Japanese photographer Emi Anrakuji (b. 1963) is known for taking obscured and often close-up images of herself. In the early 2000s, while recovering from a long illness, she found a box of old postcard with wide-ranging origins, from Europe, Africa, America, and Asia. According to family lore, her grandfather, a wine importer in Tokyo, frequently traveled to Europe and brought back photo-illustrated postcards, a novelty among collectors in the 1890s and the 1910s. The postcards miraculously survived the 1923 earthquake and the WWII air raids in 1945 and thus became a family treasure.

Struck by this story as well as the complex visual culture that these card images/objects manifest, Anrakuji felt a strong connection to her grandfather who died before she was born. Subsequently, she printed her self-portraits over 54 of them. Each work demonstrates a lyrical and sometimes provocative interplay between Anrakuji’s own shadowy figure and the miniature landscapes and artifacts, transcending time and space, triumphantly turning her family saga into an immortal palimpsest.

To view the entire series, please click here. 

In the rich tradition of Japanese photography blended with Zen philosophy, Hitoshi Fugo (Japanese, b. 1947) discovered a unique passage between inner and outer space, resulting in a seemingly infinite manifestation of natural light in a surprisingly familiar object — a frying pan in his kitchen. The artist carefully checked the sun's rays at various times of the day and repeated experiments on the surface of the frying pan, such as pouring oil.

The series, spanning over 15 years and consisting of more than 70 images, was printed in a limited edition of 10 on the occasion of Fugo’s 2015 New York solo exhibition which the artist proudly considered a culmination of his long career. The series is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), the Museum of Photographic Arts (San Diego), The Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, (Paris), among others.

The romantic picture of America is often at odds with the jarring reality of living within its complex contradictions.  In 2000, Hai Zhang (b. 1976) departed his home country of China and arrived in a small town in Alabama, the start of a connective thread that would drive his pursuit of photographing Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina over the15 years in which his vision of America as a symbol was transformed into an unsettling curiosity and suspicion.

With his diverse experience as an architect and photojournalist, Zhang understands that surrounding context. He states, “there is always more to the photograph than what is depicted within the image, more questions than answers.” Zhang’s southern images are in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), and his new artist book, “What If,” containing these images, is available at our booth.