Category Archives: Feature

Reviews, critiques and essays on selected topics

Mukashi Banashi

Royal Road is the Way of Bronica

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Royal Road is the Way of Bronica from Japan Exposures on Vimeo.

In 2010 I met up with Tony Hilton, the author of the book Bronica: The Early History and Definitive Collector’s Guide. Tony and I went to a place in north-west Tokyo called Kami-Itabashi, trying to find remaining traces of Zenzaburo Yoshino’s camera company.

Be sure to also read the previous article Mr. Zenza’s Rolls-Royce.

 

Review

Photography in Japan 1853-1912

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As the old saying goes: “those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.” Then again, while reading Terry Bennett’s fascinating book “Photography in Japan 1853-1912”, historic repetition seems almost inevitable as despite developments in society and technology, human nature is hardly changing at all and distinct personalities are thriving to define key moments in history.

The book, which is digestibly structured in portions of decades, starts out with a fireworks of “firsts”. The first photograph taken in Japan, the first photograph taken of a Japanese, the first photograph taken by a Japanese, the first photo studio by Japanese and foreigners alike and even the first Paparazzo-type shot of a ruling Japanese Emperor. These events, however , are simply the correlation with developments of Japan as a whole. Photography is a side-effect of political and geo-political developments in Asia at a greater scale. We soon realise that this book is not only fascinating for the reader interested in photography alone, but provides ample historic and cultural context on Japan as a place as well. This is much appreciated and holds some surprises, even for those of us who think of ourselves as being familiar with it. For example, I was surprised that in those days it was prohibited for any Japanese to leave the country. Violations would be punished by execution. You can perhaps imagine (and this is covered in the book) the treatment of foreigners by the armed population.

Japanese Wrestlers by T. Enami

Above: Japanese Wrestlers by T. Enami

Photography is always as much a technological phenomenon as it is a sociological one, perhaps even more so and even today. It should therefore not surprise anyone that the advance of photography in Japan is primarily driven by the rise of the medium in English-speaking countries, which is to say the United States and the British Empire. In these cultures, photography always seemed to have a special position. With a few exceptions, British and American residents are also the key persons bringing photography, sometimes on the sidelines of other engineering activity, into Japan. In an age where only the privileged were able to travel themselves, but the masses knew that the wider world existed, there was an enormous appetite for pictures taken in far-flung places. While our view focuses on Japan in this case, this is probably by no means exclusive to Japan.

The developments in trade, and especially maritime trade, make the arrival of photography on the sidelines of the forced opening of the country seem completely inevitable. The treaty forced into effect by Perry’s Black Ships triggered, what seemed like a primitive isolated jungle tribe to be propelled into modern civilisation as if a fast-forward button was pressed. It is fascinating to think about how much intellectual potential laid untapped during the feudal era Japan that ended in the 1850s.

Edward Meyer Kern, American Cemetery, Gyokusen-Ji Temple, Shimoda, Japan ca 1855

Edward Meyer Kern, American Cemetery, Gyokusen-Ji Temple, Shimoda, Japan ca 1855

As one would expect, the early photographic activities are dominated by Western technology and personalities. In the course of a relatively short time — how appropriate for photographic history — a transition is made that put the medium into Japanese hands under Japanese cultural terms. It is a perfect adoption process at which end photography is comfortably embedded and placed into the Japanese cultural fabric, of course as one would expect it to occur in other cultures too. There is no further need for the rest of the world to steer the course of developments. This seems like an obvious truth that can also applied to other disciplines, but here photography serves as a suitable case study. There is one aspect, that Bennett occasionally highlights, which is to separate technical ability from artistic ability. These are, unsurprisingly, up to this day two different things in photography, in any culture.

Tuttle-Photography-in-Japan-1853-1912

The book is a fascinating treasure trove of information and artifacts, which I found surprisingly engaging and entertaining for the reader. The lifestyles and work ethics of the personalities involved make it a very vivid read. True to the somewhat ephemeral nature of photography itself, there are constant reminders on the perilous Japanese environs and the vulnerability of the photographic medium. Earthquakes and, above all, fires and more fires cause an entire artistic legacy to be lost forever. Add to that the curious practice of studios buying other photographers’ works and marketing them as their own and you are set up for a never-ending mystery filled with conundrums around who did what and under what name! And more often than not, a sparkling career is ended by, what nowadays seem like trivial illnesses or conditions that were capable of ending someone’s life. I was relieved to observe that life expectations increased over time and by the end of the book, there is the odd personality getting over 90 years old, whereas around 50 years seemed to be more common in the 1850s.

