo-Yo Kidnapped in Provence (2011). What follows is a highly personal selection of children’s books in the ICP Library collection by Eikoh Hosoe and writer Betty Jean Lifton; Dare Wright; and Alec, Carmen and Gus Soth.

When one mentions the work of Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe, few think of children’s books. Rather, as a founding member of the influential Vivo photography agency in 1959, Hosoe is best known for his surreal and haunting images of Yukio Mishima, and jarring formal compositions of black and white nudes in Man and Woman / Otoko to Onna (1961). So, it comes as a surprise to many that he collaborated on 4 children’s books with American author Betty Jean Lifton from 1967-1985. In the first 2, Hosoe uses carefully staged and moody images to illustrate Lifton’s culturally rich stories that explore the Japanese countryside and Tokyo through the eyes of dogs. The first book, Taka-chan and I (1967 – reprinted 2012) tells the tale of Runcible, a Weimaraner, who digs a hole from Cape Cod to a deserted beach in Japan, where he is discovered by a little girl named Taka-chan. She is being held by an evil dragon, who has taken her captive because her father and his fellow fisherman no longer pay him respect. Runcible courageously asks the Dragon to release Taka-chan and the dragon says he will grant the request on one condition, that they find the most loyal being in Japan and place a white flower at his feet. Thus unfolds, through Lifton’s prose and Hosoe’s photos, an adventure that introduces western children to Japanese customs, folktales, and the legend of Hachiko, Japan’s most faithful dog. Hosoe’s photographic range is beautifully illustrated through interior scenes that are draped with ominous shadows, wide-open country lanes and crowded urban streets framed by doorways covered with traditional Japanese half-curtains (noren).

In addition to Taka-chan and I, Hosoe and Lifton also collaborated on A Dog’s Guide to Tokyo (1969), which stars Jumblie, Lifton’s standard poodle, whose task is to “give western dogs a sniff of Japan” (Lifton). Jumblie takes the reader on a tour of Tokyo, explaining how low dining tables are convenient for table scraps, and the Japanese custom of leaving a bit of rice in the bowl at the end of a meal is another welcome custom from a dog’s perspective. Sadly, A Dog’s Guide to Tokyo is currently out of print and there are no plans for a reprint.

Also about adventure, friendship, and loss, but from a psychologically dark perspective, are children’s book author and photographer Dare Wright’s The Lonely Doll series, which immediately found a strong following with little girls upon its publication in 1957. The somewhat politically incorrect story of the first book presents a lonely little girl named Edith, who wishes for playmates to join her in her majestic New York City home. One day, she is happily surprised by the arrival of Mr. Bear and Little Bear. What follows are the mischievous adventures of Edith and Little Bear while Mr. Bear is away for the day. Finding a secret woman’s dressing room in her home, Edith and Little Bear play dress up and scrawl messages in lipstick on a mirror about Mr. Bear being “just a silly old thing.” When Mr. Bear returns and finds them covered in jewelry, oversized women’s clothing and lipstick, he punishes them with spankings (the politically incorrect scene).
As a child, I was unaware of The Lonely Doll series and only discovered them as an adult through journalist Jean Nathan’s biography of Wright, The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll (2004).  The books, which in recent years have taken on a cult-like status among many women in their 40s and 50s who remember them as childhood favorites, are described by Nathan as thinly veiled tales about Wright’s own dysfunctional family history. Raised by a selfishly manipulative and overbearing mother who cut off all contact with her father and brother, Wright is portrayed by Nathan as a classic “Peter Pan,” a psychologically childish adult who doesn’t want to grow up.

Wright’s staged photos of the two teddy bears and Edith, a Lenci doll named after Wright’s mother and a visual and psychological stand-in for the author / photographer, are all the more creepy when one knows the “made for TV” back-story of her life.  Arriving in New York in her twenties, Wright worked sporadically as a model and actress before settling in fashion photography and then children’s books. Her black-and-white interiors and New York City street scenes have a staged dress up sensibility that conceptually foreshadows works by contemporary photographers such as Laurie Simmons and Cindy Sherman (a “Lonely Doll” fan). As ICP librarian Deirdre Donahue states in a 2009 Monsters and Madonnas blogpost about discovering Jean Nathan’s Dare Wright biography, “…my childhood came flooding back to me. I was compelled to reconstruct the holdings of the great books by Wright for both my own library and the ICP Library.”

