His Private Utopia
By Damian Zimmerman

… Oliver Sieber is known for his own distinct portraits on the subject of  youth- and subcultures as well of blind people and transsexuals. At Galerie Priska Pasquer he shows in an impressive wall installation his “Imaginary Club” in which he incorporates all those people he would like to be close to. In this club Punks, Visus, Mods, Psychobillies and Gothic Lolitas from Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo, Cologne or Schwaebisch Hall encounter each other. These are people who communicate their identities through clearly visible, albeit sometimes difficult to understand, codes – for to distance themselves from the masses and at the same time for to associate themselves with their own group.
…
Extended and complemented are the protagonists of Oliver Sieber’s series with black and white street scenes, which often appear being not less fantastic, as well as with portraits of friends and acquaintances.
…
Thus emerges an ideal society for Oliver Sieber, a kind of utopia, in which he feels comfortable.

Koelner Stadtanzeiger, July 15, 2010

The Contemporary Book Award goes to the best photography book published between 1 June 2009 and 31 May 2010. The Book Awards winners are chosen by the five Discovery Award nominators, Rencontres d’Arles president Jean-Noël Jeanneney, and LUMA Foundation founder Maja Hoffmann.
Rencontres d’Arles 2010

Yutaka Takanashi, Photography 1965 – 74
Editors: Roland Angst, Ferdinand Brueggemann, Priska Pasquer
Preface by Priska Pasquer, essays by Ferdinand Brueggmann and Hitoshi Suzuki
Published by Only Photography, Berlin
116 pages, 41 images, Triplex, hardcover
Text: German, English, Japanese

More details on the publication:
New gallery publication: Yutaka Takanashi, Photography 1965-74

The Historic Book Award went to: “Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and 70s”, by Ryuichi Kaneko & Ivan Vartanian, Aperture Foundation, 2009.

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By the way, this is second photobook Galerie Priska Pasquer was involved in which received an award. In 2005 the two volume publication on Heinz Hajek-Halke received the German Photobook Award:

Heinz Hajek-Halke. Form aus Licht und Schatten
Texts: Klaus Honnef, Priska Pasquer, Michael Ruetz, Alain Sayag, Rainer Stamm
2. Vol., Steidl Publisher 2005.

An english, one volume version, of the books is available as well:
Heinz Hajek-Halke: Artist, Anarchist
Steidl Publisher 2006

(German version below)

Small Opinions
Those who know Cartier-Bresson and who like Robert Frank will love Yutaka Takanashi. Takanashi who? No one was as big as him, especially not his sweetish-perverse fellow-countryman Araki, and what a joy that only now we are able to discover him. He began in the 1960s to photograph Tokyo, the people in Tokyo and the landscape around Tokyo, in a way like the young Cassavetes made movies. Dirty, blurred, rough. And why do the photographs look like being made today? Because modern Japan was always one – two decades ahead of the world? Or because Takanashi could see with 35-mm lens in our frenzied, grey, depressing future – in contrary to all other black-and-white photographers? In a reprint of his most famous book „Toshi-e“  (errata editions, ca. 30 EUR) together with Takanashi we can enter a time machine and fly to the place where the life ends and something different from the death begins. (…)
bill

Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS), June 20, 2010, No. 24, P. 28

Kleine Meinungen
Fotografie Wer Cartier-Bresson kennt und Robert Frank mag, wird Yutaka Takanashi lieben. Yutaka who? Keiner war so groß wie er, schon gar nicht sein süßlich-perverser Landsmann Araki, und was für ein Glück, dass wir ihn jetzt erst entdecken können. Er fing in den Sechzigern an, Tokio, die Menschen in Tokio und die Landschaft um Tokio auf eine Art zu fotografieren, wie der junge Cassavetes Filme machte. Dreckig, verwischt, rauh. Und warum sehen die Bilder trotzdem so aus, als wären sie von heute? Weil das moderne Japan immer schon dem Rest der Welt ein paar Jahrzehnte voraus war? Oder weil Takanashi im Gegensatz zu allen anderen Schwarz-Weiß-Fotografen mit seinen 35-mm-Objektiven in unsere rasende, graue, deprimierende Zukunft sehen konnte? In einem Reprint seines berühmtesten Buchs “Toshi-e” (errata editions, ca. 30 EUR) kann man mit Takanashi in die Zeitmaschine steigen und dorthin fliegen, wo das Leben endet und etwas anderes als der Tod beginnt.
Auch sehr gut, aber von gestern, die große Surrealismus-Ausstellung “La Subversion des Images” mit Fotos von Man Ray, Bellmer, Lee Miller, Dora Maar, Jindrich Styrsky. Diese Männer und Frauen dachten, dass es eine Welt neben unserer Welt gibt, und vergaßen, dass die Welt, nach vorne gedacht, jeden Tag sowieso anders wird. Ihre künstlichen Puppen mit ihren verrenkten Gliedmaßen und traurige, alte Varieté- und Ladenschilder sind sehr angenehm anzuschauen, mehr nicht. Aber das ist in den Tagen des sozrealistischen Neo-Rauch-Trübsinns auch schon sehr viel (seit 16. Juni im Instituto Italiano de Cultura in Madrid; französischer Katalog 52 Euro).
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Australian Centre for Photography
Friday 11 June – Saturday 17 July 2010

