The spring-summer 2023 exhibition at the Maison de la culture du Japon in Paris is the first in France devoted to one of the most significant figures in the history of Japanese photography: Ken Domon (1909-1990). It brings together around a hundred images of this pioneer of realistic photography, produced between the 1930s and 1970s. The many facets of his work are revealed here: his approach to photojournalism at the start of his career, the inevitable turn towards photography of propaganda in the 1930s, then his fascination with ancient temples and Buddhist sculpture, his touching portraits of street children and celebrities, and his moving testimony on Hiroshima.

Ken Domon’s work has left a lasting mark on the history of photography in Japan by laying the foundations of contemporary photographic creation, to the point of being, even today, considered an essential reference. Domon has sought throughout his life to obtain the most realistic images possible, without lapsing into any misery. As a new wind blew over Japan at the end of the war, his gaze, without filters, rested on society in general and on daily life:

“The social reality of daily life imposes itself on me at least as much as the traditions or the ancient culture of Nara and Kyoto; the common point of my interest in these two subjects is my attempt to understand the link that these realities have with the destiny of the Japanese, their anger, their sadness, their joy. attested Ken Domon.

This realism which is his signature and which, by definition, “stripped photography of all sentimentality”, is undeniably the guiding thread of the exhibition at the Maison de la culture du Japon in Paris which, theme after theme, focuses on retracing Domon’s ambitious journey to capture Japanese culture as a whole. In particular, it presents the two reports that most clearly reflect the social realism characteristic of his work, namely: Hiroshima (1958), considered by the Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburô Ôe as the first work of contemporary art inspired by the atomic bomb to be about the living and not about death, and The Children of Chikuhô (1960), a photographic series that bears witness to the poverty that plagues the mining villages in the south of the country, focusing on the lives of street children. Ken Domon became the leader of realistic photography in Japan in the 1950s. He was certainly influenced by great Western photographers such as Cartier-Bresson and Eugene Smith, alongside whom he exhibited in Tokyo in 1951 and 1953.

In another section, the Portraits series reveals to viewers the faces of personalities in different fields – artistic, literary, cultural or scientific – such as the writers Yukio Mishima and Jun.ichirô Tanizaki, the artists Foujita, Tarô Okamoto and Yûsaku Kamekura, the director Yasujirô Ozu or the actor Toshirô Mifune. The last part of the exhibition is dedicated to Domon’s longest photographic series, Pilgrimage to Ancient Temples, a collection of images of Buddhist statues and architecture, hidden treasures and discreet landscapes, immortalised during travels across the country as he sought to capture the beauty of sacred places in ancient times.

“We can speak of Ken Domon’s work as an autobiography, a personal rather than a social documentation, which translates his constant concern to fix on film a moment of dialogue with the subjects. His gaze fixed on the latter, whether it is a landscape, a sculpture, a person or an object, acts as the revealer of a universal beauty seen through a lens that does not ignores any of the physical characteristics of the represented form.” says the curator, Rossella Menegazzo.

Celebrated by the opening in 1983 in Sakata (his birthplace, in the department of Yamagata) of a museum dedicated to a prolific work, Ken Domon had only very rarely been exhibited abroad: in Germany in 1990 and in Italy in 2016. He had never benefited of an exhibition in France. This will be done in the spring thanks to the Maison de la culture du Japon in Paris, which is paying a tribute to a creator who has endeavored to paint a complete portrait of Japanese culture. This event highlights the fact that Domon, with the help of friends and personalities from the artistic world such as Yûsaku Kamekura and Sôfû Teshigahara, was able to initiate a real cultural transition in the 1950s, definitively putting aside the spirit of defeat to give birth to a contemporary Japanese aesthetic praised around the world.

Photographs from the collection of the Ken Domon Museum of Photography.

Curators:
Rossella Menegazzo, Professor of East Asian Art History at the University of Milan With the support of: Ken Domon Museum of Photography, MondoMostre

With the assistance of: Association for the MCJP

Ken Domon – Le Maître du Réalisme Japonais
April 26 – July 13, 2023
Maison de la culture du Japon à Paris
101 bis, Quai Jacques Chirac
75015 Paris
Metro Bir-Hakeim RER Champ de Mars Tel. 01 44 37 95 00/01
www.mcjp.fr

Schedule :
Tuesday – Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Closed on public holidays Free admission

The editors of this new book about street photography characterize the practitioners of their subject matter in hipster idioms – ‘the slicers and dicers of the flow of reality, recidivist shoot-and-scram merchants’ – picturing them as foot-loose voyeurs who get their kicks from capturing the uncanny, the incongruous, the sorrowful and the surreal. Defining the territory in such catchy and catholic terms gives them carte blanche for their selection of photographers from around the world. It is a strength of Reclaim the Street but also a weakness.

The photobook’s global dimension is admirable, featuring photographers whose work is more likely to be found on social media sites than in print form. Working in diverse places, from Bangladesh to Brazil, their combined output is prodigious – Instagram showcases talent but short attention spans of its followers encourage quantity more than quality — and this is reflected in the five hundred images that are spread across three hundred and twenty pages of Reclaim the Street. In addition to the book’s undeniable visual impact, the more than forty photographers featured in the book speak in their own words about their methods and motivations.