In contrast to Dare Wright’s now politically incorrect, yet much loved stories of Edith and her bear friends, are the playful, endearing and refreshingly naive Brighton Picture Hunt book and The Brighton Bunny Boy zines by American photographer Alec Soth’s daughter Camen and family (mom Rachel is credited as bunny wrangler, dad as editor/photographer, and bother Gus as the bunny). As a creative solution enacted when Soth arrived in the UK to work on a commission for the Brighton Photo Biennial 2010, but was denied a work visa, Brighton Picture Hunt (2010) is the outcome of his daughter Carmen’s photographic exploration of the south England town of Brighton. With father in tow, Carmen, then 7 years old, used Soth’s digital camera to shoot photographs each day from her 4 foot tall perspective. Highly vernacular in feel and devoid of any photographic conceit, the color images cover a wide range of subjects: street scenes, trash, nature, pedestrians, and animals (dogs being one of her favorite subjects). Besides chaperoning the young photographer, Soth’s job was to edit a cohesive selection from the over 2000 photographs shot during the father-daughter outings. Besides forming the basis for the book, the final edit stood center stage as Alec Soth’s replacement in the Martin Parr curated Brighton Photo Biennial. Quite a coup for a 7 year-old photographer!

Flush with the success of Brighton Picture Hunt, Carmen and brother Gus have embarked on a series of zines about a fictional character known as “Bunny Boy.” To date, there are 2 releases: The Brighton Bunny Boy (2010) and Bunny Boy Goes to Rome (2011). Similar to Wright and Hosoe/Lifton’s books, the zines address childhood fears of loneliness, loss, and isolation. The first zine, The Brighton Bunny Boy, tells the tale of a little girl who visits Brighton with her family and reads a local news article about a bunny who has the face of a boy. The bunny is very shy and won’t show his face because “people [get] freaked out” by it. The little girl meets him and becomes his friend and convinces him to come home with her for Easter and show his face. Told through Carmen’s hand lettered words and colorful drawings, which are interspersed with Alec’s photos of Gus dressed as the bunny boy, the zine has a pleasing sincerity and innocence in the best tradition of children’s books. The adventures of Bunny Boy are continued in Bunny Boy goes to Rome (2011), where a Little Girl upon arrival at the hotel is surprised to find her good friend Bunny Boy hiding in her suitcase. Just like Hosoe / Lifton’s Taka-chan and Runcible’s Tokyo quest, Bunny Boy and the Little Girl explore Rome together. They eat gelato, take pictures and visit the Pantheon, where Bunny Boy gets lost. Fortunately, he meets a magic peacock that opens its feathers and casts a spell that reunites him with the Little Girl. All ends well and as Carmen writes on the last page, “Stay tuned for the next Bunny Boy.” I’m hooked. Sign me up for the email alerts.

Chances are, I will also be able to read the next Bunny Boy zine installment at the ICP Library, where I won’t have to come accompanied by a child to look at it. This is good news, because I definitely don’t want my children’s book habit to result in a similar outcome to the two women who were ticketed last June by New York City Police when they decided to enjoy doughnuts in a Brooklyn playground unaccompanied by a child.

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Children’s photobooks and resources highlighted above:

Eikoh HOSOE and Betty Jean LIFTON

Hosoe, Eikoh and Betty Jean Lifton. Taka-chan and I (2012- reprint).
Recent acquisition. Call number not yet available.

Hosoe, Eikoh and Betty Jean Lifton. A Dog’s Guide to Tokyo. New York: W.W. Norton, 1969. Out of print and not in the ICP Library collection.

Dare WRIGHT

Nathan, Jean. The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright (2004).
TR140.W75 N37 2004

Wright, Dare. The Lonely Doll (1957 – reprint c.1985).
TR656.5 .W75 1985

Wright, Dare. Holiday for Edith and the Bears (1958).
TR656.5 W75 1958

Wright, Dare. Edith and Mr. Bear (1964).
TR656.5 .W75 1964

Wright, Dare. A Gift from the Lonely Doll (1966 – reprint 2001).
TR656.5 .W75 2001

Wright, Dare. Edith and Big Bad Bill (1968).
TR656.5 .W75 1968

Wright, Dare. Edith and Little Bear Lend a Hand (1972).
TR656.5 .W75 1972

Carmen, Alec, Gus and Rachel SOTH

Soth, Carmen and Alec. Brighton Picture Hunt (2010).
Recent acquisition. Call number not yet available.