Our civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos
Werner Herzog

Hijacked explores the socio-cultural landscapes of Germany and Australia through the diverse talents and perspectives of 32 contemporary photographers. With a focus on the young, the boundary-riding and the fringe-dwelling, Hijacked is layered with imagery that is variously evocative, confronting, dreamlike and incisive.

Building on the unprecedented success of Hijacked 1 (2008), Hijacked 2 – Germany / Australia is both a substantive book and a major exhibition that reinforce and expand upon each other: the exhibition through its experiential immersion and the book through its reflective analysis. Both eschew a simple linear critical argument in favour of a multiplicity of dialogues between works and commentators. What happens between images is as important as any given image content.

Australian artists:
Narelle Autio, James Brickwood, Michael Corridore, Andrew Cowen, Tamara Dean, Jackson Eaton, Suzie FoX, Lee Grant, Derek Henderson, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Ingvar Kenne, Bronek Kózka, Georgia Metaxas, Conor O’Brien, Polixeni Papapetrou and Louis Porter

German Artists:
Johanna Ahlert, Natalie Bothur, Jörg Brüggemann, Thekla Ehling, Albrecht Fuchs, Karsten Kronas, Anne Lass, Jens Liebchen, Myriam Lutz, Julian Röder, Josef Schulz, Oliver Sieber, Ivonne Thein, Olaf Unverzart, Jan Von Holleben and Sascha Weidner

More videos selected by Oliver Sieber can be watched at our Youtube channel.

“Boehm/Kobayashi Publishing” is a label created by the artist couple Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber.

Oliver Sieber – Imaginary Club 2
Boehm/Kobayashi, 2010
SC 34,4 x 27,9 cm, 12 pages, ed. 150
Available at Schaden.com

Youth and culture, music and society, identity and the search for individuality – these are the themes that define the works of photographer Oliver Sieber. Sieber seeks out clues in subcultural milieus, visiting clubs, concerts and illegal parties in Los Angeles, Toronto, Tokyo, Osaka, New York and small-town Germany. Here, he comes into contact with Punks, Visu’s, Psychobillies, Gothic Lolitas and Cosplayers – people who define their identity through codes, demonstrating membership of one group while distancing themselves from the mainstream.

With his Imaginary Club exhibition and publications, Oliver Sieber has brought together the different protagonists from his series. In Imaginary Club, it is the heterogeneity and the nonconformist element shared by the personalities that captures the artist’s interest.

The Changing Faces of Japan
A retrospective at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, charts fifteen series spanning fifty years of photographer Yutaka Takanashi’s work, which focuses on the nature of change and urban space.
Review by Kenneth Masaki Shima, Tokyo Art Beat

Living in Tokyo is an exercise in looking at multitude. Often impressions here are formed by ‘not seeing’, by passing over the diversity and unbalance that exists around us. We draw out landmarks from the cityscape, beacons we use to demarcate paths of familiarity without being conscious of how the urban space guides our everyday consciousness.

Yutaka Takanashi’s work creates a biographical record of Tokyo and its residents. The world within his viewfinder gives the sense of a greater composition that extends beyond the focal center to include details to the extremities of the frame. Although employing a number of different methodologies his lens is consistently focused on the minutiae amongst the mélange. In one work from ‘Tokyoites’ for example, black suits crammed into a train car dominate the image, the small headline on an exposed corner of newspaper giving subtext to mood of the scene: “Public Opinion on America…”

His earliest series in this current exhibition, ‘SOMETHIN’ ELSE’, is the most visually abstract. A solo show held at the Ginza Gallery in 1960, it portrays cityscape by focusing on superficial form. Monochrome images of the city’s solitary geometry are captured in a soft, diffused light and shot straight on. These works are almost devoid of people, accentuating the pure figurative beauty of falling scraps of cloth or shadows across a common commercial façade.

