One new photograph, specially commissioned for this 215-image retrospective, shows a spotted pooch, presumably made of porcelain but in any event exceedingly well behaved. Sporting a red leash that leads outside the frame (to its master’s hand? to a doorknob?), the animal, an English pointer by the look of it, stares patiently out at us. We can easily guess that the photo was taken in Japan (Kyoto, in fact), or at least in a Far Eastern country, as the upper corner reveals the edge of a poster on which several ideograms appear. Like all of the Japanese photos commissioned for the Fondation

Italian writer and poet Italo Calvino was preparing the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University when he died suddenly in 1985. Published later as Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the series begins by exploring the theme of lightness. Identifying the source of his literary vocation as the urgent desire to escape the paralyzing effects of heaviness, Calvino declared, “Above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.” If Calvino's enterprise was a “subtraction of weight,” the project of his compatriot and contemporary Carla Accardi has run

Jean-Marc Bustamante's new photographs, part of the “Tableaux” he has been working on since 1970, were taken in 2001 on a trip to Japan. Developed in Cibachrome by a Swiss laboratory in the largest possible format (most often vertical), they are framed in dark wood. But don't look for anything picturesque; Bustamante's Japan is not the land of triumphant modernity nor of ancestral traditions but, as is his wont, that of the urban periphery, indeterminate zones where nature blends with human traces (roads, bridges, electrical pylons and power lines, banal or prefab architecture) in ways that