MIZUWARI

How do you tell the story of a country, and even more so of a city as fantasised as Tokyo, if not by getting up close and personal with the people who live there? Following in the footsteps of the masters of Japanese photography from Provok and the French humanist photographers, Bruno Labarbère takes us on a deep-black wander through the streets and alleys of Japan’s capital, following the rhythm of the mizuwari as he meets them.

Born in Thailand in 1987, living in France since 1992, Bruno Labarbère initially intended for a career as an automobile designer-engineer. His life takes a radical turn when he buys, by chance, his first camera in 2007. Realizing that the applied mathematics is not made for him and he can do anything as well find in photography this mixture of art and technicality which fascinates him, he leaves his university in Bordeaux and enrolls in photography studies in Paris… but never finished his studies, preferring to wander around in the streets of Paris, his camera in hand. Thanks to the chance of meetings, often in bars, he is, from 2010 to 2020, in turn a salesman in Leica Store, head of the photographic section of the LesNumériques site, journalist for the French magazines Réponses Photo then Le Monde de la Photo. A decade on the technical side of still photography by the Covid-19 pandemic. The first confinement is an opportunity to take the time to finally sort out your photographic archives, where Parisian nights rub shoulders with the streets of Japan, where he went for the first time in 2011 and which he has since considered his third country of adoption. Locked up like millions of others, the (re) discovery of these photos gives him the impression of traveling to this Tokyo night whose doors will remain closed to foreigners for several years. From images to memories, a story is reconstructed. Bruno Labarbère then shows his work to photographers, booksellers, journalists, editors, and assimilates each of the critiques. While the clichés were not premeditated, everyone sees a different artistic reference: Daido Moriyama for spontaneity, William Klein for life scenes, Ed van der Elsken for shadow play. Over the course of feedback, the project evolves until it becomes this book to be published by Hemeria editions.

Admitted in residence to the French Festival Planches Contact 2022 as part of the Springboard for Young Talents, he exhibited at the end of 2022 at the Musée des Franciscaines in Deauville, Normandy: a nighttime stroll through the city’s bars…

Franco-Belgian artist, photographer-visual artist and director, originally Chinese, Diana Lui has lived and worked in Paris for 25 years. She uses several mediums (photography, painting, installation, performance, video) to produce artistic work inspired by its history personal and which seeks to document the human soul through an “intimate/psychological/anthropological” approach which questions identity and origins, in the wake of Diane Arbus.

At the same time, she regularly works for French and international media for portrait or fashion photographs.