Photo by Jeffrey Ladd

This hardcover book presents an edit of 41 images from Toshi-e in a large vertical format and the selection corresponded to an exhibition of mostly vintage prints that was on display at Galerie Priska Pasquer in Cologne, Germany. This marked the first solo showing of Takanashi in Germany. One of the gallery directors, Ferdinand Bruggemann is a specialist on Japanese photography and contributes a fine essay on Takanashi and his masterwork,Toshi-e. A second essay by Hitoshi Suzuki, who was an assistant to Kohei Suguira the book’s designer, provides a personal remembrance of discovering the book in Seguira’s design studio while it was being created. A short preface from the gallerist Priska Pasquer opens the book.

Photo by Jeffrey Ladd

Yutaka Takanashi Photography 1965-74 is beautifully realized with three different cover images silk screened onto the cloth of the boards. A yellow translucent dustjacket wraps the book and the color I have been told reflects the tone off an exhibition poster from the first solo exhibit of this work in Japan in the 1980s. The printing of the plates is also exquisite – a modern offset interpretation of the original’s lush gravure which remains rich and clean. The design reflects the twisting and turning of the original (horizontals oriented vertically) but with additional gatefolds for a few of the horizontal pictures. It was printed in an edition of only 500, 30 of which come signed and numbered with a print. An additional 100 were signed and numbered by Takanashi. I strongly recommend this book if you can get one. They are a bit pricey but I assure you it is because these books were expensive to produce.
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Jeffrey Ladd @5B4 Blog

Oliver Sieber: Blonde Angel, Osaka, 2006

Mysterious and wild
Oliver Sieber’s photographs of the global club scene
By Thomas Linden

You want to be unique and at the same time you want to be part of a group. Individualism and uniformity can be two sides of a coin in today’s world of self-expression. Oliver Sieber, photographer from Düsseldorf, investigates this phenomenon in sub cultural milieus in Los Angeles, Toronto, but also in Germany.

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Galerie Priska Pasquer has painted its walls in shimmering black, so that Oliver Sieber’s photographs reveal like windows a view onto color portraits and black and white street scenes. The latter appear like shots from B-Movies of the 1950s, mysterious and wild. “Imaginary Club” Oliver Sieber calls his work, in which the portraits looking like sculptures accentuate the show.
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In Oliver Sieber’s photographs the effort to find oneself while using the community for orientation becomes touchning visible as doomed to failure.

In Sieber’s oeuvre publications and single images become intertwined in a way that a suction evolves which sucks the viewer in this dark, glowing scene, in which people in-between Los Angeles, Tokyo and Schwäbisch Hall searching for a home.
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Koelnische Rundschau, July 31, 2010

Full review in German language:

(German version below)

Small Opinions
Those who know Cartier-Bresson and who like Robert Frank will love Yutaka Takanashi. Takanashi who? No one was as big as him, especially not his sweetish-perverse fellow-countryman Araki, and what a joy that only now we are able to discover him. He began in the 1960s to photograph Tokyo, the people in Tokyo and the landscape around Tokyo, in a way like the young Cassavetes made movies. Dirty, blurred, rough. And why do the photographs look like being made today? Because modern Japan was always one – two decades ahead of the world? Or because Takanashi could see with 35-mm lens in our frenzied, grey, depressing future – in contrary to all other black-and-white photographers? In a reprint of his most famous book „Toshi-e“  (errata editions, ca. 30 EUR) together with Takanashi we can enter a time machine and fly to the place where the life ends and something different from the death begins. (…)
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Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS), June 20, 2010, No. 24, P. 28

