Marc Feustel is the curator of two key exhibitions of the 2024 edition of the T3 Photo Festival Tokyo: “Alternative Visions A Female Perspective” and “The Wall vs the Page”.
Let’s start first with the exhibition “Alternative Visions. A Female Perspective.” What is its genesis?
In 2017, I was invited by the T3 Photo Festival as a speaker on the Western perception of Japanese photography. I was quite surprised to see how much the Japanese public was interested in this topic. Then Ihiro Hamayi, director of the festival, contacted me so that we could imagine an exhibition around the fiftieth anniversary of the MoMA exhibition “New Japanese photography”. It’s an exhibition that I’ve looked at a lot in recent years, in my journey of post-war Japanese photography. The idea is not simply to blow out candles, but to look retrospectively at this exhibition, its influence over time and to deconstruct the different elements of the exhibition. This exhibition was based on a particular curatorship: the idea of summarizing Japanese photography around 15 artists at a time when information circulated with difficulty. Not only 15 artists, but 15 contemporary artists, most of them young.
However, there are flaws and shortcomings.
Yes, I wanted to look at what had not been shown at that time. I proposed two concepts. The first based on the fact that there were no women photographers among the 15 photographers presented. It was therefore necessary to create an exhibition that would focus on women photographers active at the same time, who could have been considered. The idea was not to find totally unknown artists, but artists already published in magazines, who had already designed a book, who had already exhibited, who existed in a certain way in the world of photography. ‘era.
Why didn’t the MoMA exhibition feature any women?
The world of photography in Japan was completely dominated by men. Sayuri Kobayashi of the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art conducted research looking at the list of professional photographers registered with the Japanese Professional Photography Society. In 1966, only six were women out of more than 400. In 1974, only 27 out of 950.
However, some artists had appeared in Camera Mainichi, edited by Shōji Yamagishi. What we don’t know, or what I don’t know, is the extent to which John Szarkowski and Shoji Yamagishi, the curators of the MoMA exhibition, considered the work of these photographers to be minor in comparison to that of men. But there was some fairly virulent criticism at the time, in the United States. And it is unthinkable to imagine, given the social and political context of the 1970s, that they did not think of it.
Among the six artists exhibited at the T3 Photography Festival Tokyo — Hisae Himai, Tamiko Nishimura, Toshiko Okanoue, Toyoko Tokiwa, Hitomi Watanabe, Eiko Yamazawa — was one of them dominant, as Moriyama was in his time? ?
What is quite striking is that all these artists were different from each other. They embody a very impressive diversity of practice. At that time, these photographers had most often only completed a single project, a book, if not an exhibition. They had not been able to start a career, and these projects had probably required a fairly colossal effort to convince a publisher to publish a book by a woman on a subject. The comparison with Moriyama is not possible, and let us remember that the latter in 1974 only had one series presented compared to his quite diverse production, when Shomei Tomats. In our exhibition, Eiko Yamazawa was perhaps the only one who began to have a more extensive career. She had traveled to the United States, worked with a leading American photographer there, then opened a photo studio while playing a role in education and becoming a figure in the world of photography, encouraging many women to be photographed in particular.
Could Toshiko Okanoue or Hitomi Watanabe, to name just a few, make a living from their profession in 1974?
There are two quite different cases here. The series shown in Watanabe’s exhibition captures the student protests of 1968 and 1969 in Japan, which were among the most violent demonstrations in modern Japanese history. She began her studies at the Tokyo College of Photography in 1967. Watanebe began photographing in the 1950s, but stopped all her artistic work after getting married… That was it.
Can you tell us more about Okanoue’s work, which is very close to surrealism?
She clearly claims the influence of surrealism. She is also not the only one in the exhibition, with Imai Hisae. Japan has always been very interested in artistic movements born abroad. He drew a lot of inspiration from what was happening in the West, in Europe and in the United States. Even when the country was closed in on itself, there was always a desire to try to understand what was developing elsewhere. Photography is the epitome of this. Okanoue was close to literary surrealism. She is not a photographer, she does not make her own images, but uses existing ones, taken from Western magazines like Life, Vogue. Her works are very much in tune with the image conveyed in these magazines of what women should be. Today, many artists do not make images, but use existing images. But in Japan, during this period, it is unique in its kind.
What is the second project developed with the festival?
The other exhibition is another observation. “New Japanese photography” at MoMA presented almost no books. However, the photographic book was absolutely central in Japan at that time. The idea came to me to create a reading room, to present the books from the series exhibited in New York in 1974. I say books, but also magazines, which remained crucial at that time. The vast majority of books come from the extraordinary collection of Isawa Kōtarō, great collector of photographic books and founder of the magazine Already seen. He is now the owner of the Kawara Coffee Labo café, where a large part of his collection is freely accessible, open to reading. The book is made to be consulted, whatever the preciousness of the book, the reader must be able to hold it, be able to turn the pages, leaf through it, look at it and discover as an exploration and not as a fixed object.
We also present in another room the new editions or facsimiles of these original books published in recent years.
More information:
