Forget about the Olympics. There is a great new exhibition now up in London at the Photographers’ Gallery on Contemporary Japanese Photobooks. Curated by Ivan Vartanian and Jason Evans, this is the first photobook exhibition I have heard of where you are actually encouraged to touch the books. They’ve also done a great tumblr for the exhibition with a list of all the photographers and books, and a discussion section so you can share your love for the Japanese photobook.

Laurence Vecten of Lozenup and Oneyearofbooks, has put together a great little calendar to raise funds for the Japanese Red Cross. The calendar includes photographs by 4 Japanese photographers, Hiroshi Nomura for winter, Seiji Kumagai for Spring, Aya Muto for Summer and Yuko Amano for Autumn. Check out more images over here.

In parallel to the current Hiroshima Ground Zero exhibition at the ICP, there is an article on the ICP Library blog about the impact of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Japanese photobooks. If you tried hard enough, you could relate every Japanese photobook to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, for my money, there are a few tenuous links in this piece by Russet Lederman, but it’s a nice selection of photobooks nonetheless. The story of how the photographs in the Hiroshima Ground Zero exhibition were discovered is also well worth reading.

Takashi Homma. Roppongi Hills 2, 2005.

My piece for Foam magazine on Takashi Homma’s Tokyo and my Daughter series is now online on American Suburb X. Check it out here.

Nice resource on Japanese graphic design including work by two designers heavily involved with photography: Ikko Tanaka and Tadanori Yokoo.

Takuma Nakahira’s For A Language To Come has just been re-released by Osiris in Japan. You can now get your hands on a copy for less than 10,000yen instead of US$10,000, which is a pretty decent cost-saving. I haven’t seen the book yet, but I am willing to go out on a limb and say this is a must-have, if only for the fact that Nakahira burned most of his black-and-white work and so this is one of the rare opportunities you’re going to have to see it. It even has ‘bonus features’: a reworked cover and a supplement including a critical introduction and three essays by Takuma Nakahira translated into English for the first time. This book is part of a growing number of Japanese photobooks that are being released with an eye on the global market or even exclusively for consumption outside of Japan… Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and 70s, a recent collection of Yutaka Takanashi’s black-and-white work and the book on books on his masterpiece, Toshi-e.

Read more about Nakahira here.

For the lovers of Japanese photobooks, I recommend a trip to A Japanese Book. This is a rare bookstore’s website and they seem to have photographed spreads from every book that passes through their hands. The images all have massive watermarks and aren’t always good quality but this is a rare resource for taking a peek into some hard-to-find Japanese photobooks.

Tadanori Yokoo (*1936), Japanese Culture the Fifty Postwar Years, 1995, Offset

Great little selection of Japanese posters (hi-res) from the DNP Archives of Graphic Design. This one’s by Tadanori Yokoo, who is also responsible for this beauty, a poster for Eikoh Hosoe’s exhibition, Kamaitachi (a nice selection of some of Yokoo’s posters is available here).

A few weeks ago I got an email from Atsushi Fujiwara offering to send me three issues of the magazine that he publishes, Asphalt, edited by Akira Hasegawa. Hasegawa is a bit of a legendary photo-editor in Japan so I was intrigued. A few days later Asphalt II, III and IV showed up in Paris. The magazine follows a 2 permanent photographers + 1 guest format that gives it a strong personal aesthetic while keeping things interesting. If you like what you see from the spreads above, I recommend heading over to Japan Exposures to read their excellent post on Asphalt and I think they’ll even sell you a copy if you’re nice.