However, the editors’ minimalist deployment of a sense of history allows for too many photographs to be included that are only of passing interest. A nod is given to tradition in a subsection with the heading ‘Art?’ and the use of a lower case ‘s’ when Cartier-Bresson is mentioned — ‘the legacy of surrealism remains a key motivator in much modern street photography’ – allows the cultural movement that was Surrealism to be co-opted for highlighting photographs that merely happen to capture something contingent, quirky or mildly humorous. This can become tiresome but a directory of the photographers’ websites at the back of the book allows readers to check out for themselves the range of their work. Some of Tavepong Pratoomwong’s photographs, for instance, may be superficial but his mastery of colour and talent for composing memorable images is more than just congenial.

The traditional domain of street photography was cities like London, Paris and New York and, besides the whole digital revolution, a reason for the eclipse of their importance in this regard is the paradigm shift taking place in the personality of public spaces. The street in these cities as the public zone it once was is disappearing, becoming instead a space framed by market exchange, a privatised space in more than the neoliberal, economic sense. Óscar Monzon and Stuart Paton are alert to this when they take to the street with their cameras; Paton describes Milan’s city’s street code as ‘pretty ugly … body language screams that you just don’t exist.’ In London especially, public spaces risk becoming essentially private environs where a photographer who is not pointing a camera at themselves can be regarded as proxy for the constant CCTV surveillance. Melissa O’Shaughnessy, Andre D. Wagner and David Rothenberg, sallying out on the streets of New York, are not deterred. O’Shaughnessy is following in the footsteps of mostly male photographers but, unlike her exceptional predecessor Diane Arbus, avoids the uncomfortable and has more in common with the work of Elliott Erwitt. Manhattan is Rothenberg and O’Shaughnessy’s territory but a very different neighbourhood, Bushwick in Brooklyn, is where Andre D. Wagner lives, photographing it relentlessly ‘to make honest and relatable work that speaks to the trials and triumphs of the everyday person’.

Reclaim the Street’s achievement, responding to the way street photography’s geographic axis has tilted away from Europe and the US, is at its best when drawing attention to photographers who are relatively unknown, like Irina Sokolova in St Petersburg and Nayeem Siddique from Chittagong. Siddique responds to street life in his country because, as he says, ‘people are so friendly and curious that they will always look at your camera’. This does not prevent him from responding to a scene near a cattle market – two cattle in the back of a truck being taken to slaughter – when the sky turns a warning red behind the vehicle.

The striking images in this compendium are serious ones like those of Éléonore Simon who, conscious of the way Valparaíso also fascinated Sergio Larraín, finds the city in Chile a rich resource for her play with shadows and a self-professed intention to create ‘a calm and serene view created out of our chaotic and overcrowded urban environments.’ The book’s lacuna, nevertheless, is a downplaying of street photography emerging from engaged and critical positions in favour of an upbeat, feel-good approach. While the title happily borrows the name of the Reclaim the Streets collective – which opposes the way corporate forces are usurping community ownership of public spaces – the contents give a low profile to documentary or leftist-enlightened photography of social and political events unfolding on streets around the world.

Sean Sheehan

Reclaim the Street, eds. Stephen McLaren and Matt Stuart

Little Big Galerie presents the exhibition of Sandra Reinflet : VoiE.X, artists under constraints.

How do you live as a painter, dancer, director or poet in Papua New Guinea, Iran, Mauritania, Madagascar or Brazil?
How do you make art your profession when it seems to be the last priority of a government, when religion rules, when there is no structure for distribution or when it is muzzled by censorship?

The VoiE.X series, produced between 2016 and 2021, presents portraits of artists who pose the act of creation as an act of resistance in contexts where living from art is a challenge. Their work then goes beyond the artistic field to become political and social, questioning the freedom of creation, expression, action, in short, freedom itself.

Each course is unique but all have in common to overcome, even to divert the constraints to achieve. As the details are hidden as much in the vanishing lines as in those of the face, the portraits are taken at wide angle. A way of sketching an intimate geography where the subject and its environment are linked, willingly or by force.

During the health restrictions of 2020 and 2021, Sandra Reinflet naturally decided to extend this work to France. Since the moment when culture was officially categorized as “non-essential”, the question of the place of artists has arisen more than ever.

About Sandra Reinflet
When she has to decline a profession, she ventures: inventor of true stories.
Sandra Reinflet uses photography and text to stage reality – assuming that everything is fiction as soon as you choose a setting.
Her series VoiE.X, artists under constraints won the 2020 Roger Pic Prize from SCAM and the Carré sur Seine Members Prize. In 2014, her series “Who killed Jacques Prévert?” » (Editions de La Martinière) was honored by the Bourse du Talent. Sandra Reinflet has also just won the Great photographic assignment from the BNF.
In addition to her exhibitions in the Public Space (Meuse, Cité du Franc-Moisin, Saint-Denis Basilica, etc.), she carries out numerous cultural actions to amplify the voices of those who are not heard, or not heard enough. Sandra Reinflet has also published four books (her latest novel, Do not speak to strangers, was published by JC Lattès in 2017).

Sandra Reinflet : VoiE.X, artistes sous contraintes
Until March 30, 2023
Little Big Galerie
45 rue Lepic
75018 Paris
www.littlebiggalerie.com