Once more regarding the repetition of history: the improvement of image quality afforded by 19th century photography, you can easily find yourself looking into the eyes of people, and to some extent scenery, that belie the fact that they existed over 100 years ago. Personalities, their desires and goals, their practices and methods do not seem to have changed enough to make it appear that it happened a long time ago. Perhaps not even the now dominating digital photography and the distribution means of the internet are really changing this — we might well be in the 1850s of the digital age right now. The photographic activities we see are just the manifestation of what has always been there and what we want photography to be for us.

Japan Exposures would like to thank Tuttle Publishing for their support during this review.

Top photo: Kusakabe Kimbei (1841-1934) circa 1880 location Yokohama, Japan hand painted albumen print

Review

Going Deeper – Kaiiki by Hitoshi Uemoto

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Kaiiki, by Hitoshi UemotoI have to confess I had never heard that along with the well-known kamikaze suicide air pilots, the Japanese military had also employed suicide divers, human land mines, suicide boats, and manned torpedoes as they desperately tried to reverse their worsening fortunes in the last months of World War II. It is the manned torpedo program that forms the backdrop for Hiroshi Uemoto’s poignant Kaiiki, although its poignancy is a subtle one not readily apparent upon first view.

This isn’t a historical or documentarian look at Imperial Japan’s suicide mission program or the soldiers tasked with carrying out their tragic missions, but rather a book of landscapes, or more precisely seascapes. Nor is the sea Uemoto photographs — specifically the Seto Inland Sea, where the Imperial Navy maintained three training sites for their manned torpedo program — a rough, violent one that could help illustrate such an emotionally fraught act as sacrificing your life for a stipulated greater good. The sea we’re presented with is a disturbingly calm one, where the trail of a speeding fishing boat is the most violent thing that can be seen.

The photographs contained in the book are all in the square format, and masterfully composed. The square aids in enforcing a defined stillness, although within the square the distances and scope of the seascape and shoreline are not inconsequential. There is an expansiveness — and a surprising amount of variety — to Uemoto’s framing. The approach is much like the Seto Inland Sea itself, which is semi-enclosed (see a map here) and in many ways more like a large lake than a sea. (The Japanese title 海域 kaiiki translates to “sea area” or “waters”, as in the expression “territorial waters”.)

Kaiiki, by Hitoshi Uemoto

Although as mentioned there is a lot of variety in how Uemoto presents the Sea, there is also in the editing of the book a deliberate repeating of certain vistas, scenes shot perhaps at slightly different angles, or with slightly different foreground or background elements, where we can’t be certain whether they are of the same place or not. This has the effect — like that of the square — of keeping us mentally boxed in. Not in a negative or aggressive way, but to say, let’s stay here for a while, perhaps there’s more here than meets the eye, perhaps these views have stories to tell us if only we can have the patience to look, and listen.

The photos are almost all dark and moody, some almost impenetrably so, and many feature heavy cloud cover or foggy haze. Many may have been shot at night, although this isn’t obvious. In lesser hands this darkness could easily push the viewer to frustration rather than wonder. (The publisher Sokyusha deserves kudos for the masterful printing of what couldn’t have been easy material to work with.) But here this darkness also draws us inward, compelling us to look further, make sure we haven’t missed anything, playing upon our natural inclination to suspect there must be things lurking in the shadows.

Kaiiki, by Hitoshi Uemoto

It’s not in the shadows, of course, but that which lurks under the sea’s surface, that contains the mystery, and the suspicion that all may not be well here. A more tangible guide to what underlies all these seascapes is the handful of non-seascapes that Uemoto includes in the book, say of tunnels that must have served some military use or the one shot of a torpedo, most likely one displayed in connection with the Kaiten Memorial Museum that is located on Otsushima island, the main training site for the kaiten program. These work well to hint that this is not simply a book of landscapes, that there is a larger purpose at work, while for the most part remaining subtle enough so as to not derail the overall mood of the book. (My one bone to pick with the book is the slight tonal misstep of including two photos of a group of figures walking through the tunnels. They are probably high school boys on a school excursion, but their school uniforms give them a slightly military air and the connection is a bit too obvious for my tastes.)