Soth, Carmen, Alec and Gus. The Brighton Bunny Boy (2010).
TR179.5.S681 .B75 2010

Soth, Carmen, Alec, Gus and Rachel. Bunny Boy Goes to Rome (2011).
TR179.5.S681.B86 2011

Yasuhiro Ishimoto (1921-2012): The “ Visual Bilinguist” in Japanese and American Postwar Photography

On February 6, 2012, it was announced primarily through blogs, Facebook and Tumblr that Japanese photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto died at the age of 90. The only mainstream US news organization to run a story on Ishimoto was CNN via its photography blog. As an important link in the postwar dialogue between Japan and America, Ishimoto was, according to Minor White, “a visual bilinguist” – a photographer who was uniquely positioned due to his birth and education to act as the cultural liaison between two highly distinctive photography cultures. Despite his crucial role as both an advisor to and photographer in numerous exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago, Ishimoto’s death was largely ignored in the American press and sadly unnoticed by most in the western photographic community. This is a shame because Ishimoto was a remarkably talented photographer whose work merged a western formalist approach, learned under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Chicago Institute of Design, with a Japanese attention to subtle beauty. He was a “photographer’s photographer” — a friend who selflessly supported his colleagues in both the east and west as he acted as an aesthetic and cultural translator in an exchange that still continues today.
When over a year ago I undertook to explore the Japanese photobook collection at the International Center of Photography Library, the very first book I pulled out of the stacks was Ishimoto’s Someday, Somewhere / Aru Hi, Aru Tokoro (1958). The copy that I held in my hands that day was not a pristine edition that would be found in a photobook collector’s bookshelf. It was a well-worn book whose pages had been repeatedly turned and scrutinized over years by ICP staff members, students and teachers. It simultaneously spoke to Ishimoto’s role as a “photographer’s photographer” and the mission of the ICP Library as a resource for “information and inspiration to anyone interested in the medium [of photography].” The last time I had held this book was at a bookseller’s tiny shop in Osaka, Japan. To see it in New York and so readily available was a nice affirmation that, despite diminished visibility in recent years, students, teachers and scholars still regularly sought out his work.
Ishimoto’s life continually moved back and forth between the U.S. and Japan. (A February 2012 post by Richard Pare in the blog La Lettre de la Photographie provides a wonderful and detailed biographical overview.) Born in San Francisco in 1921, while his father was employed in the U.S., Ishimoto returned to Japan in 1924 and spent the rest of his childhood in the Kochi Prefecture on the island of Shikoku. In 1939 his family sent him back to the U.S. to study agriculture in California. Two years later, America entered WWII and Ishimoto was relocated to the Amache Internment camp in Colorado, where he first developed an interest in photography. Upon his release, he enrolled in Northwestern University’s School of Architecture, but quickly realized that his central focus was photography, not architecture. Ishimoto transferred to the Chicago Institute of Design (New Bauhaus), which was led by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Advocating a new photography of “seeing while moving,” Moholy-Nagy’s curriculum emphasized the formal aspects of the pictorial space and had a profound influence on Ishimoto’s distinctive east-west aesthetic that reinterpreted traditional Japanese culture through the lens of modernism.

It is this visual sensibility that unifies the seemingly diverse subjects in Ishimoto photography, a range which includes: architecturally focused images of an early 17^th century imperial villa in Katsura: Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture (1960); identity as explored in the provocatively posed precocious Lolitas and the urban scenes of African Americans in his Chicago, Chicago (1969); graphic and textural studies of signage, defaced facades and nature in his Someday, Somewhere / Aru Hi, Aru Tokoro  (1958); and a confrontation of the transitory in the formal abstractions and blurred Tokyo street scenes of Moment / Toki (2004). Ishimoto’s ability to take both eastern and western subjects and recontexualize them through his unique bilingual aesthetic vision, made him the perfect Japan-America photography ambassador-at-large.

