Mika Ninagawa‘s Tokyo is a nice-enough foil to, and last round of, my silly back and forth between Daido Moriyama’s super-saturated, high contrast, gritty black & white photography (made fairly continuously from the mid 1960s to the present*) and Hiromix’s color work made between ~1995 and 2000. Why Ninagawa and not another Hiromix book? Well, …
Author Archives: James Cockroft
Daido Moriyama & Shomei Tomatsu – ‘Tokyo’
Tokyo is an exhibition catalog from ‘Tokyo: Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu,’ which ran at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris, November 11, 2020 through February 28, 2021. I wasn’t in Paris at the time, and bought this from publisher Akio Nagasawa, and I very much hope it’s the last Moriyama book on my …
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‘Polaroid Now’ – Steve Crist & Gloria Fowler, ed.
Polaroid Now: the History and Future of Polaroid Photography collects recent (2010s) work on expired Old Polaroid and Impossible/Originals New Polaroid stocks by rising (Insta)stars of the medium. There’s some killer work in it, for sure, and seeing the images larger in print—in this book, anyway—gives a slightly different impression than the images did when …
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‘The Polaroid Book’ – Steve Crist, ed.
The Polaroid Book: selections from the Polaroid Collections of Photography is, as one might guess, a selection of Old, formerly existing Polaroid’s collection of prints. Sadly, New, currently-existing Polaroid (fka “Polaroid Originals,” fka the “Impossible Project”) no longer owns most of the collection: a quick Google at the time I unboxed the book shows it …
Thomas Campbell – ‘YOD’
As a child of the 1980s, and one long steeped in the (very mainstream) counterculture of the late 1980s and early 1990s, I have a large and abiding soft spot for skateboarding and skateboard culture, and I have this soft spot despite not really ever having the coordination to skate at all…. YOD, the book …
Hiromix – ‘Works’
Works collects the best of Hiromix’s commercial work from 1995-2000, and it’s the latest and last Hiromix book in my collection. *single tear
Daido Moriyama’s “Women in the Night”
In late 2020 or early 2021, Akio Nagasawa announced a new, 4 volume series of silk-screened canvas-bound photobooks from Daido Moriyama. I immediately preordered the first, and kept an eye out for the other three. Ends up, there were 5 total and there’s a surprise sort of ending, sort of. Taken individually, I don’t have …
