Seen: Kouhei Hodota’s オレとメシ / Soul Food and Me
Where: Totem Pole Photo Gallery, Shinjuku
When: August 5 - 10, 2014 / 12:00-19:00
Tired of High Concept photography that seems to have been made simply to illustrate five dense paragraphs of pretentious Art Speak about a photographer’s intent? I am. Luckily though there isn’t too much of that in Tokyo. Shows here like Hodo-chan’s are all that much more interesting because they show a real disconnect from the usual Western obsession with Modernist fetishization of perfection and seriousness in Art. The title is translated directly as “Food and Me” (or even more specifically, “Me and Food”) and is comprised of pictures of Food and the Photographer himself, often at the same time. I would argue against condescendingly writing this off as superfluous or even using that awful word “selfie” in judging it- Hodota’s own interest and food and interacting with it visually is just fine the way it is. If there’s anything that the “flood of images” which many Photographers lament about online has taught me anything it’s that letting go of our old rubrics for what’s “worthy” of being art is essentially removing the blinders so to speak, and opening up to the possibility that the real frontier now in photography is simply documenting one’s personal experience.
Who cares what someone had for lunch?
The guy who ate it, for starters.
Amateurs have naturally known this all along. Even though Hodota is a working photographer and a graduate of a Photo school in Tokyo- (Mitsugu Ohnishi is our mutual mentor, and we’ve known each other since 2002) his Soul Food and Me series something that is just right on its own terms for his own personal reasons. This is doubtlessly the main goal of a serious photographer or casual picture anyway, right?