PTP/QUOTE…….Japanese photography, in its ultimate form, is the photobook……
‘So, apart from helping the reader learn how to understand Japanese photography books, I want them to know how essential it is to Japanese photography. It’s very different from western photography, which has this idea that photographs must exist as a print. Japanese photography, in its ultimate form, is the photobook. Communicating that simple idea, to even a Japanese audience, is the main homework of this project. And you’d be amazed how revolutionary that idea is to people who are well versed in photography in the West.
Another way of saying it is that… [points to the book proof ] … this is a facsimile, this book is a facsimile of that work. So the books included in this book are not facsimiles, these are originals. That one subtle shift in the way we look at the book is so important.
It’s like an edition in and of itself; the book becomes an original print. No one image is more important than the other and in the photographer’s eyes, the prints themselves, which are going to make the book, are useless. They have no value other than the reproduction at the printing plant. So the photographs as a collection don’t exist beyond the book. This can be true of non-Japanese photobooks as well but it’s taken to an extreme with Japanese photobooks.’
This is from
Interview with Ivan Vartanian in japan exposures. Ivan has recently published a couple of books about japanese photography.
I find myself musing on the way the (true) photo=print idea is embedded in how we have understood photography and that the original might equally be the book, or the screen or the blog or……. Ok not news to some people but I find it pretty interesting. ALSO interesting is that what is the original varies from culture to culture and time to time is also interesting. (eg maybe if we are developing familiarity with making images in schools in underdeveloped countries where the cheapest printing is still expensive we can concentrate in screen based imagery rather than struggle with printers and inks and poor quality prints)
