2pm—Round Table: The Photobook as Work & Method

Architects and photographers discuss the photograph and the photobook as work and method.
Participants: Laura Stamer, Architect and Photographer (DK); Anne Elisabeth Toft, Architect, Associate Professor, PhD in Architecture and Photography, AAA (DK); Jens Frederiksen, Architect and Photographer, Associate Professor, KADK (DK)
Moderator: Claus Peder Pedersen, Architect, Head of Research, PhD, & Photographer, AAA (DK)

12noon—Lecture: The Photobook as a medium

José Luis Neves, PhD student in Art and Design at the University of Ulster, gives a talk on his research into the photobook as an artistic medium.

1.45pm—Conversation: Photobooks, Magazines & Printed Matter

A critical view on photobooks and their significance as artistic work, medium, and concept, and the role of the printed image in our contemporary society.
Participants: Jens Friis, Curator & Editor-in-chief of KATALOG (DK); Moritz Neumüller, Curator (AT/ES); José Luis Neves, PhD student in Art and Design (PT/UK).

11am—Talk by Jens Friis, Curator and Editor-in-chief of Katalog (DK)

On the history of the photobook, its importance as a communication tool for artist and its place in institutional collections.

12noon—Lecture: Finnish Artists’ Books & Photobooks.
Pirkko Siitari, Curator (FIN)

Pirkko Siitari, independent curator based in Helsinki and former Director of Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, speaks about her selection of Finnish Photobooks on view at the Aarhus School of Architecture, and about the Finnish photobook scene in general.

Chris Bowes, Money Talks, 2014
Through his day job as a bank teller, Chris Bowes encounters defaced currency more often than most of us. One of his duties is to remove such banknotes from circulation, which are recycled and replaced in the cash flow.

Alex Thebez, Feelings and Similar Items vol 2, 2014
Feelings and Similar Items is a compilation of pictures from the everyday. Initiated by Alex Thebez, the series is a way to create coherent narratives from seemingly disparate images made through a compulsive desire to photograph.

The Institute of Critical Zoologists, ICZ Phylliidae Studies, 2011
This paper by Hiroshi Abe, who is the winner of 2008/9 Phylliidae Convention, reports the results of the 26th Phylliidae Convention. Millions of years of evolution by natural selection have given us what we classify today as the order Phasmatodea. None can be quite distinct as in the family Phylliidae. The first scientists to observe these leaf insects once claimed that ‘plants can now walk’

Waterfall, Invisible Cities, 2013
The fifth edition of waterfall is comprised of a collection of works that imparts a monochrome perspective on our world, whether it be urban landscapes, people, objects or animals. As expressed by editor and art director Shauba Chang, it is a very minimal way of seeing, but expressed in a personal, sentimental way, one that puzzles together our relationship with the city through scattered fragments and comparisons. Through various texts and photographs, the city is depicted not as a concrete presence, but instead as an elusive and subjective concept.

Pulp Matter, Tough Guys, 2014
A series of black & white portraits of local indigenous dudes living on Groote Eylandt in Northeastern Australia.

Todd Anderson Kunert, The Situation We’re In, 2014
The Situation We’re In was an installation at Strange Neighbour in 2014 that included: 19 colour prints, suspension cables, and a 9 channel audio installation. The exhibition was accompanied by a 7” Vinyl and this artist book.

Geraldine Kang, Tell Me Something I Don’t Know, 2014
Tell Me Something I Don’t Know is Geraldine’s personal dialogue with Singapore. Connoting both as resignation towards circumstances and a renewed curiosity, the show is a result of Geraldine’s physical explorations of the land.

Tay Kay Chin, Made in Singapore, 2014
In Made in Singapore, Tay Kay Chin explores the life of the foreign workers who come to a little island in search of a better life. Through the journey of Salim, a construction worker who came to Singapore from Bangladesh almost 18 years ago, the Platform co-founder attempts to answer questions: What did they leave behind? Who did they leave behind? What did they sacrifice? What brought them here?

Darren Soh, For My Son, 2013
Darren Soh explores the architecture in Singapore which may soon be torn down. Featuring the recently-torn-down Queenstown cinema, an old estate at Commonwealth Close (which Darren grew up in) and the lesser-known Mathilda house in Punggol, these images are dedicated to Christian, Darren’s son, so that he may learn to appreciate these structures when he grows up.

Kevin Wy Lee, Bay of Dreams, 2013
Kevin Wy Lee looked at the Marina Bay area, drawn by its dazzle and theater.
Singapore is a nation of dreams and dream-chasers, and the Bay area is where it’s all on display for the world to see. Kevin Wy Lee, also known as Ox Lee, is the founder of Invisible Photographer Asia, one of the most prominent online portal for photography in Asia.

