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| Shikishima. By Tamiko Nishimura. Zen Foto Gallery, 2014.  |
This week's Book of the Week selection comes from photographer Morten Andersen who has selected Shikishima by Tamiko Nishimura published by Zen Foto Gallery.
"As a close follower of some of the Japanese masters of the out of focus blurry style, at some point a bit obsessive also, close to an overdose at times, with the seemingly endless stream of publications coming out during the last years... But last year at the Photobook festival in Kassel I was happy to discover a (for me) new photographer. Of course she was not new at all. But since I had never seen or heard about her before I thought she was a young photographer, but at a closer look there were steam trains, old coke signs etc and in the back it stated early seventies. She is quite close to some of her contemporaries and in Shikishima she takes us on a journey we kind of have been on before with some of her more famous fellow travelers in the are, bure, boke style. It's tilted, sometimes blurry, grainy etc… mostly from a train through some of the more remote regions of Japan in 1969-1972. Not sure if we can talk about a female touch here but there is something. Even if the style and the subject is familiar there is something fresh, free and poetic in there that makes me totally in love with her work! Shikishima was first published in 1973 and if you, like me, didn’t catch the train back then I recommend you do it now with this brand new modest but beautiful rerelease from Tokyo based Zen Photo. "—Morten Andersen
Purchase Book
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| Shikishima. By Tamiko Nishimura. Zen Foto Gallery, 2014. |
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| Shikishima. By Tamiko Nishimura. Zen Foto Gallery, 2014. |
Since his first book, Fast City, in 1999 Morten Andersen has published 15 books of his own work, most of them self-published. Late last year his latest effort in the world of self-publishing was released, Untitled.Cities, his biggest so far. If you think he only works in cities you should check out Blue Forest from the deep, old forests of Norway, or wait for his ongoing project entitled Country. Rock out in 2016... or so…! Morten Andersen lives in Oslo, Norway, far from everything.