Atmospheric

In my real life, I'm a member of the Cloud Appreciation Society (started by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, who just won the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books for his second book, The Wave Watcher's Companion).

So as a diversion, for today's here's two sky-related videos. The one above is a visualization of the noise (recorded at 20Hz, hence its name) of a geo-magnetic storm in the upper atmosphere. Really very beautiful (and sort of cloud-related). Termed "A Semiconductor work" and by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, on Vimeo, here.


This collection of 360 San Francisco skies of the year is by Ken Murphy. (He made 365, but 360 fit the rectangle.) It's definitely better experienced full-screen – and I imagine, better still experienced in a gallery or projection – but we can get an idea of it online. Great fun and a lot of work – 3 million stills used for the stop motion. (As an aside: I'm never a fan of new-age music by Moby or anyone else and wish people wouldn't accompany nature videos with it!). Detailed in his blog post here.

Digital, schmigital

With its "non-designed" look, its well-sustained print circulation, its minimal web presence, its 50-year history and its recent retrospective of covers at London's V&A Museum, it's a further celebration that Private Eye has an editor, Ian Hislop, who can – according to The New Yorker – sum up his approach to the digital era like this:

Across the room, a champagne flute shattered. A man approached Ian Hislop and asked about his strategy for the digital era. “I don’t care about digital,” Hislop said. “I don’t give a fuck.”

via magculture

Election icons

This is a curious photo-report from the Egyptian elections on The Guardian. To help clarify which candidate is which for the illiterate among the electorate, each candidate has an icon of some familiar object. These range from cameras to the space shuttle, via a vacuum cleaner and an oven. This has perhaps become strange because of the sheer number now in use (250)  – and recognising that your candidate is the Canon camera and not the Nikon camera is presumably becoming almost as difficult as recognising the shape of a name you nevertheless can't read. That ability to come up with distinct but easy to recognise items is down to the elections commission, apparently (the items, according to the report in the Guardian, are assigned rather than chosen. This doesn't do much for the reputation of Egypt's attitude to women where a female candidate has the space shuttle, when the Egyptian for "rocket" has the meaning of "hottie", says the report. While the candidate who got the pyramid must be happy.)

A fascinating use of imagery (at an important time). And one getting complicated for those selecting.

Portraits: 25

Sinead O'Connor, singer, at (my) home, London, 1990
O'Connor rejected the idea of my going to her home and came to mine instead (which was then in what was perceived as non-salubrious Harlesden in north west London) for this shoot for The Village Voice. Among the photos, I liked the religious watch face in the one shot and the expression of Sinead's own face in the other – which was the shot used. The newsprint style of the Voice – a paper I loved, making it a thrill to work for it from London – suited my own black-and-white and grainy approach. Later, another Voice shoot of Queen Latifah and O'Connor together was arranged for which I booked a studio. For some unknown reason, Queen Latifah never arrived at the shoot despite our hearing that she'd left the hotel, so we sat around the studio for a few hours without, understandably but unfortunately, O'Connor being interested in a further, solo, photo shoot.

For more on these portraits see here and the portraits tag on the right

CNNGo guide (to "arty" Japan)

Last year I started making a list of suggestions for an arts-oriented tourist visiting Japan. The posts followed Guardian readers choosing Tokyo as their favourite foreign-city destination in October 2010. I wrote then that the celebratory article by the informed Pico Iyer was accompanied by the usual stock Tokyo photos. It was those images made me wonder about the "real" attractions of Tokyo – especially for an arts- and design-oriented visitor.

So I started a short, personal list for a "designer's" guide to visiting Tokyo – and the rest of Japan. Now I've summarized 6 of them for the CNNGo website. Duplication seems unnecessary: so I've deleted them from here and you can read my CNNGo guide to arty Japan here.

(In addition, after I started posting the first suggestions on this blog, the earthquake, tsunami and meltdown happened – and tourist numbers plummeted. So – for a contribution to boosting tourism – you might also consider adding Fukushima Prefecture to your list of places to visit, with Ouchijuku.)

World Book Design 2010-2011

The print company Toppan's show – World Book Design 2010-2011 – at their Museum of Printing is everything that paper maker Takeo's Paper Show 2011 should have been.

Toppan's show plays it simple – while Takeo for some reason mostly displayed their books behind glass, at the Toppan show every book is there to be picked up, opened and explored. The show combines best-design winners from selected countries: Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Canada, China and Japan. Books range from the simple example of cover design, font use or content through to complex printing, binding and design processes.

Stand-outs:
- A Dutch book, Roodkapje was een Toffe Meid, whose cover features a CD – not just tacked on, but mounted on a sliding cutout from the single thickness of the cover cardboard itself, the cover maintaining its strength solely from firm binding paper and a plastic window showing the CD. It doesn't sound much, but is not a straightforward solution to CD mounting, and the very invisibility of its structure is what makes it noticeable.

- A German publication of Nadav Kander's Yangtze River photos. Kander's photos are superb in themselves, and are beautiful in part because of their very subtle tones and shading. The printing to match all those subtleties is excellent.

- A Japanese book of covers for Osamu Tezuka's manga, which is printed using thick, linen-y, folded paper to emphasise the designs' cover origins. (And here is where this show beats Takeo's, which also chose this book but displayed it with cover-only visible behind glass: yet the cover is plain black with a red obi and, while a neat design, is not indicative of the look and texture of the contents. In Toppan's show you could pick it up and handle it: although this was the only book with damaged binding, suggesting there was a slight difficulty in maintaining all that weighty paper – at least for multiple handing!)

- And two or three books from China: one superb one from Shanghai Fine Arts Publisher was a large, boxed collection of hand-bound books, Elegant Folding Fans from Suzhou. Each book is printed on folded, thin paper preventing ink show-through, perhaps, but more importantly reflecting the shape of a fan and also – the exhibition caption reveals – helping generate a breeze as the pages are turned, to reflect its subject. The pages are beautifully laid out, superbly illustrated (and bilingual – English and Chinese), while the fold-out box also contains a separately boxed actual fan. Beautiful – but the equivalent of £875 (¥100,000).

China had a couple of other neat designs and structures (as well, of course, being the binder for the Dutch book, for example). But I can't yet find a link to an image of the above folding fan book, no photography was allowed in the show, of course, and links to cover images don't say much, so, sorry for the lack of illustrations.

The world around us

There's an exhibition of Naoya Hatakeyama's excellent photos at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. He is famous for his fast-shutter-speed shots of exploding landscapes (of stone mining detonations etc) of which there is one stunning room in the show.

The rest is of differing land/cityscapes – wondrous, beautiful (a frozen waterfall), desolate, damaged or dominating (a man in a snowscape, two tiny people atop a man-made mountain); industrial-scapes and buildings, here often featuring clouds of steam or demolished buildings; and finally a collection from Tohoku – making a natural companion to his damaged land- or city-scapes. With so many images from the news about Tohoku, Hatakeyama's sometimes just fit in unnoticed with the already-seen, but others stand out – a keyboard in the water, a pile of rubble looking like his industrial-made or natural mountains, a submerged house.

Raising the red flag

 

My page in this month's issue of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in-house magazine on the (over?) use of the Japanese flag's red circle in 2011. Here's the text:

ON THE RISE Is 2011 the year that saw the red circle of the Japanese flag (the hinomaru) weary as a design element? Illustrations from France, for example, collected in a book for disaster relief called Magnitude-9, extensively featured the red circle in various (often very imaginative and successful) ways; a website of posters, also for tsunami relief, centered almost wholly around it; and, of course, magazine designers justifiably employed it. Bloomberg Businessweek – almost universally admired for its design team – even found itself in a controversy when the Japanese Consulate General in New York lodged a complaint calling the design “inappropriate.” It seems Businessweek’s superb design of a crack-cum-crying face in the circle linked the destruction too explicitly with the hinomaru and the Japanese people. (One commenter on the web wrote: “You cannot destroy it like this without shattering our heart.” But another Japanese blogger pointed out that the circle alone represents the sun, not necessarily the people.) Other designs employed similar distressing of the circle, so perhaps only Businessweek’s prominence attracted the attention. And possibly the red circle’s ubiquity became part of the decidedly unimpressed reception of Japanese design-meister Kashiwa Sato’s new logo for the government’s “Cool Japan” project – the circle with “speed stripes” off to the left – when it was launched in September. Yet clearly, as a design symbol for Japan, the hinomaru isn’t going to disappear anytime soon.