Sean Lee, Two People, 2013
Sean Lee created Two People, an extension of Homework, which won him the 2011 ICON de Martell Cordon Bleu award. Exploring the relationship between his parents and interpreting it through his lens, the black-and-white images depict a surreal view of Sean’s idea of his parents.

Kelvin Skewes, Nauru, 2014
Nauru: What was taken and what was given, examines the complicated history and current issues in the tiny Micronesian island nation. Its economy, once reliant on phosphate mining, now relies on aid from other countries. Nauru is also host to three of Australia’s regional refugee processing centres, where over 900 asylum seekers currently reside. Skewes’ photographs provide a launching point for interrogations of modern day colonialism, Nauru’s future and Australia’s responsibility in the region

Li Kejun, The Good Earth, 2012
Inspired by the traditional cartoon characters representing happiness, Li Kejun pays respects to the happy-go-luck country folks who have paved the road for the urbanization and economic development.

Felix Wilson, Jacob Raupach, William Horan, Radiata, 2013
Radiata is a historical archive that explores the mythology of the timber industry through a collection of selected newspaper images from the Tumut timber boom of the 1980s. The work navigates between historical propaganda and banal vernacular, questioning the reliance of rural townships upon resource-based industries.

Rennie Ellis, Cup Fever, 1987
At the Melbourne Cup, Rennie Ellis was everywhere – in the car park amid the parties and sumptuous lunches, on the members’ lawn where the fashion queens parade, in the hubbub of the betting ring, in the public stands with the battlers and out on the grass with the ‘zanies’ in their craziest of clothes. His photographs taken over three decades of the Melbourne Cup, capture the excitement, the magic and the special energy of the day.

Briony Galligan, Not Like Flying, 2013
Not Like Flying imagines and examines personal and art historical forms and how they intersect with geographic borders and global migration to create hybrid Modernities. This book includes artwork made in response to the history and archive of Lugwig Hirschfeld-Mack, a Weimar Bauhaus trained artist deported and interned in Australia in 1940 with 2,000 other Germans predominantly of Jewish descent.

Yi Hui, Winds from Aydingkol, 2012
Beautiful portraits by Chinese photographer Yi Hui. Yi Hui’s motive of making photographs is rooted in her desire to document the people around her life. Her subjects are mostly female — her daughter, her sisters, friends and relatives. She only photographs people who are extremely close and dear to her.

Diane Inc, Diane Photographic Journal Vol.1, 2014
The aim of the journal is to place the work of a group of like-minded photographers together in one place. It is the thought process and outlook that joins this group together, not necessarily the photographic content. The seven photographers had 6 pages each to dill, and were told they could shoot something for the project or raid their archives. Unseen photographs were the priority. None of the photographers knew who was using what picture of collection, so looking through the book for the first time was a surprise for everyone involved (except me). The secondary aim is for this project to grow naturally to include photographers from around the world.

Anthony Haughey, The Edge of Europe, 1996
Anthony Haughey’s series of colour photographs are an evocative portrayal of the complex relationship between the West of Ireland, its landscape and people, and Ireland’s diaspora on the East Coast of America. Ireland’s diaspora, the largest single population movement of the 19th century, has created huge global network of people claiming to be of Irish origin. The United States has become a home to millions of Irish people, a symbol of hope and economic freedom to many, whilst retaining unbreakable family ties with their homeland. In the last US census, forty million people claimed Irish ancestry.

Anthony Haughey, Disputed Territory, 2006
Anthony Haughey’s Disputed Territory series investigates the continuing conflict over territory, rights and ownership of land in Europe. What makes this significant is that such a focus is too often dissolved in a lazy rhetoric of globalisation i.e. borders don’t mean anything anymore. Whilst borders have moved throughout history, their meaning and function in flux, their consequence as a power effect remains.

Christine Redmond, Sea Change, 2014
This body of work was taken in the Forty-Foot in Dublin Bay. With the donning of bathing suits, the overt signifiers of class and status, as well as social inhibitions, are rendered invisible thanks to the equality brought about through the activity of swimming. Indeed, for many, the swim has become a regular year-round ritual and an important aspect of their lives where the constraints of everyday existence are washed away by the sea.

Ciarán Óg Arnold, I Went to the Worst of Bars, 2015
This is Ballinasloe, a sandstone town in the easternmost corner of Galway in Ireland, seen through the eyes of a native. Within the rabble, Arnold trails after the cast-offs, invisible men who spend their time in murky corners, choosing to do nothing but drift and drink. Ballinasloe is a mouth; in Irish, mouth of the ford, mouth of the crowds. “We claim to hate it here”, writes Arnold, “but the truth is that we choose to stay, hiding from reality, drowning in drink and wanting to be left alone as we await whatever fate is in store.”

David Farrell, Innocent Landscapes, 2001
In May 1999, The Northern Ireland Bill was passed in the House of Commons; it provided an amnesty to help the identification and location of people who had disappeared during the ‘Troubles’. Six locations were identified and became known as the ‘Sites of The Disappeared’. These were the burial places of eight people murdered by the IRA in the 1970s and early 1980s.

