Press

One of the most striking aspects of this series of images is the gang’s aesthetic. Despite being taken in the early 80s, the pictures have a look of another era. Like most subcultures, HM’s unity, cohesiveness, and identity is expressed through the way they dress. “I think the Hoyo Maravilla style may reference the time of the zoot suit wars in 1943,” Beckman suggests. These infamous riots erupted in Southern California when this oversized style of tailoring became unjustly and irrationally associated with grandiosity and unpatriotism, due to the fact it required what was deemed an excessive amount of fabric...

1990年代から写真家として活動し、「わたしの身体はわたしのもの」という主張を、表現を通じて発信し、多くの女性たちに勇気を与えてきた長島有里枝さん。昨年出版された著書『「僕ら」の「女の子写真」から わたしたちのガーリーフォトヘ』では、1990年代にHIROMIXさんや蜷川実花さんらと共に「女の子写真」と称された新しい写真潮流に対し、大学院で学んだフェミニズム理論を駆使した「異議申し立て」を行いました。アート棚だけではなく、社会学やフェミニズムの棚にも並び、多くの女性の手に届いた同著。「写真」を通して長島さんが行う問題提起は、私たちが毎日の暮らしの中で当たり前だと思って飲み込んでしまっている違和感に置き換えられ、気づきを与えてくれるように思います。

同著でも触れられ、長島さんが学生時代から24年間撮り続けている代表作品でもあるセルフポートレートの中から自身が選びぬいた写真集『Self-portraits』が、ニューヨークのDashwood Booksより出版されることになりました。「女性は所々で立ち止まって、自分の生活を見直さなくてはいけない場面にぶつかります」と、長島さん。一人の人間の“人生の変遷”をたどりながら、これまで経験してきた違和感について率直なお話を伺い、長島さんから溢れる希望に満ちたパワーをたくさんいただきました。

Though her subject matters are personal, Nagashima sees her photography as something everyone can relate to, and likens her work to storytelling and creating narratives. She also describes her work as “performative and political”, and some of her early series – photographs of her and her family nude, created in the 90s as a means of separating the body in photography from a sexual context, for example – speak to how she has used photography to subvert accepted ideas, from a distinctly feminist viewpoint. Through her raw and radical photography, Nagashima was questioning the way that women were traditionally depicted in photographs...

The books, featuring images taken in New York and California respectively, showcase a ceremonious ode to skateboarding. A fast and furious ride, each tome presents an intimate lens into the extreme sport: at times an adrenaline rush equivalent to an episode of Rocket Power, at others a soft depiction of skating as if it were performance art.