Le BAL continues its Japanese season displaying from May 20th through August 21st three Japanese photographers: Keizo Kitajima, Yutaka Takanashi and Yukichi Watabe.

The work of Keizo Kitajima is being exposed for the first time in France. Born in 1954 in Suzaka (Nagano) he has been influenced by the ruptures in Japanese photography by the end of the 1970’s. Changes that we find in publications such as Provoke, For a language to come (1970) by Takuma Nakahira or Bye-Bye Photography (1972) by Daido Moriyama is part of the “Workshop” photography school.

In 1993, The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum devoted to him an important retrospective called “Critical Landscapes” coupled with the book Joy of Portraits (Nabuhiko Kitamura Publishing)

The BAL will display five major series produced between 1975 and 1991: Okinawa / Koza 1975-1980, Tokyo 1979, New York 1981-1984, Eastern Europe 1983-1984 and Colors Works 1986-1990.

In the context of the exhibition, a co-edition Steidl/Le Bal reedits in facsimile the mythical series of 12 booklets, issued in accord with the exhibition Photo Express: Tokyo in the Camp Galery.

Yukichi Watabe (1924-1993) was a photographer that had independently covered the major events that happened in Tokyo.

Among them the famous 1958 series on the “case of the severed body” that is displayed in the BAL under the title A Criminal Investgation.

On the occasion of this exhibition, Barral Publishing and Le BAL will publish “A Criminal Investigation”.

Yutaka Takanashi was born on February 6, 1935 in the neighborhood that is know known as Shinjuku.

A major figure of the 20th century Japanese photo scene, he is the co founder of the famous magazine Provoke in 1968. However the series Machi presented at Le BAL breaks with the contrasted and blurred style of the “Provoke” years to concentrate itself in the tradition of a more invaded-by-the-signs-of-modernity style. To show this, using long shots, he produces with a 4×5 view camera interior and exterior portraits in color and without human presence. “Facing a landscape, the photographer is completely free: free to confront himself, to absorb, destroy, reconstruct and finally to develop”.

This series was featured beginning in 1975 at Asahi Camera and in 1977 in a “Machi” book published by The Asahi Shimbum.

Bernard Perrine
Bernard.Perrine1@orange.fr

Tokyo-e, Three Japanese photographers
May 20– August 21 2011

LE BAL
6, Impasse de la Défense
75018 Paris