Ravens & Red Lipstick: Japanese Photography Since 1945

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Ravens & Red Lipstick shortlisted for Photography category in the British Design and Production Awards Ravens & Red Lipstick provides a visually bold survey of Japanese photography's recent history. Drawing together extensive research and a succession of engaging dialogues with both emerging and established photographers, Lena Fritsch traces its development chronologically from the severity of post-war Realism to the diverse ingenuity of photography in contemporary Japan, via the work of movements and groups such as Vivo in the 1960s and'Girl Power' in the '90s. Interspersed are fascinating original interviews with some of the most influential photographers of each era, from Daido Moriyama to Nobuyoshi Araki and Rinko Kawauchi. Interrogating the business, education and art-institutional backdrops to each movement, Fritsch masterfully demonstrates the centrality of these contexts to the form and reception of a cross-section of Japanese photographic works. Fritsch's great achievement is to bring observations from a range of disciplines to bear on her commentary with imagination and clarity. As a result, this comprehensively illustrated volume is both an accessible introduction and an illuminating work of analysis for general readers and aficionados alike.

Reviews

'An expansive, informative book' - Tatler
'Lena Fritsch's vivid commentary and nuanced scholarship contextualise the influential characters, important works and entangled political movements of a fascinating history' - Aesthetica
'Vast and luscious' - AnOther
'A rich, visually alluring survey of Japanese photography from the post-war period to the present day' - The i Newspaper
'Glorious' - Elephant
'Impressive' - FAD magazine

Author Bio

Lena Fritsch is a specialist in 20th- and 21st-century Japanese art and photography, and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum (University of Oxford). Her publications include The Body as a Screen: Japanese Art Photography of the 1990s and an English-language edition of Moriyama Daidos Tales of Tono.