never the straight nail

Seen:  Rama Lama Ding Dong / press release

Who: Yusuke Yamatani / website

Where: Yuka Tsuruno Gallery / website / map

When: November 21 - December 19, 2015

In the summer of 2014, photographer Yusuke Yamatani and his wife took a month-long honeymoon traveling over 2000km from Hokkaido to the island of Kyushu with a tent and changes of clothes.  Yamatani also had his Contax T3 and plenty of black and white film- the photographs from their trip resulting in his latest series, Rama Lama Ding Dong.  Photographing one’s wife- and indeed, even one’s honeymoon- is certainly not without precedent in Japan. Indeed, diaristic photographs of spouses and lovers can be exhibited and published without accusations of vanity. Yamatani’s contribution to this photographic dialogue is rougher around the edges in the best way possible- the viewer will note the bug bites, public bath visits, and random natural nudity that appears in the series. Speaking with him in the gallery he said that he was not going for a “sentimental” journey, and instead wanted to keep things on his term for this age.  This was one of my favorite exhibitions of 2015- and likewise the self-published hardcover book of the series (featuring twice as many images as in the show) is in my Best Books of 2015 list as well.

The gallery venue complex, TOLOT/heuristic SHINONOME,  is situated in a large white cube that shares the second floor of a dockside former printing factory with several other (and literal) large white cubes in an industrial district near Shinonome station.  It is not the easiest gallery to get to, but one well worth the trip it takes to visit. 

Above: Exhibition detail of Yusuke Yamatani’s Rama Lama Ding Dong at Yuka Tsuruno Gallery, Dec. 2015

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“I found out that they had a darkroom upstairs where amateur photographers got together every day. Even though I was using a digital camera, I’d always been more attracted to film photography. I thought I could make prints every day if I lived there, so I asked the owner of the cafe on the spot if I could move in there and he said yes. I stayed there just like that and moved into a flat he owned. I met Shomei Tomatsu then and he took me under his wing. He said to me “Show me 500 photos per week.”  So I shot with a digital camera and created contact sheets for him to see. He’d tell me which ones were powerful or weak. This went on for three months.” – Yusuke Yamatani, on living in Nagasaki in 2010- in conversation with critic Kotaro Iizawa 

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The entire interview is a good read- Yamatani’s experience with Tomatsu demonstrates the need for putting in work. Later on, he discusses his choice of using Fujifilm Neopan 400 for his honeymoon series Rama Lama Ding Dong - and even more interesting, Iizawa, perhaps the foremost authority on the work of Nobuyoshi Araki, discusses the relationship of Yamatani’s own documentation of his honeymoon with that of Araki’s Sentimental Journey.

Read the full interview here: Yusuke Yamatani: Showing the Realities of Contemporary Culture

Jorge Luis Borges, Buenos Aires, 1975-76 -by Willis Barnstone

I think that time is the most essential mystery. Other things may be mysterious. Space is unimportant. You can think of a spaceless universe, for example, a universe made of music. We are listeners of course. But as for time, you have the problem of definition. — Jorge Luis Borges, at University of Chicago, May 1980

from: 

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