Filippo Maggia

Araki's career in full, from the portraits of the early 1960s to city scenes and tender tributes to his wife Araki is known the world over for his controversial erotic portraits of Japanese women, often bound using the kinbaku (Japanese bondage) technique. A unique figure in contemporary photography, he has always found creative inspiration in his daily existence, without making any distinction between his personal life and public and professional practice. The Araki Effect offers a broad overview of his career: from the first series from 1963-65, Satchin and His Brother Mabo, to Subway of Love, a large collection of images taken in the Tokyo subway between 1963 and 1972, the year he also made Autumn in Tokyo, which recounts the autumn he spent wandering through the city in the twilight hours. These are followed by Sentimental Night in Kyoto, less known than the famous Sentimental Journey, both tributes to his wife, Yoko; Balcony of Love, Death Reality, Tokyo Diary from 2017, and one of his latest collections, Araki's Paradise from 2019. Born in Tokyo in 1940, Nobuyoshi Araki worked at an advertising agency in the 1960s, where he met his future wife, Yoko Araki, the subject of his now classic volume Sentimental Journey. Araki's oeuvre spans erotic portraits of women, still lifes, images of plants, scenes of everyday life and architectural photography. He has published around 400 books, shown in many international exhibitions and his work is part of important collections worldwide. Araki lives and works in Tokyo.

The Araki Effect

From nudes to landscapes, a wide-ranging retrospective of the work of Edward Weston, one of the greatest 20th-century American photographers. Edward Weston (Highland Park, Illinois, 1886 Wildcat Hill, California, 1958) began to take photographs at the age of sixteen and in 1911 he opened his first photographic studio in the town of Tropico in California. He became an increasingly important figure on the American art scene, so much so that in 1936 he was the first photographer to receive a research grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1946 the MoMA in New York gave him a major retrospective, showing 300 works and thus definitively confirming him as one of the great artists of the 20th century. Often directly compared to painting and sculpture, Westons photography is the expression of a relentless quest for pureness, both in composition and in the almost obsessive perfection of the image. This catalogue published to accompany an exhibition in Modena, the first show in Italy for over twenty years, celebrates Westons extraordinary oeuvre with over 120 original photographic prints.

Edward Weston

Daidō Moriyama

'Provoke' is the title of the magazine founded in 1968 by a group of Japanese photographers, graphic designers, poets, critics, and political activists. Moriyama's photography is indeed provocative, both for the form it takes (dirty, blurry, overexposed,or scratched) and for its content.

The World Through My Eyes

Le Notti Bianche brings together twenty images of Opera Houses, created by Hiroshi Sugimoto in Italy since 2014. The title that the artist chose is also the title of the film being projected during the shoot at the Teatro di Villa Aldrovandi Mazzacorati in Bologna and directed by Luchino Visconti in 1957 and starred Marcello Mastroianni and Maria Schell. The story was originally set in St. Petersburg during the endless summer nights, when it never gets truly dark and night falls slowly, and was moved to Livorno for Visconti_s version; with Sugimoto, Le Notti Bianche becomes a subtle metaphor with a range of meanings. The theatre screen with the vivid light emanating from it suggests the white of the photographic paper where the images come to life during the development process. Frame by frame on the screen in the darkness of the cinema, and detail after detail on the light sensitive sheet immersed in the chemical baths in the darkness of the darkroom, the story takes shape just as the picture slowly appears. The new collection of twenty works presented in the book was created entirely in Italy over the past three years, after a break of more than a decade in the production of Theaters. For the first time, in addition to the image of the front of the stage, the stalls and the gallery where the camera was set up are included. This is an additional step on the part of the Japanese photographer in his desire to let the audience participate in the work, beyond pure contemplation of it. The theatres photographed, chosen for their architectural characteristics as well as for their history, are the Teatro Carignano in Turin, the Teatro Farnese in Parma, the Teatro all_Antica in Sabbioneta, the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, the Teatro Comunale in Ferrara, the Teatro Scientifico in Mantua, the Teatro dei Rozzi in Siena, the Teatro Sociale in Bergamo, the Teatro Comunale Masini in Faenza, the Teatro Goldoni in Bagnacavallo, the Teatro dei Rinnovati in Siena and the Teatro di Villa Aldrovandi Mazzacorati in Bologna.

Le Notti Bianche

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Francesca Lazzarini

Claudia Fini

A wide-ranging and detailed survey dedicated to the protagonists of the contemporary art scene in Eastern Europe. As the title suggests, history, memory and identity are the principle "open questions" for many countries in Eastern Europe that have over the past twenty years seen their course in history change radically in the wake of the fall of the Berlin wall on November 9th, 1989. The catalogue includes twenty-nine artists from eighteen countries, including the Russian Federation, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Serbia and Croatia, many of which are presented here for the first time in a survey comprising more than 150 photographs, films and video-installations. History Memory Identity marks a continuation of Asian Dub Photography (Skira, 2009) dedicated to Far Eastern art.

History, Memory, Identity

Contemporary Photography from Eastern Europe

Considered one of the great masters of contemporary Japanese photography, Daido Moriyama is always on the road, a lone traveller whose black-and-white images recount visions and worlds hidden just beneath the surface of reality. This book contains 250 photographs taken over the latest five years. A constant flow of images that is often frenetic or suddenly suspended, following the rhythm of an unfettered, restless life spent travelling the roads of the world. Daido Moriyama (born 1938) is one of the most important living photographers and photobook makers.

Filippo Maggia

About

Books

Join the club