While still a student at the Institute of Design in the early 1950s, Ishimoto’s teacher Harry Callahan introduced his work to The Museum of Modern Art photography curator Edward Steichen, who would exhibit it in the seminal 1955 Family of Man group show and a later solo show in 1961. Impressed by Ishimoto’s ability to easily navigate both the Japanese and American photographic communities, Steichen asked the young photographer after his return to Japan in 1953 to host the museum’s architectural curator Arthur Drexel, in addition to gathering Japanese submissions for the Family of Man show. More than 20 years later in 1974, MoMA’s John Szarkowski and his Japanese co-curator Shoji Yamagishi would include Ishimoto’s work and acknowledge his help “as a selfless liaison with the other [Japanese] photographers and, as a translator who [understood] the photographer’s special language” in the museum’s New Japanese Photography exhibition catalog. In his role as a photographic bilinguist, Ishimoto was also largely responsible for introducing a formal modernism imbued with a distinctly western sense of individuality to a new generation of Japanese photographers through his 1954 solo show in Tokyo, and his widely published architectural images of Katsura. This exposure contributed to the emergence of the more expressive “image school” generation, whose members included Ikko Narahara, Shomei Tomatsu and Eikoh Hosoe.Although he became a naturalized Japanese citizen in 1969, Ishimoto continued to visit the U.S. to work on a variety of photographic projects – many of them resulting in photobooks. Within the ICP Library collection there are 5 Yasuhiro Ishimoto photobooks, published over a period from 1958 to 2009. When viewed together, they show the different sides of Ishimoto’s multi-tiered photographic vision, while also confirming a unity in what on first glance seems to be a disparate body of work. The earliest is Someday, Somewhere / Aru Hi, Aru Tokoro (1958), the well-read book I pulled from the stacks on my first visit to the library. It is organized into three sections and includes images taken in both Chicago and Tokyo. The book, often cited as one of the first important postwar Japanese photobooks, begins with a selection of black-and-white and color offset images that highlight a formal modernist exploration of signage, graffiti and urban abstractions. Towards the end of this section, the prints become rich high contrast gravures, some with vertical gatefolds that showcase a repetition of flat Warhol-like graphic car images. “The Beach” section that follows continues his focus on the formal, as it shows the cropped sandy legs and torsos of beach visitors along with groups of bathers lounging or standing in the abstracted patterns of the sand. “The Beach” gives way to the last section called “The Little Ones,” which allows Ishimoto to shift gears and explore identity and race with photographs of masked children that bring to mind later images by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Shot in both the U.S. and Japan, Ishimoto’s photos of white, Asian and African American children progress in a formal manner, grouping together like-image of girls with glasses or boys with guns. Often the children stare at the viewer with a knowing edge that suggests the weight of an adult world.
With Ishimoto’s relationship to Chicago as their starting point, 2 later books in the collection present distinctly different historical studies of his work. Yasuhiro Ishimoto: A Tale of Two Cities (1999), the comprehensive catalog for a traveling retrospective exhibition organized by Colin Westerbeck at the Art Institute of Chicago, does a thorough job of covering the different themes found in Ishimoto’s photography up to1999. Although the images included overlap with several of those found in other more narrowly focused Ishimoto books at the library, the context and the wonderful essay are extremely valuable in confirming Ishimoto’s role as a “visual bilingulist.” On the opposite end of the spectrum is the slim Stephen Daiter Gallery (Chicago) catalog Newman & Ishimoto – Reunion in Chicago: Photographs 1949-52 (1999) on the friendship between Ishimoto and the American photographer Marvin E. Newman. The two photographers met while both students at the Chicago Institute of Design and cemented their friendship during long hours spent together in the darkroom of the Fort Dearborn Camera Club. The Daiter Gallery catalog, which presents familiar Chicago street scenes by Ishimoto, is particularly beneficial for elucidating the common thread of an underlying formalism rooted in modernism that shaped both photographers’ work.
This strong sense of form and composition is always present in Ishimoto’s work and photobooks. Whether the street scenes of his Shibuya, Shibuya (2007) that sequence images in groups based on the patterns and logos worn by fashionable Tokyoites or the abstractions of leaves and clouds interspersed by blurred urbanites in his Moment / Toki (2004), these two later books in the ICP Library are further affirmation of a vision that consistently merges a western modernist education grounded in the teachings of the Bauhaus with an eastern attention to a subtle and often fleeting beauty. Completed when Ishimoto was already in his 80s, Moment /Toki (2004) calmly confronts time, a time that is changing and ultimately fading.  Shibuya, Shibuya (2007) is more rhythmic and patterns its sequences to the beat of the urban environment. Both books speak to Ishimoto’s role as a bilingual guide in a photographic journey that conflates an abstraction centered on form and texture with a social exploration bound to western individuality. The mementos of this bi-directional east-west passage are deceptively quiet images that emerge from a refined visual sensibility that “[writes] haikus with a camera” (Westerbeck). As James N. Wood, the Director and President of The Art Institute of Chicago commented in the foreword to Ishimoto’s retrospective catalog, A Tale of Two Cities, “…Ishimoto’s photographs build a bridge that spans a hemisphere. The magnitude of Ishimoto’s accomplishment was recognized… in his homeland when he was made a ‘Person of Cultural Merit,’ an honor that entails a fellowship for life… Now it is our turn to celebrate Ishimoto’s lifetime achievement…”

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Yasuhiro Ishimoto books at the ICP Library:

Someday, Somewhere / Aru Hi, Aru Tokoro. Tokyo: Geibi Shuppansha, Showa 33, 1958. TR681.C5 .I84 1958 -R

Westerbeck, Colin. Yasuhiro Ishimoto: A Tale of Two Cities. Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago, 1999. TR647.I83 .W47 1999

Newman and Ishimoto – Reunion in Chicago: Photographs from 1949-52. Chicago: Stephen Daiter Gallery, 1999.  TR647.N489 1999

 Moment / Toki. Tokyo: Heibonsha Ltd., 2004. Signed. TR655 .I38 2004

Shibuya, Shibuya. Tokyo: Heibonsha Ltd., 2007. Signed. TR659.8 .I83 2007