Kleine Meinungen
Fotografie Wer Cartier-Bresson kennt und Robert Frank mag, wird Yutaka Takanashi lieben. Yutaka who? Keiner war so groß wie er, schon gar nicht sein süßlich-perverser Landsmann Araki, und was für ein Glück, dass wir ihn jetzt erst entdecken können. Er fing in den Sechzigern an, Tokio, die Menschen in Tokio und die Landschaft um Tokio auf eine Art zu fotografieren, wie der junge Cassavetes Filme machte. Dreckig, verwischt, rauh. Und warum sehen die Bilder trotzdem so aus, als wären sie von heute? Weil das moderne Japan immer schon dem Rest der Welt ein paar Jahrzehnte voraus war? Oder weil Takanashi im Gegensatz zu allen anderen Schwarz-Weiß-Fotografen mit seinen 35-mm-Objektiven in unsere rasende, graue, deprimierende Zukunft sehen konnte? In einem Reprint seines berühmtesten Buchs “Toshi-e” (errata editions, ca. 30 EUR) kann man mit Takanashi in die Zeitmaschine steigen und dorthin fliegen, wo das Leben endet und etwas anderes als der Tod beginnt.
Auch sehr gut, aber von gestern, die große Surrealismus-Ausstellung “La Subversion des Images” mit Fotos von Man Ray, Bellmer, Lee Miller, Dora Maar, Jindrich Styrsky. Diese Männer und Frauen dachten, dass es eine Welt neben unserer Welt gibt, und vergaßen, dass die Welt, nach vorne gedacht, jeden Tag sowieso anders wird. Ihre künstlichen Puppen mit ihren verrenkten Gliedmaßen und traurige, alte Varieté- und Ladenschilder sind sehr angenehm anzuschauen, mehr nicht. Aber das ist in den Tagen des sozrealistischen Neo-Rauch-Trübsinns auch schon sehr viel (seit 16. Juni im Instituto Italiano de Cultura in Madrid; französischer Katalog 52 Euro).
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Till death do us sculpt: Russian to render human bodies into art materials
Fancy a long-lasting keepsake of your loved one? What better than a statue made from the resin of their mortal remains?
It gives a grim new meaning to the term body art. A leading contemporary Russian artist says he has perfected a technique to boil human corpses into crude oil from which he will create permanent sculptures, and he has already signed up willing volunteers. [...]
The Independent

Andrei Molodkin: black gold, blood red
Molodkin’s obsession with oil began when he ate it on bread as a recreational drug. Now he wants to make it from human corpses [...]
For Molodkin, oil, ink and blood are all the same. Ink is the blood of a pen. Oil is the blood of Russia. Blood will one day be oil, which may be made into ink. Boiling down corpses into oil, he reckons, is just speeding up the process. “People say I should not show,” he says apologetically, calling up his custom-made furnace thing on his computer. “They say it is like a meat-shop. But it is a simple idea. From all organic things you can make vodka or spirit. It is just a measure of time and some chemical things.” In the pictures there is a small amount of oil under a huge tank. Molodkin says that you should get 2.5 litres from a person, but this was his trial run, and there was an accident – the machine was opened too early and the transformation was not complete. “Still liquid,” he adds, reassuringly. Who was inside? “Just the dogs and cats I find on the road. I wanted to ask the zoo, for maybe they had an elephant.” So far, he has a whole range of volunteers, from a French porn star to a BBC journalist. He’s planning to write to lots of international figures and, when he dies, plans to be made into oil himself. “Maybe I can be enough energy to drive a short way in a Porsche,” he laughs. “Or 50km in a Japanese car. Or an economical light.” [...]
The Times

Andrei Molodkin wants your body
Andrei Molodkin is telling me about his sensational plan to boil down human bodies into oil for his sculptures. He imagines they will make a “yellowish sweet crude”. Not only this, in June he represents Russia at the Venice Biennale with a sculpture filled with human blood which he intends to buy on the black market. He also thinks it would be “really cool” to make a sculpture from the remains of a suicide bomber. And I arrived at our meeting thinking that art no longer had the power to shock. [...]
Evening Standard

The man with oil in his veins
It is easy, in an age of hyper-commercialism and polished public relations, to believe that art has lost its bohemian edge completely. How many of today’s artists are inspired, not by an innermost compulsion to express themselves, but by the common desire, shared by more prosaic professions, to make a decent living? Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst are consummate PR men, as deft in the arts of marketing as in those of pure creation, and almost unfeasibly rich. But every so often, the spirit of the artist as radical outsider can still make itself felt. I travelled to Paris last week to visit the studio of Andrei Molodkin, a 43-year-old Russian who is shortly to feature in an exhibition in a new London gallery, Orel Art, and who will represent his country in the forthcoming Venice Biennale. [...]
Financial Times