David Farrell, The Swallowing Tree, 2014
I made my first photograph of what I would subsequently term The Swallowing Tree during the first search in 1999 for the bodies of Kevin McKee and Seamus Wright at Coghalstown Wood, Wilkinstown. These two young men belonged to a small group of people who became known as the Disappeared from the conflict in Northern Ireland

David Greene, Where We Are, 2014
A year long look at modern Ireland. A lot has been said, reported and written about Ireland in the last 5 years. Soundbites, headlines, rhetoric. A single phrase sums it up – Where We Are. A political phrase that starts where it ends, making it the perfect metaphor for talking in circles. The idea is that by looking, not talking, we might get a clearer sense of where we are.

Dragana Jurisic, Yu: the Lost Country, 2015
Between the silences which seem to envelope the older generation and the ennui of the young, Jurisic’s Yu is the landscape of still and mournful places, in which the weight of the past forces itself upon everything. Rebecca West valiantly fought to believe in the future of Yugoslavia. Dragana Jurisic traces the effects and aftershocks of its disintegration in the subtlety of her colours, her capacity for intimacy and the intelligence and empathy with which she sees what was once Yugoslavia

Eamonn Doyle, i, 2014
Eamonn Doyle has been photographing his fellow Dubliners since the early ‘90s and has developed a unique approach to his street portraiture. Despite the close range muggers-eye-view, the images remain respectful, reverent, almost in awe of the mysterious figures they depict. The photographs give us mere fragments of their subjects’ narratives yet enough to inspire feelings such as kinship and compassion. His photographs suggest that every life has weight and drama, even if its meaning is ultimately elusive.

Eamonn Doyle, On, 2015
Eamonn Doyle’s second photo-book ON follows his previous book i, a collection of street portraits from Dublin city centre. In ON, black and white figures stalk across Dublin streetscapes, by turns lost, menacing, wary, browbeaten or entranced – but always at odds in some way with their environment. As in i, the photographs were mostly taken on Dublin’s Parnell Street and O’Connell Street. But here the historic role of those two streets as zones of resistance, protest and insurrection is far more present. The figures are dynamic – muscles taut, heads in mid-turn, bodies in motion.

Fiona Hackett, Self Storage, 2015
Yi Fu Tuan’s claim that ‘space is security and space is freedom…’ is embodied in the self-storage spaces on the peripheries of cities and towns. These spaces which store material possessions reflect who we are and how we now live in our contemporary world. Through photographs and stories Self Storage documents these spaces and the life experiences which bring people into them.

Garry Loughlin, Between Spaces, 2014
Whilst there is a photography tradition of documenting the American road trip, I felt that traveling by bike would expose me to opportunities and encounters that could be overlooked if travelled by car or bus. Taking a slower pace and being on my own speed allowed me, as an observer passing through small American towns, to see the beauty in the banality of everyday life. I feel the decision to cycle not only gave me a stronger connection the landscape but also to the people I met along the way.

Grainne Quinlan, White Crane Spread Wings, 2013
A studied observation of Tai Chi enthusiasts in Hong Kong. One finds these elderly enthusiasts throughout the city; along pedestrian crossovers, tiled promenades, beneath the highways and in officially designated areas. The interest is not in photographing the complexities and techniques of these movements but rather the individuals who participate in this unique routine. The individual appears entranced and otherworldly, removed from their surrounds and absorbed in a performance. As movement is stilled within the frame, the nature of this performance is amplified and as such human form and expression are central to this work.

John Duncan, Bonfires, 2008
John Duncan’s Bonfires documents a long-standing tradition of bonfire building by Protestant communities in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The bonfires are built in preparation for annual 12th July celebrations, which commemorate the defeat of James Stuart at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. The imposing bonfire structures are a powerful provocation with which Protestant identity is asserted and a sense of solidarity and continuity is re-affirmed.

John Duncan, Trees from Germany, 2003
Trees from Germany shows the ongoing regeneration of Belfast, a City attempting to emerge from a troubled past. Duncan explored the city from many different viewpoints and offers a mixture of the old, the new and the transitional, and in some instances all of the above within one frame.

Kate Nolan, Neither, 2014
Neither is an exploration into the hearts of young women in Kaliningrad. The first generation to have grown up after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they look to define their identity in this small island within Europe. The women Nolan has been living with and sharing with have generously opened up their homes and their minds to allow her to better understand this link between place, identity and history.

Kathrin Baumbach, Colombian Skateboarders, 2013
In a world where traditional male role models are scarce, and there is security in numbers, young skaters on Bogotá’s street look to each other to keep themselves safe, free of the influence of the drug trade, and eagerly looking forward to a day where their recreation might well lead to their salvation

Kenneth O’Halloran, The Handball Alley, 2013
These are relics of a once vibrant chapter of Irish life. The ruins of these abandoned alleys, mapped and photographed by O Halloran, bear silent testimony to a feature of Ireland that has perished through time and modernisation.

