A pictorial record of the exhibition Japanese Photography 1930s, Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, 1988, which collects photographs from the emerging photography of the era. Approximately 340 illustrations of the work of photographers such as Kiyoshi Koishi, Shoji Ueda, Ei-Q, Koshiro Onchi, Nakaji Yasui, Iwata Nakayama, Shinzō Fukuhara, Kineo Kuwabara, Terushichi Hirai amongst others.

Iwata Nakayama (1895-1949) is regarded as a one of the most important contributors to the Shinko Shashin movement. After graduating from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1918, he received a scholarship from the Japanese government and went to California before settling in New York. At the same time Nakayama was attracted to avant-garde movements and moved in bohemian circles where he met Shimizu Toshi. Shimizu encouraged him to move to Paris in 1926 where he met Man Ray, Fujita Tsuguji, and Enrico Prompolini. These encounters left a deep impression on him and when he returned to Japan in 1927 he energetically set about forming his own vision of ‘pure art photography’. In 1929 he settled in Ashiya (nr. Kobe) and in the following year founded the Ashiya Camera Club with Hanaya Kambei, Korai Seiji, and others. This club became the main driving force of New Photography in Japan. Together with Kimura and Nojima he founded Koga magazine in 1932 that was the most important forum for artistic photography at the time.

For almost thirty years, Wolfgang Tillmans has been creating new pictorial worlds of abstract photography with his Silver works, which sound out and compellingly expand the boundaries and representability of photographic processes. Brought together for the first time in one opulent artist’s book, Tillmans describes the pictures as ‘stained, impure, bright, unstable, exhausted, fugitive, smear, shimmer, as solid colours’. In addition to the pictures, Tillmans also shows images of the Silver works in exhibition settings: as elements of installations, for example at K21 in Düsseldorf in 2013 or as pure Silver installations like those at Tate Britain in 2003, the Venice Biennial in 2009 or, most recently in 2020, at WIELS in Brussels.

The plates of the present is a project based on the photographic process of photogram. In February 2013, artist Thomas Fougeirol and artist/curator Jo-ey Tang set up a photographic darkroom(nicknamed DUST) in Ivry-sur-Seine, bordering Paris. Since then, 130 participants have come through The plates of the present, comprising over 1,000 prints and a film. The project is named after the beginning of a sentence in William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (published in six installments between 1844 and 1946), the first photographically illustrated book. An exhibition was curated by Sonel Breslav at Baxter St/Camera Club of New York, New York in 2015 with a book published by Blonde Art Books and Secretary Press. A second exhibition was curated by Jo-ey Tang and Thomas Fougeirol at Galerie Praz Delavallade, Paris in 2017. At the end of 2018, the entire archive entered the permanent collection of Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou, Paris.

Wols (1913–1951) was celebrated posthumously as one of the pioneering artists of the Art Informel movement. His distinctive early photographic work of the 1930s is however very little known. In an unusual travel across time and space his work is discussed in connection to that of contemporary American artist Eileen Quinlan (b. 1972). This book, a companion to the eponymous exhibition Always Starts with an Encounter, Wols-Eileen Quinlan, curated by Helena Papadopoulos and organized by Radio Athènes at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens in 2016, further explores the relationship between the work of the two artists through an indexical structure, various textual forms and inflections, different registers of images and close-up textures that act like another text. Spectral and suggestive, but also precise and factual it reflects on a circular idea of time as it wanders in the abstruse physicality of the photographic.

Texts by Quinn Latimer, Laura Preston, Helena Papadopoulos, Oliver Berggruen. Designed by O-R-G Inc., David Reinfurt.

Japanese monograph dedicated to the photographic works of Man Ray.