Gate Hack Eden

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It is rare to encounter a photobook that is able to open up radically new ways of thinking around how the printed picture can operate. There is only so much you can do with the general form. You will have to arrange the pages in some fashion, and you will have to assemble everything in such a way that it fulfills the basic functions of a book.

A gifted artist, however, might decide to leave some conventions by the wayside for the sake of his own work. With Osamu Kanemura‘s Gate Hack Eden, a truly groundbreaking publication has been published that pushes the boundaries of the photobook in any number of ways, all of them good.

The book was published by ori.studio, which sells the book through their online store. I bought it through ShaShaSha (link here), mostly because adding in more books (by different Japanese artists) made shipping costs more palatable. The book is not particularly large, but it requires careful handling and shipping. If you live outside of Japan, you will have to pay for that.

The Japanese Yen is rather weak at the time of this writing, meaning that the book itself costs about $80. That is a lot of money for a book; and yet I need to point out that a lot of recent photobook releases by Western publishers have now reached price points of $75 or $85. From what I can tell, general costs in the world of the photobook (paper, printing, etc.) have gone up quite a bit recently.

If this is of any help, when you buy a copy of Gate Hack Eden, you’re not buying a book. You’re buying a piece of art. In a general fashion, all photobooks are art. But I’m not talking about that low bar. This particular publication is a piece of art in ways that most other books simply are not.

To begin with, it looks and feels like a piece of art. The closest object I can think of that has some similarities to what the object looks like is an external hard drive. The book presents itself as a black block that sits on top of a smaller white block.

If you put it in front of you on a table — to look at the book, you will absolutely need a table — Gate Hack Eden commands its presence. That presence is a lot larger than the size (163 × 117 × 81 mm) would have you imagine.

How do you look at it? In a very basic sense, the object operates just like any other book, or rather it has the same elements as most other books. The black exterior operates like a slipcase. You can slide it off by pulling it upwards. Once that has been achieved, the cover will open: two cardboard pages that fall away from the interior of the book. Now, you can see the individual pages.

You will also see that the book has five sections, each of them sandwiched by two thin, transparent plexiglass sheets (the one at the top is visible before you open the book). To make the book, its makers had to use some material to give everything just enough stability for it not to fall apart.

Four of the sections contain images, the fifth contains essays (in Japanese and English). When assembled, the former are hidden underneath the black slip case, while the latter is visible at the base of the book. One of the plexiglass sheets juts out a little and creates the base for the slipcase to rest on.

Fully assembled, Gate Hack Eden is very stable. Once the slipcase has been pulled off, the objects becomes a lot more fragile.

Again, how do you look at this? In a nutshell, the five sections are stacked on top of each other. The pages are bound using a single screw post, meaning that in order to look at the images you need to swivel them open. If you want to imagine that you’re playing a game of cards, the pages very much behave like playing cards you’re holding in your hands.

The description of the book states that it has 1648 pages. Initially, I found that hard to believe. I don’t know whether it’s true (I’m not going to count the pages). But given how thin the pages are, I have no doubt that it’s true (the essays are printed on thicker paper). The essay section has 48 pages, which gives you four sections with 400 pages each.

What are all of these images? Apparently, each book was assembled from the same set of pages (or rather subsections of pages), albeit in its own order, creating a sense of randomness for each viewer.

In one section, a large number of black and white photographs unfolds. The paper is so thin that one doesn’t really know whether one possibly missed a page. Two pages might have stuck together. But that wouldn’t matter.

The photographs aren’t photographs, they’re fragments of a larger photograph, and that larger photograph appears to show some greenery in front of one of the many soulless buildings that clutter the Tokyo cityscape. It might be a train station or maybe a parking garage or maybe an indoor mall. It doesn’t matter (the complete disregard for the larger cityscape with which Japanese real-estate developers approach erecting buildings is truly astonishing).

There is picture after picture of the same thing, presented as tiny shards of a larger whole. It is these shards that are more interesting than the larger whole, even if that larger whole never becomes visible. Or maybe it does, elsewhere.

When the next shard finally changes to something noticeably different, there is a brief sense of relief for the viewer. But the next subsection turns out to be just as visually jarring as the one before it. It’s Tokyo, after all, the amazing city that manages to hide its beautiful soul behind mind-numbingly boring facades — and consumption, endless consumption. “I don’t like Tokyo,” Kanemura noted in the first interview included in Beta Exercise.

(Between Spider’s Strategy, Gate Hack Eden, or Beta Exercise, you probably noticed some idiosyncratic word choices; compare: “Mass of the Fermenting Dregs […] The distinctive name […] is simply a collection of words that the original members of the line-up liked.”)

“I started taking pictures of developments promoted by big capital,” the artist said in the same interview, “whose values neglect whether or not they are actually liveable for humans, although I felt uncomfortable about it.” And: “Living under the urban capitalist system strips subjectivity from human beings, transforming them into a mere part of its system.”

It’s not all black and white photographs. There also are shards taken from any number of printed materials, from what look like video stills (Kanemura has a background in video and is using that medium as well), and from drawings, busy doodles that channel the photographs’ nervous energy. In between, there also are larger scenes (that possibly appear broken up elsewhere), the types of photographs the artist is known for in the West (think Spider’s Strategy).

All of this combines into an incredibly immersive experience for a viewer. The little black tower disintegrates before her or his eyes (by their own choice), to reveal a visual chaos that means everything and nothing. You will have to shed your expectations of “narrative” or “sequence” when you approach this book, much like you will have to ignore what it means to edit photographs.

Gate Hack Eden exists outside of the widely accepted narrow ideas of how photographs ought to be treated and used. The book uniquely focuses on Tokyo in a way impossible for, say, New York City, Berlin, London, or Warsaw. Whatever you might be able to say about those Western cities, none of them has the nervous energy Tokyo has, and none of them comes even close in terms of creating its own specific world.

“I have no interest in photos that imply something,” Kanemura said in the same interview I quoted from above, “I’m interested in the possibility of the photograph that doesn’t imply anything, cut off from any implication or meaning.” I might as well note that even if that interest is absent, I don’t think it’s possible to escape the clutches of implication quite that easily.

I think it is only through the form of this book — as opposed to Spider’s Strategy — that the artist achieves that goal. The conventional form of the well-known book only brings back too many implications. Here, though, through the inclusion of all of these other materials and through the cutting up of photographs into smaller parts, the aspect of photography as this thing being done with these specific cameras falls away.

Here, photography finally is a form of art that transcends what the vast majority of photographers have been trying to do before. Here, photography becomes art because it acts like it — and not because it follows artificial conventions.

Thus, Gate Hack Eden is a absolutely essential masterpiece, a publication that explodes the boundaries of the photobook. Unlike artists such as Paul Graham, who have remained stuck in making work that ultimately only attempts to showcase the cerebral approach with which it was made, Osamu Kanemura has figured out how to re-define photography.

I’m in awe.

Gate Hack Eden; photographs and images by Osamu Kanemura; essays by Osamu Kanemura and Pauline Vermare; 1648 pages; ori.studio; 2024

You Can Fix a House With Enough Duct Tape

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“The foreign obsession with Japan’s material culture began soon after the opening of the nation’s ports in 1853,” Matt Alt writes, detailing how the West fell in love with what became known as Japonisme in French. “Often overlooked, however,” he continues, “is the fact that, at the same time, the western world possessed an equal or even greater fascination with the absence of Japanese stuff.”

In fact, there is a straight line from an observation by the UK’s first ambassador to Japan (quoted by Alt: “There is something to admire in this Spartan simplicity of habits, which seems to extend through all their life, and they pride themselves upon it.”) to contemporary self-help gurus such as Marie Kondo and her Netflix show.

As Alt outlines, none of this actually makes sense: “If Japan truly were a minimalist paradise, why would it need Kondos and Sasakis in the first place?” (Fumio Sasaki is another self-help guru.)

But labels stick not because they’re truthful but because they’re underpinned by ideology. That a lack of material possessions in early modern Japanese history might simply have reflected the general poverty of larger segments of the population escaped most outside observers.

You only have to go to Japan today and look around to find a country that is considerably more complex than the serene paradise of Zen temples and Muji stores inhabited by people who prefer to live with less.

