Teppei Togashi, a noise artist from Tokyo, recently traveled to India. He went to make some field recordings of funerals along the Ganges; recordings of immolation. A small book has just been made of the photographs he took while he was there called Formless India. When i look at this book i am reminded of the many Japanese photographers who visited India and brought back classic reportage styled black and white photos. What Teppei brings to that tradition is a looseness and a real fascination with life (and death). His images feel casual and unconsidered, often it doesn’t look like he was trying to find a specific image but just took whatever he saw. That might sound simple, but i think it’s quite hard to do, hard to take images of what you are actually seeing, rather than what you want to see. Schema’s (HERE) are hard to break!

Although they are not black and white some of my favourite photographs of India are by soft-porn photographer Kishin Shinoyama (one of the only Japanese men over 50 to be arrested twice for indecency in 2010) in his book “Yokoo Tadanori soshite Indo”. Supposedly even Yukio Mishima helped out with that book; good luck finding it though. Super mezurashi. Instead, buy Teppei’s great little book, it has a lot of life in it and will be sold at the small Bonehouse and Working Towards Stall at the upcoming Tokyo Art Book Fair (HERE).