Category: Press

November 3, 2011 — November 30, 2011

 

“He was not to do anything of bad taste, the women of the inn warned old Eguchi. He was not to put his finger into the mouth of the sleeping girl, or try anything of that sort” – ‘House of the Sleeping Beauties’ by Yasunari Kawabata.

 

Daniel Blau, London/Munich, in collaboration with Galerie Meyer, Paris, is pleased to present an exhibition of Nobuyoshi Araki polaroids.This exhibition will take place in the cultural quarter of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, to coincide with the photography festival in November.The quarter is infamous for the French home of existentialist literature – the creative birthplace of prominent writers including Jean-Paul Satre and Simone de Beauvoir.With this in mind, and in ode to the relationship between photography and literature, we have decided to engage directly with literary themes, by presenting to you a series of frozen narrative moments in photography: Araki’s polaroids.

 

In the introduction toYasunari Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties,Yukio Mishima compares Kawabata’s writing to a photograph. He says, like a still image, Kawabata’s writing might expose the light-world in which we live, revealing its bright, plastic hypocrisy. Literature is compared to the photographic image; both freezing moments in narrative time. Like Kawabata, Araki developed a profound frustration for the conservativism of Japanese society’s attitude to sex, and like Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties, Araki’s photographs seek to radicalise and re-invent the way we view nudity and sexual implicitness in Japanese culture, alongside the boom of the sex industry in Japan in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

 

With true beauty and precision, it is Araki who brings this idea to life in the image; his series of polaroids conjuring a Kawabata-like story; where nude women become the beautiful protagonists in the perfect eroto-pornographic tale.

 

November 10, 2011 — November 13, 2011

 

Daniel Blau is pleased to present a unique collection of rare vintage NASA photographs. These incredible pictures depict the wonder and awe of space travel.

 

These photographs have become part of our collective visual memory for the twentieth century; pictures that markedly symbolise the speed and power of post-war technological development at a time when Cold War tension was rife between the US and Russia. And so began the space race; the period of the 1960’s that saw the first man on the Moon. Missile technology, taken from Germany at the close of  WWII, set the technological precedence for manned space crafts to orbit the Earth, eventually landing on lunar soil: a period in human history incomparable to any other; photographed, with immense beauty, for the whole world to gaze in astound.

 

These are not simple snap-shots by an amateur, taken with a Kodak box, but the result of the combined efforts of thousands of workers and scientists at NASA. Indeed, these are the most expensive photographs ever produced. To see these prints in the flesh is an experience as close to bouncing on lunar soil as any of us will ever get. These magnificent landscapes can be compared to Gustav Le Gray’s large prints of  Fontainebleau or his seascapes. Today we treasure these vintage prints for their artistic quality and as permanent visual evidence of a time when the future seemed so close…

 

‘…Our first shock comes as we stop our spinning motion and swing ourselves around so as to bring the Moon into view. We have not been able to see the Moon for nearly a day now, and the change is electrifying. The Moon I have known all my life, that two-dimensional small yellow disk in the sky, has gone away somewhere, to be replaced by the most awesome sphere I have ever seen. To begin with, it is huge, completely filling our window. Second, it is three-dimensional. The belly of it bulges out toward us in such a pronounced fashion that I almost feel I can reach to touch it…’

 

– Michael Collins, Apollo XI, July 1969 (NASA Sp-350, 1975, p. 207)

 

Paris Photo, 10 – 13 Nov 2011

Grand Palais, Avenue Winston Churchill, 75008 Paris

 

A newspaper catalogue will accompany the exhibition.