In fact, that idea is belied by some of the most well known attractions of the country, such as the famous Shibuya crossing. How is that zen? Or step into any of the hyper commercialized public spaces to encounter New York’s Times Square on steroids. Again, there’s absolutely nothing zen about those spaces, with their onslaught of audiovisual cues.

Artists such as, for example, Osamu Kanemura have long focused on the visual clutter (let’s stick with Alt’s word choice). In the West, Kanemura is mostly known through his Spider’s Strategy, a depiction of the clutter of electricity and utility wires in Tokyo’s built environment.

Apart from being a writer, this artist has long moved into making videos and ambitious installations of his work, and Spider’s Strategy does not even remotely capture the breadth of Kanemura’s output around his main theme of work.

Interestingly, it was through Kanemura’s Instagram feed that I came across Kohei Maekawa‘s You Can Fix a House With Enough Duct Tape.

Much like eBay, Instagram has lost almost all of its utility as a site where photography can be discovered. But you can win the lottery, and there are those rare moments when you can find genuinely interesting work you haven’t seen before or snatch up something great on eBay. Having just managed to do both, I’m thinking that there’s a long dry spell ahead of me.

Regardless, Maekawa’s book is self-published, and I bought it directly from the artist who very kindly shipped the book before I had even had had a chance to pay for it (if he has his own website, I have not been able to locate it; I messaged him through his Instagram account).

The book comes in the form of a folded piece of cardboard with a photograph attached to the front and the title and artist’s name on the back (in Japanese and English). Inside, there’s a statement about the work (the English version was produced using a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT), a small (inkjet) print, and a set of unbound sheets of prints. Everything is held together with a single binding clip, the type that you might use in an office setting.

Whether or not this is a book or a portfolio of prints is too boring a conversation for me to engage in (the accountants of the photo world can argue about this). Conceptually, though, the rickety construction of this publication is in full service of what the photographs show. Having worked as a delivery driver in suburban Tokyo for years, Maekawa photographed the kind of folk art that he encountered while doing his job: involuntary sculptures if you will or maybe bricolage.

Maekawa mostly photographed at night with a flash, which serves to enhance the sculptural properties of the various objects he came across, a dazzling array of useless beauty. Maybe it is because my late father-in-law had produced similar objects in his workshop and backyard that I am particularly interested in the work. You might be able to find these kinds of art works that nobody would consider as such in many other places of the world.

Whatever it might be, I’m finding myself deeply fascinated by Maekawa’s photographs, especially given that the visual delight they offer does not appear to fade away. And much like the photographer, I can’t help but wonder about the people who are responsible for this kind of visual culture. “The open-ended egos and ideas embedded in their creations are uncharted territory,” he writes, “and to me, at least, remain beyond reach.”

And therein lies the beauty of it all: doesn’t art often start exactly where understanding ceases?

The artistic geniuses behind the various installations encountered by Kohei Maekawa while delivering pizza are likely to remain anonymous. They do not have a place within the grim sphere known as the art world. But their ambitions and ideas nevertheless have resulted in the creation of often surprisingly complex pieces of art.

Neoliberal thinking has brought us the idea of art for everybody (meaning: everybody can consume art by placing some money on the table). You Can Fix a House With Enough Duct Tape, with its Arte Povera elements, shows us the counter model: art can be made by everybody. And it can be enjoyed if you keep an eye out for it.

Recommended.

You Can Fix a House With Enough Duct Tape, photographs and text by Kohei Maekawa; unbound set of prints; self-published; 2024

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Portraits in Life and Death

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There a numerous reasons why Peter Hujar is not as widely known as anyone who is familiar with his work would assume. Such familiarity has so far been difficult to obtain. Hujar published one book during his life time, the 1976 Portraits in Life and Death. The book had been out of print until this month. Now, there is a much overdue reissue.

Hujar has so far been shoehorned into being a very specific photographer: a photographer not just of any time and place, but one who lived in New York City before and during the AIDS crisis. His own untimely death at age 53 would include him in the countless victims of that disease — at the time, they were stigmatized in the most revolting fashion.

Of course, Peter Hujar was very much a member of New York’s artistic community, and the death toll created by AIDS is very much real. When I wrote that he was being shoehorned, I do not intend to take anything away — on the contrary. What I mean to argue instead is that beyond that specificity in time and place, there is a universality in his work that deserves to be seen more widely.

It’s a trite statement to say that portrait photography uniquely centers on the human condition. The moment you place yourself with a camera in front of someone who has agreed to be photographed, the resulting picture (or pictures) will say something about the human condition.

What makes photographic portraiture so interesting is that if you take a picture of someone famous, most people will obtain a picture of someone famous. In his very good pictures, though, Hujar was able to create photographs of human beings, people as brilliant and flawed and vulnerable and lonely as he was, and the fact that they were famous plays no role in any of that. You can see people with an inner life, possibly a very rich one.

Being able to take these kinds of photographs is a gift that even someone like Hujar was not able to conjure at will. In Peter Hujar’s Day, a conversation with Linda Rosenkrantz about a single day in the artist’s life, Hujar somewhat casually re-narrates how on 18 December 1974, he set out to photograph Allan Ginsberg as a commission piece for the New York Times.

Long story short, he treks over to what at the time was one of the seediest areas in Manhattan, 10th Street between Avenues C and D. “The neighborhood intimidates me,” he tells Rosenkrantz, “it’s frightening, so run down and dreary. I don’t have any real fear but it’s very uncomfortable to go down there.” Thinking that Hujar somehow is much more connected to the Times than he was, Ginsberg at first acts like a real jerk, only to warm up a little later (in the way that an incredibly chilly morning might do in mid-winter).

The photography session unfolds as a real disaster. Ginsberg breaks out into chanting at various times (“He sat down in the lotus position, looking very Buddha, right in the doorway, and started to chant. And I really thought well, I can’t interrupt God.” — Hujar), but there are pictures for the photographer. And he knows that these pictures are of the first kind I mentioned above: they’re of someone famous. But they’re not more than that.

After all, even for someone as gifted as Peter Hujar, there is only so much that can be done when the stars do not align in the right fashion as someone’s portrait is being taken. You can see one of the Ginsberg photographs here.

What it is (or rather was) that enabled Hujar to align the stars in just the right fashion I don’t know. Of course, there are all the statements made about Hujar by those who knew him (many of them found themselves in front of his camera; many of them the kinds of irritating motormouths New York tends to produce in such abundance).

Susan Sontag, a close friend, wrote the introduction to Portraits in Life and Death, which is included in the reissue. The portrait of her by can be found in the book. I suppose it’s maybe the one photograph by this artist that is more widely known. Alas, it’s also just a picture of someone famous. It’s very good. But it doesn’t go where many of Hujar’s real treasures went.

I’m thinking that Peter Hujar knew of the power a camera can have because he placed himself in front of his own many times. There are two such picture in the book. The first shows him mid leap in his own apartment, giving a military style salute to the camera. This is brilliant. It’s not necessarily a masterpiece photograph; but I don’t think I can imagine another photographer, living or dead, who would pull this off (other than, maybe, Nadar whose photographic materials were way too slow to allow him to do this).

The second photograph can also be found on the cover of Peter Hujar’s Day. It shows Hujar lying in bed. His arms are raised above his head and rest on the pillow. The photographer has turned his head just enough for him to be facing the camera.

I have no way of knowing whether this photograph was made on the same day that he took my favourite photograph of his (which, alas, is not included in the book). In that photograph, Hujar, fully nude, is slouched on a chair. To say that there is a quiet desperation on view would be to take words to describe a situation that exists outside of language itself. The photograph is entitled Seated Self-Portrait Depressed, 1980.

It’s one thing to expose others to the camera’s cruel gaze. It’s quite another to be as relentless in exposing yourself to it as Peter Hujar did. He knew what it meant to suffer. So he knew what he was asking of others when they presented themselves to his camera. That, and only that, is what it takes to be a really great photographer.

When you look at Portraits in Life and Death, you want to ignore everything you know about those portrayed (there’s an index in the back). Instead, try to see the human beings that Peter Hujar saw.

Highly recommended.

Portraits in Life and Death; photographs by Peter Hujar; essays by Susan Sontag and Benjamin Moser; 100 pages; Liveright; 2024

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Costa Bravo Holiday Paradise

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We don’t really know much about Tomas, other than what we can infer from the photographs and words he left behind. Oh, and there are the snippets of memories by his grandson Terje (Terje Abusdal, the photographer), who was too young to ask more questions around the time Tomas took his pictures.

Tomas moved in with Terje’s family after his wife had died. He was already in his seventies. Even as his upcoming exploits — in the form of travels — would hint at a man aware of a newly found freedom, it would appear that he also was fundamentally lazy. Without a wife serving him life might have been too difficult, too tedious certainly.

There’s a short story in Costa Bravo Holiday Paradise about how Tomas, the widower, went to see his childhood sweetheart who had remained unmarried. Alas, he was told that now it would be too late to get married.

Which is interesting, because on the one hand, there is the possibility of romantic love and the reality of life near its end. On the other hand, the childhood sweetheart might not have needed a possibly rather helpless and lazy old man to take care of, given she had avoided just that all her life.

We will never know. We can only imagine.

By the way, if you spotted a typo in the title: congratulations! It’s Tomas’, and Terje carried it forward. So please don’t email Terje or me. We know.

But it’s a very interesting typo, isn’t it? Having taken up traveling late in life, Tomas went to a number of places to enjoy the good life. This included the Costa Brava. I’m imagining that he maybe misread the name of the locale as a confirmation that finally!, he had taken up living the good life. Bravo! (Again, we will never know.)

The good life thus consisted of traveling and seeing places and people. People inevitably included women, and as far as one can tell the seeing remained that, seeing. “There are many out of focus pictures of younger women,” Terje writes, “and over seventy self-portraits. He gave the camera to strangers and posed.”

For many of his photographs, Tomas wrote short captions. The photographs are interesting because they’re so utilitarian and artless, and the same is true for the captions. A somewhat blurry photograph of some red and white flowering bushes, possibly located in the setting of a shopping mall, comes with the caption “Many flowers” (the captions were all written in Norwegian, there are English translations underneath).

It’s hard to tell whether there was any depth to Tomas’ life. There might not have been. Depth does not necessarily make for an interesting or good life. (The lack thereof doesn’t either, though.)

At some stage, Tomas was so old that he was unable to travel on his own any longer. Given the above, you can probably guess what happened. Yes, that’s right, family members had to travel along to make sure that Tomas was not missing out.

And who can blame him? From what Terje infers, Tomas had never liked the work he had had to do his whole life. And he might not have liked his deceased wife, either: “There are no pictures of his wife in the albums. There is only an image of the headstone on her grave.”

Ultimately, though, all we can do as viewers is to infer what we might be able to come up with, given the photographs and the few details that Terje is able to remember or was told earlier.

The more often I look at the book, the bleaker it gets. Obviously, that’s me seeing Tomas, and it’s me seeing the world. Your own impressions might be very different.

There have been many books made with photographs left behind by often nameless strangers. Working with such imagery has spawned its own industry, with some artists doing only that. The problem with those books for me usually is that the material is enticing or maybe even really interesting. But once the novelty has worn off, you’re left with… Well, not much.

In the case of Costa Bravo Holiday Paradise it’s the other way around. The photographs aren’t particularly spectacular. But there is enough in them that forms an image of the person who took them (or had others take them for — and of — him). There are, in other words, many small hooks that attach to a viewer’s own flesh, making her or him think about life choices and about what it means to be a person in this world.

Whether or not the life choices one infers for Tomas have anything to do with reality is completely besides the point. The man has been dead for a long time, so there is no way of finding out. It seems clear, though, that he managed to set up a relatively happy ending for an otherwise unhappy or maybe discontented life.

And that’s what we all have to do with our own lives: deal with their realities and see what we can make out of them. Ideally, we’ll be starting to think about this a lot earlier than Tomas might have done.

Costa Bravo Holiday Paradise; photographs by Tomas Mølland, edited by Terje Abusdal; 144 pages; journal; 2024

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to my Patreon. There, you will find exclusive articles, videos, and audio guides about the world of the photobook and more. For those curious, there now is the possibility of a trial membership for seven days.

Much like journalism, photography criticism involves a huge investment of time and resources. When you become a subscriber, you not only get access to more of my work. You will also help me produce it (including the free content on this site).

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