New Cosmos of Photography 2008 Tokyo Exhibition
Report on the open-committee meeting
Grand Prize selection open-committee meeting: Nov.28, 2008(Fri.)
A meeting, which was open to the public, of the selection committee that decides the Grand Prize winner of New Cosmos Photography 2008 (the 31st competition) was held at a hall located on the first floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography on November 28, 2008. At the meeting, six Excellence Award finalists who were Grand Prize nominees-Okabe Tokyo, Kohei Koyama, Kenya Sugai, Masanori Hata, Ayano Hoya, and Miyuki Motoki-gave presentations and answered the judges' questions. After that, a grand prize decision-making meeting was held.
Overall Evaluation
General comments on the 31st competition
Nobuyoshi Araki
Looking at the entries made me think that photography might be finished.
Overall, I didn't feel that there was much love for or homage to the subjects. Photographs shouldn't project your own image, they should pay homage to the subject. There didn't seem to be any identification with the subjects, and I wondered why the subjects hadn't been depicted more beautifully.
The raw emotions of the artists don't come across in the photographs. It's as though the sweaty relationship between photographers and subjects has disappeared. The pictures aren't even cool. They feel a bit a cold, a bit dry.
I think all this is a result of the shift to digital photography. Many of the entries highlight the way digital photography has changed how
people take pictures. In the film era, the camera was so close to the photographer's face that it almost became an eye. But the digital cameras
of today are nothing more than objects. So when I said "finished," I meant that with the world moving to digital, photographic expression as our generation knew it is finished.
Nevertheless, this might not be something to feel sad about. This new era has arrived, and it might be what the New Cosmos of Photography
had always been aiming for. Perhaps these cold and dry pictures will get hotter in the future.
One more thing I'd like to say is that all the entries were too well organized. I personally place more value on little ideas than the quality
of the photographs or the composition, and my decisions depend on whether I feel that the photographer has the potential to really go
places in the future.
Kotaro Iizawa
In the last few years I've felt that there have been too many people entering the New Cosmos of Photography with false impressions about what the competition is. So this year I made the unusual move of excluding well-organized works from my final selections.
Basically, producing photographs is about how you react to the real world. It's about the energy with which you throw the real world back.
So when I was judging the entries, rather than worrying about the level of perfection, I focused on whether the entrant had the potential to grow himself or herself as a photographer through the development of his or her work, and I actually felt that a lot of the entries conveyed
this kind of latent potential.
What I felt with all the submissions was that they are all beginning to flounder in modern Japanese society. Many of the entries conveyed a
hidden rage, a powerful desire to want to do break this deadlock before it's too late, and quite a few of the entrants are seriously attempting to do that. On the surface they may be cool, but many of the entries constitute a real attempt to change society or the world in general. Therein lies their potential.
A global trend in photographic expression is that the era of expressing things like emotional strain through straight snapshots is ending, and a new form of expression, in which the various relationships between one's own body and reality are the themes, seems to be emerging.
This year's entries also offered a glimpse of this trend.
Fumio Nanjo
The competition used to attract a lot of entries comprising straight snapshots, but there's been an increase in submissions that are almost
like fantasy.dreamy depictions of imaginary, virtual worlds. Straight photographs are now competing with constructed photos and other photographs offering a surrealistic worldview. The latter works are well finished, and also evoke feelings of constructive tension. Overall, I was left with the impression that this genre has reached maturity.
On the other hand, there were also entries that seem scrabbled, as though they've deliberately been finished off in a rough and ready manner. But these works are strong because the intentions of the artist come through clearly in them. Whichever approach the artist takes, the attitude that he or she had when putting the finishing touches to the work is important.
In the world of modern art right now, an extremely large number of works feature photographs. The physical existence value of photographic works as modern art is increasing, with the artists that create them carefully specifying their size, type, display method, and edition.
The creator's way of life as an artist comes through in the way he or she controls the work.
We are now in an era in which society is flooded with photographs, and I sense the difficulty of expressing oneself through photography.
In other words, if anyone can take high-quality photographs with ease, what you can do with photographs? Unless you have strong individuality
or a powerful approach to things, you won't be able to make it as an artist. Budding photographers therefore need to think about how they can establish their own identity, about how they can create things that are different from those produced by others.
Ryoichi Enomoto
Although it's causing a clash, I feel that the entries are going rapidly from being "photographs" to "visuals," and that "photographers" are being transformed into "photographic artists." However, if you focus solely on producing visuals, you get the loneliness that comes from the departure of the world created through the camera.
So amid this clash between the appeal of photographs and the excitement of visuals, my judging focused on the extent of photographic appeal. That meant I was looking for the portrayal of real things. In short, photography is suitable for the portrayal of life and everyday scenes. This means that there is still life in orthodox documentaries and Araki-style shi-shashin ("I photography").
However, if you look at the history of painting, you see that realism gave way to abstractionism, and before long the concept of painting itself collapsed. I think that a change much like this one that occurred with art is now happening with photography, so another thing I was looking for was a new artist whose work can remake the history of photography and yet still be accepted as modern art. I felt some people had potential, but to be honest, no one really stood out. Even so, I felt that these artists would soon mature. This is obvious, but it's important because at the moment universities and colleges don't have instructors who can teach really advanced digital imaging techniques.
At present, digital photographers must develop themselves. The people in their 20s who are currently emerging will become the pioneers.
One thing that concerned me was that many of the entrants included too many photographs in their submissions. They had mixed various elements, and I couldn't understand what they wanted to show me. A photographer should be able to demonstrate his or her qualities really simply, with just six or seven pictures, for example.
Katsumi Omori
I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of submissions, but I felt that works of or above a certain standard spoke to me naturally.
On the whole, I felt that the level of perfection was high, with errors few and far between. But I wondered whether they all needed to have been produced. I felt that many of the photographs had been taken for the sake of taking photographs. Personally, I wanted to see more works that reflected the joy of encountering something. To produce pictures like this, the first requirement is not to live for the purpose of taking photographs. I want the starting point for people to be an urge to photograph something specific. I got the feeling that a lot of the works had been edited and formatted specifically for the New Cosmos of Photography. I didn't necessarily feel that they needed to have been taken.
Another thing is that photographs are often diverse and very different from each other. I think the photographers should think about what to include more carefully. For example, there were a lot of photo montages, but when I looked at them I often felt that it would have been better to have gone for a single photograph. I don't think the output for expression needed to be photographs, but I think more photographs could have been used. With the world overflowing with photographs, it's impossible to produce something that's completely original.
So if you're going to photography despite that, you need to think more carefully about meaning.
I really think that the most important thing is to have joy, or something like that, in a photograph. It's like when you've discovered something and you suddenly realize what it was. This goes for all photographers, be they professionals or amateurs.
Noguchi Rika
I haven't paid much attention to the New Cosmos of Photography in the last few years, though I'd heard that it had been a bit lacking in energy. But I felt a lot of power in this year's entries. I really enjoyed looking at them.
Nowadays most photography is done digitally, so I imagined that the entries would have changed more than they actually had. There are now people who started out taking digital photographs, and I wanted to see what these people would do. As it turned out, though, I didn't really feel that there was much difference between the digital and analog photographs.
I used two criteria for making my selections. First, I looked for expressions that I wouldn't have thought of myself. Second, I looked at how things that I'm interested in myself, things that I feel affinity with, were expressed differently by other photographers. The decisive factor was the shock of seeing something that I had never seen before.
There were a lot of works dealing with dark things and works suggesting introspective murmurings. Although works like this have been around for many years, there now seems, perhaps because of the age we live in, to be a tendency to somehow stay locked up inside oneself.
But I don't think this means that we should try to force the creators of such work to be positive. I think that stifling atmospheres in which you cannot go anywhere has existed in every era. I took up photography just after the Japanese economic bubble had burst, and back then there was also a feeling that you couldn't go where you wanted to. I wonder if new expressions will emerge from the current darkness, from the darkness of society.
