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Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers


Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers

Details from Aperture

Japanese photographers have created a tradition strikingly different from that of their Western counterparts. Their work is based on ideas, rules, and aesthetics that are specific to Japanese culture but often little known in the West. Many photographers throughout the history of the medium in Japan—including master postwar photographers such as Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu, and Nobuyoshi Araki—have produced substantial bodies of written work that form an essential counterpart to their visual art. Setting Sun is an anthology of key texts written from the 1950s to the present by Moriyama, Tomatsu, and Araki, as well as by other leading Japanese photographers, including Masahisa Fukase, Takashi Homma, Eikoh Hosoe, Takuma Nakahira, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. The only anthology of its kind to appear in English, Setting Sun makes these texts available in translation to Western readers for the first time and provides a crucial context for photographers who have become increasingly well known and admired in the West. Each chapter in the anthology is devoted to a central idea or theme that is particular to Japanese photography, such as watashi shosetsu (or the "I novel"), the bonds between man and woman, the role of nostalgia, and the shadows of a war lost and of a culture jettisoning its past. These writings vary in form from diary entry to scholarly treatise, but all reflect a clear connection between word and image. This connection is so essential that no comprehensive consideration of Japanese photography can be complete without familiarity with these writings.

Lee Friedlander: America by Car


Photo Lee Friedlander

At the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London

Timothy Taylor Gallery is proud to announce an exhibition of two bodies of work by the influential and critically acclaimed American photographer Lee Friedlander, on display for the first time in the UK. This will be Friedlanderʼs first solo exhibition in London since his 1976 show at the Photographersʼ Gallery.
Lee Friedlander: America By Car charts numerous journeys made by the photographer during the last decade across most of the fifty US states. Shot entirely from the interiors of rental cars, typically from the driverʼs seat, Friedlander makes use of side and rearview mirrors, windscreens, and side windows as framing devices for a total of 192 images.
In America By Car, Friedlander uses the quintessential icons of US culture – cars and the open road – to explore contemporary America, revisiting in the process many of the places and strategies that he has incorporated into his practice throughout his career.
Functioning as an introduction to America by Car we are also very pleased to be simultaneously exhibiting The New Cars 1964 portfolio, also previously unseen in the UK.
Comprising of 33 works in total, The New Cars 1964 was the result of a commission for Harperʼs Bazaar to mark the unveiling of the much-anticipated new car models of that year: Chryslers, Buicks, Pontiacs and Cadillacs.




A pleasant surprise and my first visit to the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London was this exhibition of work from Lee Friedlander. Social Landscapes as he refers to his own work.

America by Car features 90+ monochrome photographs, all shot using a wide angle lens from inside a car, splitting the image to reveal different elements and also reflections in mirrors and glass. The story travels through the US and features only a few prints with people. Four of the last five prints include stop signs and the final photograph is of Friedlander himself looking into his car holding the cable release, a fitting end...