Kaiiki, by Hitoshi Uemoto

Uemoto provides an afterword (available, along with a map of the area, in English in addition to Japanese) that gives a brief background of the kaiten program. In this day and age of agenda-inflected buzzwords, “suicide bomber” is a hard concept to come to grips with without the corresponding invective, but if we separate the men who carried out their training and eventual suicidal missions from the authorities who dictated them, it is difficult to fathom the psychological turmoil these young men must have been going through as they looked out from the island out onto the sea. As Uemoto writes, “I could not possibly convey here just how taut their state of mind must have been at the time. Yet the color of the sea and the aspect of the island remain unchanged today.”

There is such an obviousness to the latter statement, and yet reading this I was taken aback a bit. Of course, but for minor details here and there, the sea we gaze upon through Uemoto’s lens is the same one these young men looked upon. It is the constant and steadfastly innocent party to that which man has chosen to do with what it wants to.

Kaiiki, by Hitoshi Uemoto

Uemoto also uses the afterword to tell us a bit of he came to photograph on Otsushima. He writes that it was one of the first places he went to when he took up photography in the mid-1970s as he looked for something to shoot, but that he was unprepared to reconcile his relatively comfortable upbringing with that of the young men who prepared to die there some 30 years earlier. Comparing himself at that time to them, he writes:

[…]I recall feeling pathetic for having come of age during Japan’s economic growth spurt (that is, an era of materialism and greed) and I departed the island as if to flee from it. Now, approaching my sixtieth year, I am finally visiting this island again, feeling that I may now be able to direct my camera at it.

One can only wish more young photographers would flee from their chosen subjects in such a manner, for the intervening years and maturity have helped Uemoto produce a measured and reflective work of subtlety and craft that, much like the usually placid water surface Uemoto has captured, invites us deeper, but doesn’t submerge us.

Kaiiki is available in the Japan Exposures book shop.

Photographer Profile

Dialogue with Charlotte Dumas

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Charlotte Dumas is a photographer based in Amsterdam. Her latest book,
Anima, features the burial horses of Arlington Cemetery.

Japan Exposures: First of all, congratulations to your personal “Japan Exposure” in IMA Magazine! Could you describe how the feature came about?

Charlotte Dumas: I think the first time one of my publications was featured in IMA was the issue previous to this one with the publication Repose. Then right after they contacted me again because of the publication ANIMA which I’ve done last year and shows 14 portraits of the burial horses of Arlington National Cemetery near Washington DC. I portrayed the horses at night in their stables as they were drifting to sleep. During the day they work pulling the caissons that carry the caskets of deceased soldiers of the US. Charlotte Cotton was asked for this issue to name some of her favorite books and included this one in her choice. I was very happy about that.

Japan Exposures: Can you please describe your photographic interest and background, including the relation to Japan (if any), and the some detail around the work that was featured?

Charlotte Dumas: I think I mentioned this above already a bit but I mainly take portraits of animals and have been doing so since 2001. My main focus is on animals that are of some significant importance to us either practically as well as symbolically. Because it’s becoming increasingly rare to use animals being used for labour (although some professions are gaining popularity) and their continuing disappearance in our daily life I try to find places and situations where they are still prevalent in a specific function such as police or army horses or search dogs (see Retrieved -on the search dogs of 9/11) or where they encounter us by their overlapping habitat, such is the case in my most recent project which will be published next month ‘The Widest Prairies’ (oodee publishing) which focuses on the wild horses of Nevada that roam the residential areas of the desert population.

Charlotte Dumas -- Ima Magazine spread

Japan Exposures: Do you think your work was of particular interest to a Japanese audience, and if so, can you explain why?

Charlotte Dumas: I wouldn’t be able to say for certain but I know that one of my earlier series (Day is Done resp.) did get some attention in Japan. This series involved lying down roman army horses and I think ANIMA is definitely a series that a Japanese audience can appreciate for it’s spiritual character. The vast and rich history of animals in mythology in Japanese (and in general) culture is in many ways a great inspiration to me as a photographer researching each of my subjects. There is always a strong connection to the history of each subject both in reality as in the depiction and place they have in art history.

Japan Exposures: Here at Japan Exposures, we get numerous requests from people asking for advice to get noticed in Japan, which you have obviously accomplished. What is your advice to achieve this?

Charlotte Dumas: I’ve been making (small) books since 2005 on my own behalf sometimes in close collaboration with different publishers. I think doing this is a great way to distribute ones work internationally and allowing it to be seen by people who can then in their turn recommend it to a larger crowd making the work more known. It’s a very democratic process that I am a big fan of. It is really nice to get the recognition from people who buy and celebrate your books.