Kevin Griffin, Omey Island: Last Man Standing, 2013
Kevin Griffin’s Omey Island, Last Man Standing tells the story of Pascal Whelan and his life on Omey Island, County Galway. Pascal is a former stuntman who travelled the world plying his trade in movies, TV and live shows. However after the death of a work colleague, and friend, during a live show Pascal’s career was finished. Pascal returned to Omey Island where he lives alone to this day.

Laura Curran, Lots of Cake!, 2014
Lots of cake! is a discourse on family structure and how celebration can be used as a mode of escapism. This project began as a chronicle of special occasions, emphasising the role that the photographer´s mother plays in creating important moments, and evolved from a document into a revelation of her character and imagination.

Linda Brownlee, Achill, 2010
Photographed in their favourite spots, near their homes or sites chosen by Brownlee, these adolescent figures – resting or only hesitating within the cameraʼs frame – draw the eye into and across the islandʼs contours, revealing the shape of the land through the intimacy of their relationship to it. A tranquillity pervades Brownleeʼs photographs that, despite rain or wind, stems from a sense of belonging. Her careful images capture the moody portrait of a place.

Martin Cregg, Midlands, 2015
Over a ten year period Midlands has explored and mapped the physical transitions which are as a direct consequence of the promise of the National Spatial Strategy, and the physical effects of the failures of this plan – from 2004, until it was abandoned in 2013. The work began at the height of the Celtic Tiger period – the promises of re-populating and re-generating the midlands region were, on paper, strategically created to give economic stability to the region.

Matthew Thompson, Instance, 2014
Deliberate references to classical culture highlight the continual remaking of history and question the authority of the “definitive” memory. In observing the role history plays in our understanding of self, we witness the relationship between time’s layering and the conditioned nature of our own perception.

Maurice Gunning, Familie: Family, 2014
Familie: Family is an intimate photobook revealing the home life of children with disabilities in Romania. We encourage an increase in supports given to families, ensuring that these children can continue to live within the family home.

Miriam O’Connor, Attention Seekers, 2012
We spend much of our daily lives caught up in busy routines, unobservant of the curious details that make up the visual world we are passing through. Irish artist Miriam O´Connor´s photographic series Attention Seekers lingers on these often overlooked traces, singling them out with an attentive and subtle gaze that imbues them with a mysterious and magical vitality. Attention Seekers is concerned with the representation of everyday scenes, spaces and people encountered by the photographer, and O´Connor has a unique talent for discovering infinite possibilities of image-making amidst the quotidian banality, slicing out those details which petition for attention.

Miriam O’Connor, The Legacy Project, 2013
The NWCI initiated The Legacy Project to challenge mainstream representations of women and work and to look instead at the alternatives. There were four core commissions led by artists Miriam O’ Connor, Sarah Browne, Anne Tallentire , Ailbhe Murphy and Ciarán Smyth of Vagabond Reviews. These commissions aimed to create another kind of public dialogue that would amplify the advocacy work of the NWCI, the membership, interested communities and individuals. They are equally about the contribution artists make to our knowledge of the world.

Patrick Hogan, Still, 2012
Patrick Hogan’s partly autobiographical photographs present an intimate view of his everyday encounters and surroundings in a remote area of County Tipperary where he has lived for the past two years. His compelling portraits, dense still lives, brooding interiors and pensive landscapes convey a sense of uncertain anticipation and quiet foreboding. Though modest and focused in geographical scope, Hogan’s powerful images explore expansive existential themes of love, fragility, decay and loss.

Paul Gaffney, We Make the Path by Walking, 2013
Over the past year I have walked over 3,500 kilometres with the aim of creating a body of work which explores the idea of walking as a form of meditation. My intention has been to create a series of quiet, meditative images, which would evoke the experience of being immersed in nature and capture the essence of the journey. The images seek to engage the viewer in this walk, and to communicate a sense of the subtle internal and psychological changes which one may undergo while negotiating the landscape.

PhotoIreland, New Irish Works, 2013
Introducing works by 25 Irish and Irish based Photographers. Published to accompany the exhibition with the same name, produced during PhotoIreland Festival 2013.

Ronald Ansbach,  A Grande Seca, 2015
The Big Dry is a circular, imaginary perambulation through the city of São Paulo, from the historic center towards its edges and back, assembled from juxtapositions that reveal a self-devouring city in constant mutation. The book is an exploration into the generic, global city, suspended between its physical presence and its image.

Claudio Edinger, O Paradoxo Do Olhar, 2015
In The Paradox of the Look, the photographer seeks to portray the intimate way and the universal way of seeing the world, through images taken in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Bahia, Amazon, Santa Catarina, Paris, Venice and Los Angeles. The selective focus, which highlights certain details in an image, while others appear out of focus, is a metaphor for our numerous contradictions in our daily life.

