Thursday, August 16, 2012

John Gossage and Kazuo Kitai - double signing at Dashwood NY


John Gossage - The Code
This coming Monday, August 20, Dashwood Books NYC, presents a signing of new books by John Gossage and Kazuo Kitai, published by Harper's Books.

American photographer John Gossage is known for his numerous book projects and has long been a lover and admirer of Japanese photography. Gossage was asked to design Kitai's book, and to join the project by contributing his own photographs to Kitai's exhibition, being shown at Harper's Books August 18 through October 1 in Easthampton, NY. In September 2011, Gossage traveled to Tokyo to meet with Kitai and shoot the images for his new book, The Code. These color photographs signal a departure from Gossage's usual territory. While his revelatory sanctification of the banal is inescapable, here we see a subtle shift to a more accessible perspective, with several luminous street scenes, and a host of pictures that capture the irrepressible beauty rooted in the fabric of the Japanese experience.
 
Kazuo Kitai began his photographic career in 1965 at the young age of 22. Japan was on the cusp of a sea change in its photographic culture, and Kitai stood at the vanguard of this transition. After being persecuted by the police who thought he was a radical, and abandoned by the leftist radicals of the protest movement who saw him as a traitor, Kitai found himself embedded within a cadre of ordinary students who took over the Art Department at Nihon University in Tokyo. For four months, Kitai manned the barricade and photographed the protesters in and around the University, focusing more on the quotidian nature of their struggle, rather than on images of police dispersing students in a haze of tear gas. The Barricade series, shot in 1968, the pivotal year of global protest, has never been published before outside of Japanese magazines.

Kazuo Kitai - Barricade
Monday August 20th 2012, 6 - 8 pm, 33 Bond Street (between Bowery and Lafayette) New York, NY 10012 

You can order the deluxe edition of The Code HERE and Barricade HERE


 

No comments: