Last June, the Taka Ishii gallery, one of the largest in Japan, opened a space in Paris dedicated to Japanese photography and to vintage and contemporary photobooks. The Tokyo gallery, divided into three spaces, features the work of some of the masters of photography—Garry Winogrand, Larry Clark, Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama—as well as up-and-coming Western artists like Thomas Demand, Dan Graham, Elmgreen & Dragset and Cerith Wyn Evans, building a bridge between the avant-gardes of the past and the present. Following Shomei Tomatsu and Keiichi Tahara, the Taka Ishii gallery in Paris will be exhibiting the luminous work of the young photographer Yosuke Takeda (b. 1982) through November 29th. The next exhibition, which runs from December 4th to January 24th, will feature Takashi Hamaguchi’s reports on the student revolts in the 1960s Japan.
We met with the elegant and detached Takayuki Ishii at his gallery’s stand during Paris Photo ,to which he has participated since 2008. He told us about his passion for his profession.
Takayuki Ishii: I was an art student in the mid-1980s. I spent a semester abroad in Los Angeles. It was the middle of the economic bubble in Japan and everywhere. I found part-time work buying and selling art. I thought I wanted to be a painter—that was a mistake [Laughs]. I visited studios and galleries, met with artists, and that made me want to work with artists. In 1991, my father fell ill, so I went back to Tokyo and decided to stay.
At first, I kept working as an art dealer, but I didn’t enjoy it all that much. So I decided to open a gallery, even though I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t have any money, so I opened the gallery on the ground floor of my parents’ house. I chose to make photography a priority because I had been a painter and I wanted to focus on another medium. For our first exhibition, in 1994, we exhibited Larry Clark’s photographs, a very powerful choice. For the second exhibition, in 1996, we released the Japanese version of his book Tulsa. We printed a thousand copies and they sold out in the first two months. From the outset, we exhibited work by Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama and others.
When I started out, photographers of the older generation like Takashi Hamaguchi, Shomei Tomatsu and Kiyoji Otsuji were little known, even in Japan. I was one of the first to exhibit them. Today they inspire the next generation as their popularity spreads and more galleries are exhibiting them. Last summer, for example, a lot of young photographers came to see Kamaitachi, we held the Eikoh Hosoe exhibition at the gallery last year.
Read the full article on the French version of L’Oeil.
Takayuki Ishii
Taka Ishii Gallery
119, rue Vieille-du-Temple
75003 Paris
http://www.takaishiigallery.com
CURRENT SHOW
Yosuke Takeda – Stay Gold
Through November 29th 2014
UPCOMING SHOW
Takashi Hamagushi – Student Radicals, Japan 1968-1969
From December 4th to January 24th 2015
