Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s

This beautifully-assembled collection has been an inspiration over the past few months. There are many amazing images, and beautiful repro/packaging on show, but it’s the sheer narrative surge, the urgency of the photobooks themselves as assemblages that grips me. Give me 90 minutes with Hosoe’s Man and Woman or Kikuji Kawada’s The Map over watching a film (other than Tarkovsky, maybe) any day. An essential purchase, though a frustrating tease for those of us without access to the original books. Shame that so many of the volumes lovingly-reproduced here havent’t been reprinted, and are only available at auction for crazy …

Scottee — Cafe

Scottee’s one-day-only cafe/’working-class therapy’ performance at Maiden on Shoreditch High Street… pix here.

Stranded

Stranded — the magazine made by contributors (including myself) stuck overseas by Eyjafjallajökull earlier this year — is now on sale. Profits go to the International Rescue Committee. Grab a copy.

Street Knowledge

King Adz’s new Street Culture primer, Street Knowledge, has hit the shelves. Flip through to ‘B’ and you’ll find a nice double-page spread of one of my photos from Slumbarave at Metropolis a while back. Buy a copy and you’ll even be supporting me financially (in a tiny, Amazon Associates kind of way).

Dickie Beau — RETROFLECTIVE

Dickie’s new show, at the RVT for two nights only (and yes, you’ve missed them both). It’s a must-see, so get along to Bistrotheque on 5th September to do just that. Pix here.

Eat Your Heart Out, Edinburgh

Scottee and the gang [including MC Gaffee, above] are currently in residence at C Aquila in Edinburgh, putting on a run of EYHO as part of the Fringe. We dropped by to get some shots. Pix here.

Schön! 7

London fashion/style magazine Schön! interviews Masumi. Couple of my shots from this shoot last year, and lovely work by David Sims… grab a copy online or off the shelves…

Lovebox 2010

Thanks to the people running Lovebox 2010, I had a weekend pass to the festival, instructed to come back with “wide shots that show off the scale and beauty of the park” as well as whatever else caught my eye. That’s actually a tricky brief: to get a sense of the scale of Lovebox’s Victoria Park setting, you really need aerial shots. Without access to balloon or microlight, I decided to take the brief as a ‘creative starter’ rather than attempt a too-literal interpretation which would have been doomed to failure or cliche: I was keen to avoid the ‘generic …