iTunes

Today it took ¥7,000 from me even though I couldn't download any of the songs it said that I had from my "Wish List". (Why's it called a "Wish List" and not a "Shopping Cart" like other user-friendly places online?) So, I feel happy to link to today's coincidental rant by Charlie Brooker against the software.

Mapping a city

I went to a superb exhibition over the weekend. Sohei Nishino makes collages combining thousands of small photos into a "map" of a city. Last year he made one diorama of London (and a couple from his imagination of an island and city at night). The huge undertaking makes a kind of single "snapshot" out of thousands, making the city the star and the photographs simple reactions to being there. The finished prints are like some sort of little ocular history. From a distance the "map"-ness prevails – in the sense that London is suggested by the familiar curve of the Thames and hills to the north, Hiroshima by its three rivers, Tokyo by the Yamanote line etc – close up, little details emerge – part tourist, part personal, part city-portrait.

There's something obsessive about them – in both the taking and the making. (Apparently he narrowed down the shots for the London picture to 4,000.) And this makes them all the more fun. London, the most recent, is also the most confident, doubling in scale from previous assemblages. The first, in 2003, is of Osaka, and doesn't have so much of a focus, but Hong Kong, also last year, is a wonderful portrait with the sea between island and mainland dramatically taking up half the picture. Meanwhile, Kyoto has its surrounding green and temples, but is rightly dominated by city, and Istanbul has an unexpected stream of passers-by, making it suddenly a more peopled city.

Viewing this doesn't work well on the internet (which could be taken as a plus) – the originals are full of tiny photos but each is between 1.3 and 1.7 metres square, and the London one is 2.3 metres long. Nishino is only 28 and has been doing this for about 8 years, covering 10 cities in Japan and the rest of the world. Fascinating and excellent.

Details of the London diorama above from the website of the gallery he's exhibiting in at the moment, the Emon Gallery in Tokyo.

Portraits: 8

Blur, band, recording studio, London, 1991
I see this was taken in April, and the band's first album was released in August that year, although their first top ten single "There is No Other Way" was released that month, so this must have been for an interview to mark that. I knew little about them at that stage, but they were an approachable group. Taking an idea (for what it was worth) merely from their name, I wanted to add a sense of "blur" if not Blur by shooting them through the window. For City Limits.

Lester Bowie, backstage, London, 1989
I admired Lester for his madcap/serious approach to music, his defence of respecting your elders and his defiance against pickling jazz into one image. I love his band's Brass Fantasy's covers of popular/pop songs and his album "I Only Have Eyes for You" is still one of my favourites. This wasn't a shot for an interview, but I was covering his concert for The Wire, and took along lights so I could grab a quick portrait in the corridor backstage – where he quickly and irreverently posed between two roughly set-up lights. Love the cigar smoking Groucho Marx-like in his hand. Now passed on (in 1999) he was one of the greats.

Don Byron, musician (clarinet), hotel, London, 1993
This is on instant Polaroid negative film (as I've mentioned before on this blog) and lit by torchlight in complete darkness. After several attempts – some solarising, some with the streaked torchlight not quite successful, this shot saw him more relaxed and with the best light. You can see the three stripes of torchlight in his glasses where I've "painted" the light over him. I originally printed the black-and-white film on colour paper, selecting a deep green colour which I've remade with this scan of the negative. For The Wire.

For more on these portraits, see here, and the Portraits tag at right.

Maps are strange

The excellent Strange Maps site has an interesting posting on artist Armelle Caron's deconstruction and re-categorisation of city maps. Like the above classification of Paris' shapes. I think there's something a little strange in our need to classify, and this plays to it very neatly.

Analogue appeal

Tacita Dean voices a strong appeal for the analogue and digital to work alongside each other after the lab that prints her 16mm films suddenly stopped the service. She expresses well many an artist's love of making things with a hands-on approach here, in The Guardian.

Re-think

A neat chair design from a company called nendo, the office of Oki Sato in Japan. The chair is wooden, but the base of the legs are transparent acrylic, painted to fade into the wood and give the appearance of a floating chair. Very nice.

via mestudio.