During the early 1960s Takanashi developed a reputation as a commercial photographer, winning awards for his advertising works. Throughout 1964 the portrait series ‘Otsukaresama’ appeared in Camera Mainichi magazine. In it popular media figures act out their public personas against a white background, dislocating their character from the familiar media environment while foregrounding the ‘mask’ of public image and cult of personality inherent in the rise of television culture. Flexing her muscles, child star Yukari Uehara is literally plugged-in to the television aerial through which her popularity is ’strengthened’.

Pursuing non-commercial projects, Takanashi began searching the city with a smaller 35mm camera and wide-angle lenses (21-28mm), taking snapshots of the city’s residents. These images culminated in the highly recognized series ‘Tokyoites’ in 1966. Takanashi’s mentality for this series was something between “a hunter for images” and “a scrap picker,” he said. We see in these photos young families and the overlap of generations, lifestyles and landscapes that all co-existed during this period of booming capitalization. Lacking the critique of consumerism and reification of the subsequent ‘Tokyoites 1978-83?, this first ‘Tokyoites’ portrays a people still in ambivalent awe of the rapid change in their society, and less of the contradiction mixed with complicity present in the later series.

In 1968 with Takuma Nakahira and others, Takanashi co-founded the photography and criticism magazine PROVOKE, with the subtitle “provocative materials for thought.” However, Takanashi’s works stood in contrast to Nakahira and Daido Moriyama’s work, known for being “aré, buré, boké [grainy, blurred, and out of focus],” a style that dismissed previous photographic conventions in framing and shooting, snapping without using the viewfinder and having images of unaligned and unbalanced composition. Takanashi’s style is different, being grounded in the realistic image, though it still contains its own elements of subversion, and as a group the contributors to PROVOKE had a large influence on photography.

‘Hatsu-kuni: Pre-landscape’ (1983-92) searches the rural regions of Japan for religious iconography and traditional ceremonies — landscapes of pre-modernity. ‘Chimeiron: genius loci Tokyo’ (1994-2001) is perhaps the most difficult series: the works are paired shots of cityscape based around a specific area (loci) of Tokyo. However, the spaces are not ‘attractions’ in the conventional sense, but just spots buried in neighborhoods or parallax views of the same stretch of street. They attempt to convey the prevailing character of their place and here we see another example of minutiae — not something necessarily small but rather commonly thought of as trivial.

Recently, Takanashi has focused on the relationship between residents and the boundaries and pathways created within urban spaces. ‘Windscape’ emphasizes the image impressed on our mind from a sudden glance from a train. Presented as a slide show the viewer has only brief seconds to grab each image before the slides advance, emphasizing that intuitive or impulsive moment of snapping the shutter Takanashi himself experienced. The most relevant series for current Tokyoites is ‘Kakoi-Machi’ (2005-6), whose wall-sized images foreground barriers, grids and borders normally unconscious – construction barriers, mock-up posters, nets and patterns of light all of which confine and define the space around us: the process of which we rarely consciously see.

Through Takanashi’s lifetime of works questions are posed about the nature of change in Tokyo — of space and patterns of lifestyle, and of how much of our world remains unseen. We see here patterns of work and consumption that physically and psychologically create boundaries for our ability to see. This formulation gives us the power to transcend our patterns and makes us conscious of what we were unaware.

Are, bure boke: Radical aethetics in Japanese
“… Cologne gallery Priska Pasquer is showing in a gorgeous exhibition some historic prints by Yutaka Takanashi from “Toshi-e”. Taken out of context of the narrative especially some of the dark prints achieve an iconic quality. (…) On occasion of the exhibition an impressively beautiful monograph has been published.”
Freddy Langer, FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), May 22, 2010

Also please find the review in the attached PDF file.
FAZ, Review of Yutaka Takanashi exhibition, May 22, 2010

Yutaka Takanashi belonged to the small group of photographers who launched the magazine Provoke in 1968. The magazine had considerable influence on Japanese photography of that period. He was one of the founding members of this group along with the photographer Takuma Nakahira, the critic and photographer Kôji Taki, and the theorist Takahiko Okada. Daidô Moriyama joined the group during the production of the second issue.

As a member of the small Provoke collective, Takanashi was able to find a new theoretical approach and its visual language. The influence of this group and of the magazine on the photographic scene in Japan was immense. Nobuyoshi Araki described Provoke in retrospect as the trigger of an explosion in Japanese photography. In the following years the Provoke photographers produced major works in terms of photographic history, whereby Yutaka Takanashi defined the high point as well as the end of this era with the publication of his first book, Toshi-e (Towards the City), in 1974.

This two-part book set new standards in terms of design, materials and craftsmanship. In a compartment behind the larger volume, Toshi-e, one finds an earlier series in the smaller format volume, Tôkyô-jin; it seems to have provided the basis for the larger book. The smaller volume is designed to look like a printed notebook on simple paper. This combination is indicative of Takanashi’s non-dogmatic treatment of the different visual styles and approaches of the 1960s. While he shows the real Tôkyô on the verge of becoming a modern urban society in Tôkyô-jin and names the concrete location at which each of the photographs was taken, Toshi-e contains a view of an urban landscape that has no defined location.

Our book, Yutaka Takanashi, Photography 1965–74, presents a representative cross-section of these two pioneering photographic series in 35 full-page illustrations and 6 large format plates. An extensive biography, list of exhibitions and a bibliography round off our newest publication.

The limited edition of 500 will be published in three different versions:
Editions numbered 1 – 30: include a gelatin-silver print of a photograph from Toshi-e (double page 19–20), personally printed and signed by the artist, in the same format as the book. The book along with a separate portfolio containing the print, both bound in linen, are enclosed in a printed linen slipcase.
Editions number 30 – 130 are signed by the artist and will be sold for 128 €.
Editions number 131 – 500 will be sold for 98 € – and are available with one of two linen covers printed with alternative motifs.
Each of the books is stamped with the artist’s personal stamp.

Available at:
www.only-photography.com
www.schaden.com

In the Kölnische Rundschau Thomas Linden writes:

Nur ein Spritzer auf dem Bein
Galerie Priska Pasquer zeigt faszinierende Fotografien von Shomei Tomatsu

Symbolisiert die Wolke über dem Meer einen aufsteigenden Gedanken, ein Zeichen der Hoffnung und der Freude? Oder ist sie nichts weiter als ein wenig Wasserdampf, der sich im Sonnenlicht über dem Pazifik gebildet hat? Fotografien von Shomei Tomatsu sind engagiert und geheimnisvoll zugleich. Dieses Foto aus der Serie “The Pencil of the Sun” zählt zu den Ikonen der Fotografiegeschichte.

Shomei Tomatsu: Untitled (Hateruma-jima, Okinawa), from the series “The Pencil of the Sun”, 1971  ©Shomei Tomatsu

Shomei Tomatsu, das ist für viele Japaner der bedeutendst Fotograf der zweiten Hälft des 20. Jahrhunderts. Gleichwohl ist die Ausstellung bei Priska Pasquer seine erste Einzelpräsentation in Deutschland. Der 1930 in Nagoya geborene Künstler besitzt viele Talente, und er hat sich mit seiner Kamera immer dort aufgehalten, wo es der japanischen Gesellschaft besonders wehtat.
…
Tomatsu zieht isch nicht auf den Status des scheinbar objektiven Dokumentaristen zurück, seine Arbeiten zeugen von Emotionen und subjektiver Anteilnahme. Obwohl die Ausstellung nur Kostproben des umfangreichen Werks liefern kann, ist sie höchst eindrucksvoll.

Please find the full article in the attached PDF file
Download: Tomatsu review at “Koelnische Rundschau”, April 9, 2010

In the Kölner Stadtanzeiger Damian Zimmermann writes in a double review on Eikoh Hosoe and Shomei Tomatsu:

Manga, Malerie und alte Mythen. Die Wurzeln der japanischen Fotografie

Noch vor wenigen Jahren löste japanische Fotografie auf dem deutschen Kunstmarkt eher ein desinteressiertes Schulterzucken aus. Das hat sich mittlerweile geändert, und nun gibt es in Köln gleich zweimal die Gelegenheit, einen Blick auf die Wurzeln der japanischen Fotografiegeschichte zu werfen. Das Japanische Kulturinstitut zeigt die erste Einzelausstellung von Eikoh Hosoe seit 30 Jahren in Deutschland, und die Galerie Priska Pasquer widmet seinem Kollegen Shomei Tomatsu die erste Einzelausstellung in Deutschland überhaupt. Dabei zählen beide zu den bedeutendsten zeitgenössischen Fotografen Japans und haben die folgenden Generationen entscheidend mitgeprägt.
…
Völlig anders [als Eikoh Hosoe] die zweite Fotografielegende Shomei Tomatsu. Der hielt die Nachkriegserfahrungen seiner Heimat fest – und damit auch die Amerikanisierung Japans. In seinen Bildern zeigt er ein Japan zwischen tiefer Tradition und Moderne, B-52-Bombern und Kaugummi, Hiroshima-Opfern und Schokolade.

Please find the full article in the attached PDF file
Download: Tomatsu-Review_Newspaper_Koelner-Stadanzeiger, April 3, 2010