Gabriela Machado, Rever, 2014
The book Review is more than a poetic look at the daily life of the author, Gabriela Machado. It is also the first publication to gather images from the world of the photo-sharing network Instagram. With a diary-style language, the volume brings a gentle chromatic treatment and a delicate look.

Claudia Jaguaribe, Entrevistas, 2014
A book that brings together more than 70 neighborhoods of São Paulo, such as Jaguaré, Morumbi, Bras, Água Funda and Jardins, among others. Claudia Jaguaribe shows us panoramic images of interior spaces, showing its inhabitants and its windows to the outside world, always in twilight. The choice of shooting at this time is due to the desire to find people at home, after work. In each picture we see the contrast between the colossal built mass of the city and the intimate side.

Iatã Cannabrava, Pagode Russo, 2014
Iatã Cannabrava’s first photographic project is revealed almost 30 years later in this re-publication called Russian Pagoda. Cannabrava was in Russia in 1985 to participate in the World Festival of Youth and Students for World Peace. There, he witnessed the beginning of the end of the Cold War, or the dismantling of the Iron Curtain. The result is a gaze directed at urban scenes, common subjects, and common people, whereby the ordinary and the banal become the main focus of the investigation.

This year, we are able to present 70 Japanese photobooks published within the last 10 years and selected by Mikiko Kikuta, an independent curator based in Tokyo. Traditionally, Japanese photography has been closely linked to the printed matter, more than exhibitions, since the 1950s. It used to be very important for a photographer to show the new work in magazines such as Camera Mainichi or Asahi Camera and then making a book, as a next career step. Yet in the 80s and 90, some of these magazines closed down and big publishers stopped publishing photobooks, because quite few became big sellers.

In the last 10 years, there was a large shift in the publishing of photobooks in Japan. Many photographers returned to self-publishing, in the spirit of Daido Moriyama’s work at Provoke, in the end of the 60s, and Araki’s Sentimental Journey in the 70s. On the other hand, more than 10 new publishers specialised in photobooks were founded. Graphic designers started to be interested in the medium as well, because it gave them a stage to exhibit their talent.

Mikiko Kikuta is an independent curator, born in Tokyo, where she lives and works. She has curated more than 50 exhibitions of photography and contemporary art in Japan and Europe. She has been the artistic director of European Eyes on Japan since 2002 and the artistic director of Shiogama Photo Festival in Miyagi, Japan, since its beginning.

Keiko Nomura, Soul Blue, 2012
This is Keiko Nomura’s fifth book, published as the final chapter of the long-term series about the lives of women. Travelling through the past and the present, Tokyo and other cities, the photographer looks back on her own life as well the changing urban landscapes.

Lieko Shiga, Rasen Kaigan, 2013
Shiga’s photographs from Kitakama are different from her previous work in that they were produced over more than four years, in collaboration with the local residents. This personal connection is noteworthy and it might not be far-fetched to say that Shiga is operating more as an “organiser” than as a “photographer”. Although Rasen Kaigan acknowledges the March 2011 tsunami disaster by which Kitakama was severely affected, this is far from a book of “tsunami photos”. The images in this book call to mind many things outside the realm of photography: surrealism, land art, happenings, sculpture and the presence of Japanese “earth spirits,” to name just a few.

Rinko Kawauchi, Ametsuchi, 2012
In this project, Kawauchi, shifts her attention from the micro to the macro. The title, Ametsuchi, is comprised of two Japanese characters meaning “heaven and earth,” and is taken from the title of one of the oldest pangrams in Japanese. In Ametsuchi, Kawauchi brings together images of distant constellations and tiny figures lost within landscapes, as well as photographs of a traditional style of controlled-burn farming (yakihata) in which the cycles of cultivation and recovery span decades and generations. Punctuating the series are images of Buddhist rituals and other religious ceremonies, an attempt to transcend time and memory.

Taiji Matsue, Gazetteer, 2005
This is a book on aerial landscapes, shot by Taiji Matsue around the world, from the South-American Altiplanos to Alpine peaks, the jungles of Malaysia to the deserts of Texas. The landscapes are shot only when the sun hits the highest point of the day.

Taiji Matsue, CC, 2005
Taiji Matsue is most known for his large-scale aerial photographs from around the world. In CC, Matsue suggests a “new map of Japan”, offering views not only of architectural structures, but of city scenes, rural terrain and coastlines as well.

NaoTsuda, Masato Seto, Akane Asaoka, Document Fukushima, 2006
Three Japanese photographers were commissioned to make a work about Fukushima nuclear plant. The work was completed before the earthquake and tsunami that caused the plant to have a reactor meltdown.

Mao Ishikawa, Hot Days in Okinawa, 2012
Mao Ishikawa was born in 1953 in Okinawa. She participated in Tomatsu Shomei’s Workshop in 1974. Her work is strongly related to Okinawa, an island with a complicated history – it has been a Japanese colony and was the only battle field between America and Japan during World War II. Many civilians were killed by both sides. After the war it was occupied by the U.S. army and is still home to a large U.S. military base.

Takashi Suzuki, Bau, 2015
Takashi Suzuki was born in 1971 in Kyoto where he lives and works today. A graduate from the Photography Department of The Art Institute of Boston, Boston, MA, U.S.A., he has also been a guest student in the class of Thomas Ruff at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. There are 4 different covers to this edition.

Nobuto Osakabe, Hanabi, 2015
The Hanabi series expresses a longing for the universe. Using fireworks photographed on paper, I am trying to realize the universe I haven’t seen with my own eyes. What kind of lights would there be, if I could ever able to go to the space? I would never be bored photographing the brightest spectacle.
This is Nobuto Osakabe’s first photobook.

European Eyes on Japan vol.13, 2012
European Eyes on Japan vol.14, 2013
European Eyes on Japan vol.16, 2014
Ongoing since 1999, this project consists in inviting European photographers to Japan, to record images of the various prefectures of Japan, on the theme of contemporary Japanese people and how they live their lives.
The photographs shot in various locations around Japan are collected the following year in the European Eyes on Japan publications and in exhibitions featured in cities throughout Japan and Europe. Works that have completed the exhibition circuit are then donated to their prefectures of origin as part of the cultural heritage of their later generations.

Takuma Nakahira, selected by Satoshi Machiguchi, Takuma Nakahira 1000, 2014
During the preparations for Takuma Nakahira’s 2003 exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art, a large amount of black-and-white prints made by the artist – all previously unknown to the public eye – were discovered. These photos were shot in a Yokohama suburb close to the artist’s home, thought to be taken between 1978 and the late 80s. Nakahira would start the day with a walk in his neighbourhood, on his bicycle, to take photos, and then develop the prints himself. From the large amount of unearthed prints, only “photos that feature cars” and “photos that also feature cars” were selected and compiled into a massive book.

Trip Zine by Newfave 02, edited by Dasuke Yokota and Hiroshi Takizawa, AMS, 2015
The second edition of the Newfave Trip Zine is made up of photographs Daisuke Yokota and Hiroshi Takizawa took on their trip to the Netherlands in September 2014. There are two different versions, edited respectively by Yokota and Takizawa who picked their favorites out of more than 10,000 photos. Through their personal selection, the two photographers’ interest in their surroundings becomes clearly visible, while it also gives the viewer a peek at how Yokota and Takizawa have grown from editing not only their own, but also each other’s material.

Mika Ninagawa etc, On Happiness, 2003
On Happiness : contemporary Japanese photography. Catalogue for an exhibition held at Tōkyō-to Shashin Bijutsukan, Sept. 9-Oct. 5, 2003.

Naruki Oshima, Armin Linke etc, Appearance: Urban Space Interpreted Through Photography, 2007
Catalogue from the group show “Appearance:Photography Reveal the Depth of Contemporary Urban Space” featuring the photographers Oliver Boberg, Candida Hoefer, Armin Linke, and Naruki Oshima.

Takashi Homma, New Documentary, 2011
Takashi Homma started out in advertising and fashion magazines in the late 1980s, and moved to London in the early 90s where he worked for legendary cultural magazines like i-D and met a few photographers who produced their own works by diverse methods. Upon his return to Japan, his own photographic works capturing the landscape and people of Tokyo’s suburbs were published in Tokyo Suburbia. This exhibition catalogue focuses on his work since 2005 and draws our attention to his new approach of dynamically exploring the diversity and polysemy of photography. Essays by Elein Fleiss, Noi Sawaragi and others.

Takashi Homma, M, 2010
Takashi Homma’s M series is about mass-produced food and images. He created silk-screen prints based on photographs of McDonald’s all around the world, which is an appropriate medium to demonstrate the endless proliferation of fast food restaurants around the world. M was published on the occasion of an exhibition at Gallery 360, Tokyo. This first edition was limited to 500 copies, each with a unique cover screen print.

Taiji Matsue, JP0205, 2013
Taiji Matsue has been steadily producing flat photographic representations of large-scale earth surfaces in locations all around the world. This volume presents the latest works in his JP series of aerial photographs of regions throughout Japan, focusing here on the prefectures of Aomori and Akita in Northern Honshu. Matsue’s aerial photographs suggest a “new map of Japan”, offering views not only of architectural structures, but of city scenes, rural terrain and coastlines.

Tomoki Imai, Light and Gravity, 2009
Tomoki Imai was born in Hiroshima in 1974. He graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts in 1998. In his works Mahiru – In the Middle of the Day (2001) and Light and Gravity (2009), Imai photographed everyday landscapes such as streets, forests and ordinary rooms. These tranquil works convey Imai’s sincere attitude toward the act of looking. In recent years, Imai’s work has turned towards questions of visibility and invisibility. This concern can be seen in books like Semicircle Law and A Tree of Night.

Takashi Yasumura, Domestic Scandals, 2005
Some of Yasumura’s photos break over your eyes with simple perfection that transcends any stance: a rose in a bud vase next to a stack of toilet paper. It would be an optimistic leap to say that this is some kind of celebration of the everyday. But in the estranged domestic space Yasumura creates, there is still a straining beauty. If you’re not a fan of what some German and northern European artists have been doing with their own mute things and quotidian but well-lit spaces, don’t look here. The essays that accompany the book have their own largely consumerist interpretation, hinting at the surrender of tradition.

Yui Amano, First Love, 2014
The young photographer Yui Amano creates handmade photobooks and First Love is the latest issue. Mobile phone portraits of young people in spontaneous situations, making love, spraying graffitis or cooking lunch are counterposed with urban and suburban landscapes.

Ryuichi Ishikawa, A Grand Polyphony, 2014
The Okinawan people have maintained their pride for Okinawa Island at all costs, regardless of who controlled it. The islands have constantly fallen victim to people’s greed and sorrow. However, for my generation, this was simply a given, something that started long before we were born. You might say that this history, made up of conflicts and invasions, is a basic human problem. To those of us who have freely consumed chocolate and coffee beans since we were children, it was impossible to change the life that we had grown accustomed to. We simply had to deal with the contradictions and the frustrations they created.

Risaku Suzuki, Stream of Consciousness, 2015
Catalogue of solo exhibition for the show Stream of Consciousness, shown at MIMOCA, Japan, 2015. In 1990, Suzuki held his first solo exhibition, and in 1998, he published his first photobook, Kumano, which looked at his native Kumano region of Japan. Kumano took the form of a narrative sequence, as did his Piles of Time. His approach won acclaim as a new form of photographic expression, and in 2000, he received the 25th Kimura Ihei Award for photography.

Takashi Kuraya and Yusaku Yamazaki, My Sweet Chii-chang, 2015
This Zine – published in an edition of 100 – was made by two young photographers, and is thus divided into two parts, so you have to turn the book around when you reach the middle spread. Accordingly, it has two different title pages, each in its own style.

Shuhei Motoyama, SM Tabloid, 2005
These large-format yet slim publications feature Motoyma’s pictures taken while travelling in Japan and abroad. Mostly in black and white (except volume 11), they feature images taken often at night, in bars, at festivals and public events.

Shinryo Saeki, Aisatsu, 2009
Aisatsu means “greetings” in Japanese, and the book presents itself quite boldly. The cover and binding of the book is all bright red and white, colors which have a specific meaning In Japanese culture: life and death. This motif is reflected throughout the book, not only through images with strong red and white elements, but also the juxtaposition of images dealing with these themes. Perhaps it’s because he is a monk that he’s able to think so clearly, and at times almost humorously, about these questions. Saeki shows a light, human touch in dealing with these heavy topics.

Tomoko Yoneda, After the Thaw, 2014
This book is comprised of work done while Tomoko Yoneda visited Hungary and Estonia in 2004. Yoneda’s work is based on a fundamental understanding of photography as recording, not only one that is visible in reality, but also what we project through the memory and history. Through the era of long resistance, it played a role in the independence and democratisation and in engineering the collapse of the Soviet Union in the two countries. Behind the serene landscape photographs lurk drama and history. After the Thaw, a critical photo collection, is published in a world situation that continues to shake.

Yoshinobu Uchida, Miki Matsuoka etc., Kyushu, 2015
Zine from three young photographers from Kyushu area (the southern part of Japan). They try to look with fresh eyes on their own land. This is the third edition of this project.

Isamu Sakamoto, Chuko Jazz, 2012
Sakamoto Isamu was born in 1979 in Osaka and is known as one of the most talented photographer of the Japanese mid-generation. Chuku Jazz is published in 66 limited copies. Each book has different handmade covers.

Pirkko Siitari is a former director of Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma (2010-2015) where she also worked as a chief curator (2008-2010). Before Kiasma, she was a director of Kerava Art Museum (2004-2008). In 1999-2004 she worked as a chief curator of Finnish Museum of Photography and in 1989-1999 she was a director of Northern Photographic Center in Oulu.

Jaakko Heikkilä, Silent Talks, 2011
Jaakko Heikkilä has long been interested in the questions of cultural identity and minority communities around the world. In Silent Talks he meets people on the shores of the White Sea, in New York’s Harlem, or on a Brazilian island. Empathy for his subjects appears in his intimate and poetic images.