Also, I like this from the Netherlands-based Japanese designer Yasuhito Hirose's yaslab. It's a GPS-guided white cane. The cane turns in the direction you need to go to get to your destination. Seems like a good idea to me that would be good hearing from some blind users about…

Among unnumbered things I didn't know of…

I'd never heard of this fascinating manuscript/book – known as the Voynich manuscript after the man who acquired it in 1912. It's on vellum dating from the early 15th century and that's about all that's known about it. It's written in an undeciphered script and language, perhaps in some sort of cipher text, so the content is unknown, although all the hand-painted illustrations seem to relate to (linked or otherwise) botany/herbs/astrology/astronomy/health/anatomy.

Weird, wonderful, and unexplained. Options include a hoax (perhaps by Voynich), Renaissance outsider art, or various other believable (or unbelievable) authors.

Wikipedia has a page and also images of all the pages of the book.

Faces

Nice post featuring the work of Noma Bar over on the SPD site

More Tezuka

I've just finished reading Osamu Tezuka's latest manga to be released in English translation, Ayako. It's an especially dark story (originally serialised in 1972-73) covering about 30 years of post-war Japan, and one family's attempt to keep its local power and standing by any means necessary as the family falls apart. The American occupation is a backdrop, politics an ever-present overlay but the massively corrupt family is the book's centrepiece, while Ayako represents an odd "purity".

From dramatic comic framing...

It's like some Victorian drama but, at the same time, as modern as you'd like it to be. Epic in itself (nearly 700 pages) it's just part of Tezuka's dark-side output (alongside his extensive, more popularly recognised work like Astro Boy and Black Jack). As such it's illustrations range from the almost slapdash to the suddenly detailed and careful.

But it is another "joy" – if underage incest, rape, family-enforced imprisonment in a cellar, murder, political intrigue and the after effects of war can be termed "joy". That sounds sensationalist, but this is simply a melodramatic, large-scale creation around corruption and hope. I call it modern, but I'd be curious to see how it would fare with the current Tokyo bill on depictions of sexuality in manga for minors. Ayako is pretty clearly an "adult" book in itself and therefore possibly unaffected, but Tezuka crosses over age groups extensively and it would be interesting (if impossible, of course) to know, if he was writing now, how he would approach his work in the light of the restrictions.

...to the suddenly detailed.

There are quibbles: the translation is strange – the family speaks with a country accent that reads weirdly in English. It's the one slight let-down and reminder that you are reading a "comic" rather than a book. (And certain translations don't read well at all – ie: all the references to "big bro" etc). It may or may not be a direct translation of Tezuka's style, but it doesn't work so well to English-language readers, as online reviewers have pointed out. One plot and illustration point seems inconsistent to me. But the latter is just a glitch that reinforces a certain genius.

It's from Vertical publishing again. Chipp Kidd had been doing the Tezuka cover designs, but this time the cover is by Peter Mendelshund, and it's an excellent, understated, clean design with a neat handwritten font for the title.

How would Tezuka fit
comfortably with the current
regulations in Tokyo?

Portraits: 7

Ben and Jacqui, couple, London, 1993
This is not commissioned shot. I took a small series of "couple" shots (friends and mother/son included). This one, I liked and submitted for the then-named Kobal Award at the National Portrait Gallery in 1994. It didn't win anything, but was included in the exhibition. Since the Portrait Gallery is one of my favourites, this photo's inclusion was an exceptional treat for me.

Nigel Benn, boxer, at training, London, 1987
This was one of a couple of portraits I took for The Face. The magazine's then-art director (Phil Bicker) had expressed a liking for my jazz photos and asked me for a black-and-white shot to be taken in a similar, non-set-up way: just to go along and record the training and take a portrait as well.

For more on these portraits, see here, and the Portraits tag at right.

Typography posters

I went to the Teien Museum in Meguro (Tokyo) over the weekend, where there is an exhibition of typographic posters from throughout the past 100 years. There's a small introduction to each couple of decades explaining trends and tendencies. The work ranges from a concentration on sans serif to the liquid text of 60s American rock, a classic Modern Jazz Quartet poster to a classic constructivist Russian poster, Tadanori Yokoo's cutup techique to Morizawa's bizarre font-as-rubbish promotional poster. Plenty of the familiar, but plenty to inspire anew. Above, Ryuichi Yamashiro's "Forest" (hayashi-mori) promoting Japan's woodland, 1955. Below, Kari Piipo's 1993 Hamlet poster.

What's in a word?

Cigarette marketing in Japan is not yet subject to the same restrictions as, say, in the UK. So this new product uses the current associations with good, healthy things of the word "hybrid". Hybrid cars combine the electric and fuel, clearly. But a cigarette?! Turns out the pack is split between regular and menthol. Is this meant to suggest that you're doing yourself good by smoking menthols half the time? God knows. Just a big push to sell more cigarettes by the Pavlovian use of the word "hybrid".

MdN Designers File 2011

I'm happy to say that I have a page listing in the new MdN Designer's File 2011 book, which invites designers working in Japan to be listed for the year. 250 talented designers... and me. I'm only one of three foreign designers listed, and it was a great privilege to be asked to submit – so big thanks are due to Aki-san.

You can buy the book from here.

Go low

I'm afraid I've ground to a halt with my Impossible Project Polaroid camera: the new film is so unpredictable that the chances of having nothing come out meant I stopped looking at anything as a possible subject. I may start up again as I love the idea, but perhaps this prototype would be a good alternative solution to a desire for something "analogue" or low-fi: a camera which mimics low-quality old prints. (Of course, I scanned the Impossible Project film after use, and this camera is digital, but the general idea of analogue sort of holds up.)

This is a camera which recalls the old toy camera, the Holga, by using cheap lenses – for vignetting and even light-leakage – by not including a preview screen and by removing as many features as possible. Sometimes we just miss all that old-fashioned lack of quality, don't we (?)

Designed (superbly) by Saikat Biswas,

via fastcodesign

Portaits: 6

For more on these portraits, see here, and the Portraits tag at right.

Andy Bell, singer (Erasure), hotel in Manchester, 1992
After watching and photographing electro/pop Erasure's flamboyant concert (Andy in bottomless cowboy chaps, riding a large white swan, in ballooning "globe" dress etc) I took the portrait the next day, as I remember. So, I photographed a naturally quieter Andy in jeans and T-shirt at his hotel. The rococco decorations seemed a good place to have him as a kind of faux-Greek sculpture/rococco combination, just to reference something of the gay theatricality of performance. For City Limits.

Salt

An entry on the Fastcodesign blog is about Motoi Yamamoto's labyrinthian gallery installations made of salt. They look beautiful, and poignantly they apparently started from salt's purification/mourning association after the death of his sister. Currently exhibiting in France.

Great cover

Subscriber-only edition

Icon retired

For the past couple of years, Japanese drivers over 70 years old have had to display a stick-on mark on their car to show just that – that there's an older driver at the wheel. A little unfair perhaps. But, anyway, it was tear-drop shaped (the "learner" sticker is like the fin of an arrow) and also supposed to reminiscent of an autumn leaf (above left). So it has been redesigned it after protests that it was too miserable an idea, all this tearful and autumnal stuff. So there is a new design (by, I believe, a 35-year-old designer) which is perkier and has an "S" for senior citizen (above right) – although "senior citizen" is not a common phrase in Japanese. Good to know that people can pressure to change a design supposed to reflect what they don't believe they are.

Stop-motion calendar

Uniqlo has made a calendar with stop-motion, "miniature"-effect videos online that covers all 47 prefectures in Japan. All speeded up, so not the most relaxing calendar in the world (and beware: launches with music, which I always dislike in a website) but, well, you can pass the time looking at Japan while you check the date (or choose to browse Uniqlo's goods. I would say I don't necessariy want to link to a promotion, but then I see I am wearing Uniqlo jeans and a Uniqlo heat-tech shirt while I write this!)

NHK World

Stimulating article by editor-in-chief of Monocle (and Japanophile), Tyler Brule, criticising NHK World. (And if you don't know what it is, that's not unexpected.) See here on the FT where he says,

"At a time when Japan should be making strategic plays to strengthen its voice and influence in the world, it is producing a TV service that reinforces many of the negatives that plague both the government and corporate Japan: rigid, bureaucratic, slow, out-of-touch, arrogant, inward-looking, dated and not particularly international"

for starters.