Customer Reviews

Tokyo Love

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As an amateur portrait photographer, both candid and posed, I was much taken by "Tokyo Love" by Nan Goldin and Nobuyoshi Araki, particularly the portraits by Araki. I'm familiar with Goldin's work through her book "Devil's Playground" as well as a feature on the book done late last year in "Aperture" and I'm familiar with Araki through his books "Araki by Araki" and "Shino".

I find Goldin's contributions consistent with her style in "Devil's Playground" and, I assume, in all of her collected work, while Araki's - and it's Araki's portraits in Tokyo Love I find so compelling - seems a departure from his usual almost numbing never ending "bad boy Araki" series of nudes.

The Araki "Tokyo Love" portraits have the feeling of snapshots, although they're clearly posed, if not in a studio, then against a portable background using strobe light: half of them with the subject entirely within the frame, often sitting on the floor (clothed, as it happens - unusual for Araki; Goldin is the one who finds many of her subjects in a state of undress); the other half with faces cropped tight, framed full face, staring into the lens. They look outward, not particularly trusting, poking their noses into the photographer's world, none of them professional models. All, I assume, representatives of a Japanese culture of a time and a place about which I know nothing, other than the fact I've heard it's a culture undergoing radical transformation.

"Tokyo Love" to some degree reminds me of the impossibly funky and fascinating Soichi Aoki's "Fruits", a book depicting a cultural (radical fashion) segment of young Japanese, published in 2001, some six years after "Tokyo Love". Will the "portrait" subjects in "Fruits" look like Araki and Goldin's "subjects" in "Tokyo Love" when they themselves are five or six years older? Will the age group of fashionistas found in "Fruits" splinter into the various factions in "Tokyo Love"? My own idiosyncratic reaction, of course, the reaction of the observer, but a not bad indication the photographs in "Tokyo Love" do elicit a reaction, a good sign something is happening.

So, even though there seem to be many who've been less than impressed, I say the hell with it, go out and buy "Tokyo Love". Gives you something to defend when you're arguing Art and Life among friends.

Nan Goldin is one of the best photographers of our time. She is real, true and awesome. Her photographs are raw and unsensored. She doesn't just go out and photograph random people on the streets, which would not necessarily be a bad thing anyway... but she establishes real relationships with the people she photographs before taking their picture. Therefore, her images really show something true about the person. Her colors and compositions may seem simple or whimsical to a stupid person, but anyone with half a brain will see that they are actually carefully thought out. She is a master of color use in order to convey a certain mood. I love Nan Goldin and reccommend this book to anyone not looking for pretty nature photography or decorative type "art". Nan Goldin's photographs are raw, real, and powerful. ...

If this collection of Goldin photographs demonstrates anything, it is fine wine, great paintings, loving relationships, and fine art education do not necessarily inspire, guarantee, or, in themselves, produce extraordinary photography. Whatever her experience might have been in Japan while making these photographs, the resulting images are, at the very most, photo album, vacation snap shots holding very little in substance and meaning to anyone except Nan Goldin. Goldin's effort here is one of self absorption which most artists bathe in on occasion. While the images in this edition, as boring and lacking in any form of specific or universal meaning as they are, can be 'blamed' on Goldin, the editorial decision to publish this book prove publishers continue to be a steady source for the 'bargain book' shelves at bookstores everywhere.

Just an ordinary collection of young Japanese people in face or body shots wearing ordinary everyday street clothes. Very few nude or provocative shots. Was this someone's first intermediate school photo project? I am going to delete Nan Goldin's name from my hard drive.