13 September 2017: 10×10 salon focused on books from the Pacific Rim region. Our special guest presenters were Anita Totha, Yoko Sawada and Mikiko Hara. David Solo graciously hosted the salon at his impressive book and art filled apartment in Brooklyn.
Anita Totha, who runs the fabulous Auckland photobook distribution initiative called Remote Books, shared books by New Zealand photobook makers Fiona Clark, Ann Shelton, Allan MacDonald, Bruce Connew and Yvonne Todd, among others.
Yoko Sawada of Osiris Books showed us a maquette and drawings for Japanese photographer Takuma Nakahira’s Circulation: Date, Place Events book, as well as discussing her 25-plus-year career as a book editor and publisher in Tokyo.
Bios for our presenters below:
Anita Tótha is a Hungarian-American curator and writer originally from New York, who worked at Yossi Milo Gallery prior to relocating to New Zealand in 2011. Currently based in Auckland, Anita is a co-founder of the NZ photography collective Tangent and the founder of Remote Photobooks, an international distribution initiative specializing in photobooks and photo-related publications by photographers and independent publishers from New Zealand. In 2015, she co-produced a short film Pictures on Paper: Photobooks in New Zealand, documenting 6 photobook makers. Anita has contributed writings about photography/photobooks to Feature Shoot, ProPhotographer (NZ), Photofile (AU) and Common Ground Journal (AU).
Publisher and artist agent Yoko Sawada has been involved with books and photography since the 1980s. Beginning her career on the editorial staff at Heibonsha Publishing in Tokyo, Yoko went on to co-found the seminal photography quarterly déjà-vu in 1990 before establishing Osiris, her own photobook imprint. More recently, she co-edited Change by Mikiko Hara and collaborated on the international traveling exhibition, “Provoke: Photography in Japan Between Protest and Performance, 1960-1975.” Osiris also represents several contemporary Japanese photographers as well as manages the archives of Takuma Nakahira, a leading postwar photographer and a founding member of Provoke magazine (1968-1969).
Mikiko Hara is a Japanese photographer who lives in Kawasaki and graduated with a degree in literature from Keio University before studying at Tokyo College of Photography. Mikiko, who recently received Japan’s prestigious 42nd Ihei Kimura Award for her 2016 photobook Change, uses a medium format camera to photograph random people and places within her daily existence. Her works have been exhibited at and are included in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. Mikiko’s work has been featured in the New York Times T Magazine. Her second solo exhibition in NYC will open at the Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery this September.