Portraits: 24

Michael Nyman, composer and musician, at home, London, 1993
Nyman generously gave me time to photograph him in his house in London. Perhaps most of all I liked a black-and-white shot I got of him on his sofa. But I also liked this one, taken using a small, unfocusable old Russian panoramic camera I had, which was not often suited to portrait shots. (Though I also liked the shot of Laurie Anderson taken on the camera.) It was shot on the top floor of the house – his piano/music room – and the panorama was a good way to encompass the surroundings, him and the music scores cluttering the floor. For The Wire, which used a medium format close-up cross-processed (slide to negative film).

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

Two words from Japan: otaku and tsunami

Just a round up of some aspects of otaku culture and the tsunami in Japan – it seems these reports in the Asahi could be coordinated. First an arts group called Chaos Lounge bemoans the fact that otaku culture (from which the group spring) hasn't responded appropriately to the quake and disaster.

It could be argued that the core otaku culture doesn't respond well to much outside itself – that's partly what defines it as otaku/geek. The name suggests a certain self-centredness. But perhaps the claim of inappropriate response is belied by the mainstream, otaku-connected like Takashi Murakami donating work to an auction to raise money for those who have been hit by the disaster. Or two reports of manga (not necessarily otaku-created themselves of course – but manga in general is part of both otaku and a wider culture) that take as their theme the response to the quake – here the story of a tsunami-hit railway, and here about the human response as a woman considers the effects of giving birth in the post-disaster area (pictured below).

So, I'm not sure how true the original questioning is. Except, of course, the currently big news for those seriously obsessed with one meeting point between popular and otaku culture – the all-girl pop group AKB48 – can visit a new website which allows you to wonder what your baby would look like if you had it with a group and a member. Not a great response to world events in general.

Meanwhile, the top illustration is the cover of a book released in the summer, which features images from a manga of 32 years ago – about the fear of Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

Font Aid

The Font Aid "Made for Japan" font is – finally! – available. All the proceeds from the font (you can buy it from and see the whole font at My Fonts, for example) go to post-quake medical charities (such as Second Hand which is an international Japanese charity now working in the tsunami-hit area). The glyphs were designed and donated for free by designers from 45 countries. It started back in March and members of the Society of Typographic Aficionados has since been assembling all the submissions into the single font with about 450 glyphs. Better late than never – and medical and reconstruction aid is still important 6 months later. My glyph was based on a photo I took of a school sports day cheerleader's shout – a concept of "gambarou" and ouen (support).

Books and paper

I'm not sure what to make of this year's Takeo paper show. Takeo is a major paper producer in Japan – a country, of course, with a love of the craft of paper. This year's paper show has the theme of books. At the main Takeo shop's display floor, these books are in exhibition, along with iPad and electronic displays of books and papers, plus there's a thick book about the show (with paper samples included) for sale. (There's also an interactive "bookshelf" which I didn't quite follow.) 78 people chose a book each for the show, which are mostly diplayed behind glass, and it's an odd way to display those books which have simple covers. (This is primarily about paper, and the feel is only from those available in currently published form and the exhibition book itself.  Only those with dramatic or unusual cover design really work in this behind-glass form.)

Nevertheless, the Takeo shop itself is a work of minimalist art. And there are satellite displays in various bookshops around Tokyo. The craft of paper is a joy, and that joy is celebrated by Takeo. But the exhibition itself – although thought-out in its detail and display – struggles to have impact. Or perhaps its me who missed something.

Portraits: 23

Leonard Nimoy, actor/director/photographer, in a club room, London, 1989

This was one of the times I was I was most excited about taking someone's portrait, because I – like many – had grown up enthralled by Star Trek. Of course, Star Trek is not a summary of what Nimoy is about (the headline that went opposite this photo in print was "I'm not Spock") but it nevertheless was an excitement for me. Being interviewed was not necessarily an excitement for Nimoy: the previous year (and we'd only just entered 1989) saw him divorced and the death of both his parents, so this photo just perhaps captured something of both his mien during the interview – although the shot below shows that the conversation was absolutely not without humour – and, via a simple play of light from a lamp behind him, just the tiniest hint of being beamed somewhere. For City Limits.

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