The Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts in Japan is on a project to support young photographers, buying up work for their permanent collection. They are now calling for entries to the Young Portfolio 2012, a seach for exceptionally original work that pushes the boundaries of photographic expression or methods of production.

Qualifications for submitting to the seventeenth annual event are very inclusive. Basically, curator Yuko Yamaji writes:

As long as a photographer is under thirty-five years of age, he or she can participate as many times as they like, with the result that there are people who have taken part for over ten years and who have as many as one hundred works in our collection. Whether it is their first work or they have been published before is quite irrelevant.

Submissions will be accepted Sunday, April 15, 2012 – Tuesday, May 15, 2012. For an idea of the kind of work they tend to go for, the 178 images by 26 photographers that were selected last year with be on view at the museum Saturday, March 24, 2012 – Sunday, June 24, 2012.

This year’s selection committee is made up of Kikuji Kawada, Hiroh Kikai, and Eikoh Hosoe, Director of the Museum and photographer of the groundbreaking, classic Japanese photobooks Barakei and Kamaitachi. His 1963 collaboration with controversial author Yukio Mishima Barakei, part photographic performance, part surreal portrait of Mishima as both iconoclast and self-mythologist, was faithfully reproduced by Aperture as a facsimile in 2009, limited to 500 signed copies. Kamaitachi, another collaborative work produced with Tatsui Hijikata, founder of ankoku butoh dance, in 1969 was reproduced in close consultation with Hosoe by Aperture in 2005 as a limited addition facsimile, and again reprinted with an updated text in 2009. The work is a “magnificent and seductive combination of performance and photography,” a “subjective documentary” chronicling Hijikata’s spontaneous interactions with the landscape and people of the Japanese countryside.

Young Portfolio 2012
Submissions accepted:
Sunday, April 15, 2012 – Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Young Portfolio Acquisitions 2011
Exhibition on View:
Saturday, March 24, 2012 – Sunday, June 24, 2012

Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts
3545 Kiyosato, Takane-cho, Hokuto-shi, Yamanashi 407-0301 Japan

Heads up to all photo book collectors:

Aperture is reissuing a limited edition of Barakei, as well as the next two books to our popular Curated Collection, available exclusively online.

In 1963, controversial author Yukio Mishima and photographer Eikoh Hosoe put the finishing touches on their masterful collaboration Barakei (Killed by Roses), part photographic performance, part surreal portrait of Mishima as both iconoclast and self-mythologist. The original edition, designed by Kohei Sugiura, famously established the touchstone for two subsequent editions in 1971 and 1985.Aperture is delighted to reissue this faithfully reproduced facsimile of the 1963 classic, making available once again one of the most infamous and intriguing photo books of the twentieth century. This edition is exquisitely produced by the Japanese art shop NADiff, in close consultation with Eikoh Hosoe.

This reissue of Barakei is published in a limited edition of five hundred copies so get yours while they last!

Aperture Curated Collection:

The Chance is Higher, Photographs by Ari Marcopoulos is a thoughtfully designed volume produced by David Strettell–aka Dashwood Books, who understands the careful attention it takes to create a book that honestly reflects the sensibility of the artist. The texture and ambience of this publication is rough, raw, and supremely gorgeous. As David describes it, the pages “are not Xeroxes themselves but beautiful reproductions of them. An artist’s book that seamlessly combines photographs of Marcopoulos’s family, skate pictures, graffiti, landscape and portraiture. Ari feels it is his best book to date and I am very proud of how it came out. Working together with the designer Gilles Gavillet, we were looking to produce something that felt very fine but with a punk/street sensibility.  It was pretty dangerous territory but I feel we really pulled it off.”

Oliver Sieber has photographed a variety of pop-cultural niches over the years—from Teds in Germany to Rockabilly fans in Japan. In Character Thieves, Sieber has focused on European manifestations of the “Cosplay” subculture, where participants dress up in costumes—and live part of their lives—as characters from Japanese video games, animated films, and graphic novels. This volume was produced by Böhm/Kobayashi Publishers in collaboration with one of our favorite German independent publishers and booksellers, Markus Schaden.