Markus Henttonen, Silent Night, 2013
In this publication Markus Henttonen photographs urban landscapes and culture, devoid of the people usually occupying these spaces. Markus Henttonen is known for his images of urban life in big cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Barcelona centered on the theme of man’s relationship to his environment. In Silent Night he is photographing urban culture without people, American houses surrounded with Christmas light decorations.

Tiina Itkonen, Avannaa – Photographs of Greenlandic Landscapes, 2014
Tiina Itkonen has been documenting Greenland since the mid 90`s. Over the years she has developed a close relationship to the country and its people. Ecology is an inescapable theme in her work, inviting us to consider the special value of the Arctic region and the local and global ramifications of climate change.

Sanna Kannisto, Fieldwork, 2011
Since 1997 Sanna Kannisto has spent several months per year living alongside with biologists in the rainforests in Peru, Brazil, French Guyana and Costa Rica. Adopting elements of her companions´s scientific methods and concepts, she developed her own form of visual research.

Anni Leppälä, Young Artist of the Year, Tampere Art Museum, 2010
Leppälä ´s images are like fragments trying to find a space for an overview, a familiarity and a closeness that can unite the viewer and the artist.
She says that for her photographs are like fixed points in the process of change and alteration. They open up for observation and they allow the viewer to step closer. One can gather trust and confidence in recognizing something in them, but simultaneously, photographs have another kind of nature – a side turning towards the invisible and the unidentified. What finally becomes recognized can be something “outside” the image, something out of sight – something imperceptible.

Ilkka Halso, Gallery Anhava, 2005
Halso approaches the restoration of nature through the means of technology and science, showing dystopian visions of man’s relationship to nature, and his confidence in technology to solve the problems caused by his own activities.

Niko Luoma, Time Is No Longer an Obstacle, 2012
Luoma’s abstract images are process-based works that are created through the analogue process of exposing a negative to light. Each negative is exposed multiple times, sometimes into the thousands. Light is his material and subject, and his concerns encompass process, repetition and seriality.

Anni Kinnunen, Personal Landscape, 2015
Anni Kinnunen addresses the relationship between man and nature and the influence of the environment on the development of identity. Several of her works are based on performance and on incidents that last for only a moment, which the camera makes visible.

Marjukka Vainio, Light of the Earth, 2006
In Vainio´s photographs of plants, leaves, roots, flowers are viewed as individuals, objects and portraits. Form, colour and structure are the focus and everything unnecessary is eradicated.
Her journey with plants has led Marjukka Vainio to an increasingly sparse and reduced form of expression.

FIRST PRIZE
The dummy book Home Instruction Manual entered in the competition by Jan McCullough is a real discovery in 2015. Jan is a photographer from Belfast with a weak spot for manuals, books that tell you how to do things. For this project she searched the internet for tips on how to build your perfect home. After collecting all the tips, Jan rented a house and followed all the instructions given to her. She photographed the end result; a home with a forced personality. Something you can’t say about Jan McCullough, a natural talent to watch out for.
Erik Kessels

SECOND PRIZE
Kumiko Motokis’ White Fang is based on an actual dog fight that took place in Aomori in Northern Japan in early 2014. It moves cleverly between colour and black-and-white imagery: colour for the build-up before the event; black and white for the fight scenes; colour for the brutal outcome. Varying between formal, straight-up portraiture, and Antoine D’Agataesque blurred imagery, along with well-placed inserts on the history of dog fighting in Japan, this book perfectly manages to walk the fine line between the gruesomeness of this ancient and brutal practice and the well-crafted aesthetic of a modern-day photo book.
Curt Holtz, Prestel Publishing

THIRD PRIZE
Oliver Blobel’s Amateure, on German amateur camera clubs is both a funny and illuminating body of work. Taking a subject matter that I have never seen explored before , he shows the club outings, the print competitions being judged and studio sessions of these camera enthusiasts. This is photography at it’s best, where an apparently boring subject is turned into a hilarious and yet very dry set of photos.
Martin Parr

The Nordic Dummy Awards was launched in 2012 by Fotogalleriet and the Norwegian Association of Fine Art Photographers (FFF) and takes place annually in connection with Fotobokfestival Oslo. Artists from the Nordic countries can submit their unpublished photobooks to be judged by a jury that shortlists candidates and selects the winner. The jury for 2015 consisted of: Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger (curator, The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki), Mette Sandbye (Head of the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen), Marie Sjøvold (photographer), and Tony Cederteg (editor of Libraryman).

The winner of the Nordic Dummy Award 2015 was the photobook “Ungleichgewicht” by Karina-Surkku Kurz (FI/DE). The jury announcement was presented by Marie Sjøvold at Fotogalleriet at the opening of Fotobokfestival Oslo on September 11th. As the winning book, “Ungleichgewicht”, will be published by Kehrer Verlag in collaboration with Fotogalleriet and launched at the Fotobokfestival Oslo 2016.