Japan Exposures: Language barrier aside, we believe that the Japanese photo world is unique and extremely broad, photography and photographers seem abundant. What is your impression?

Charlotte Dumas: I think Japan has a great and excellent eager audience that loves art and photography and follows it very closely. There is a great public interest I think and worth investigating as well as (trying) to take part in. I am planning my first trip to Japan next spring to photograph and can’t wait to experience the culture myself.

Japan Exposures: Are you interested in Japanese photography and if so, can you elaborate what you like about certain work or artists?

Charlotte Dumas: One of the books and work that springs to mind immediately is that of artist Akito Tsuda and his book Street Cats, brilliantly done and beautiful direct work. I love the very personal approach that many Japanese photographers incorporate in their work and feel affinity with that for sure.

I appreciate greatly the work by Daido Moriyama and this I say not just because of the famous photo of the street dog. I just saw a fantastic show titled ‘With a Trace: photographs of absence’ curated from the Bidwell collection at the Akron museum of Art that included a wonderful work by Moriyama on the ungraspable factors and layers of life.

Photographer Profile

Interview with Shinya Arimoto

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Shinya Arimoto was born in 1971 in Osaka. He won the No.35 Taiyo award in 1997 and set up TOTEM POLE PHOTO GALLERY in 2008. Arimoto has been photographing and exhibiting work since 1994. Currently teaching photography at the Tokyo School of Visual Arts, he has supervised and lead the artist-run Totem Pole Photo Gallery since founding it in 2008.

John Sypal is an American photographer who has lived in Japan since 2004, and joined Totem Pole in 2010.

Please also see this and this special gallery with more images by Shinya Arimoto.

Japan Exposures: 私達は新宿近辺で何回か偶然に会っていますね。有元さんは毎日カメラを首から下げて撮影してるというイメージです。このやる気はどこから生まれてきますか？

We’ve randomly run into each other many times in Shinjuku over the years. My image of you is that you’re always out with your camera around your neck photographing. Where does this desire come from?

Shinya Arimoto: 都市の路上は飽きることがないです。同じ場所を歩いていても、すれ違う人は毎日違う。その一瞬一瞬を見ていたいという欲望があります。

I never get tired of the streets of the city. Even though I walk the same streets, it’s different people passing every day. I have a desire to look at each moment as it happens.

JE: それは素敵な言葉だけど、他の人達も同じことを考えるでしょう（笑）。有元さんは言葉だけではなく、実際に行動していると思います。一ヶ月に何日間「撮影」をしていますか？　大体何時から何時まで？　一日に何本ぐらいのフィルムを撮影しますか？

That’s a common sentiment about shooting on the streets but what’s different about you is that you’re really out there all the time making work. About how many days a month do you shoot? What kind of hours?

SA: 他の仕事が無ければ、基本的には毎日撮影に行きます。去年の夏などは全く仕事がなかったので、本当に毎日撮影していました。正午頃に新宿に着いて、日が暮れるまで撮影しています。なので撮影時間は季節によって変化します。
私の場合、街で出会った人に声をかけて撮影することが多いので、まず大切なのは撮りたい人と出会う事が重要です。これは偶然性の問題でもあるので、その確率を上げる為に多くの時間を〈街にいる〉ことに費やしています。

If I’m not at work, I’m going to shoot every day. When I’m not teaching, such as last summer, I was out there every single day. I arrived in Shinjuku around noon, and shot until sunset. The time I am able to photograph varies depending on the season though. In my case I often communicate with those who I photograph on the streets so it’s important that I just get out there to meet who’s out there. Depending on who I meet depends on random encounters so in order to increase my chances I need to increase the amount of time I spend out photographing in the city.

JE: 一日に何本ぐらいのフィルムを撮影しますか？　また一ヶ月間ではどのぐらいの数になるでしょうか？

How many rolls of film do you shoot a day? A month?

SA: 一日に10本撮る日もあれば、全く撮れない日もある。平均すると一ヶ月で50本ぐらいでしょうかね。

Some days it is not possible to shoot at all, other times I’ll shoot 10 rolls a day. The average is probably about 50 rolls a month.

JE: プライバシーの問題は、現在のストリートフォトグラファーにどのような影響をあたえていますか？
How do privacy concerns affect street photographers today?

SA: 社会的に見ると、プライバシーの問題は時と共に重要になってきていると感じています。
しかし個人対個人で向き合った時、その問題は社会的な問題というよりはむしろお互いの問題へと変化します。私の場合、相手に許可をもらってから撮影することが多いので、トラブルにはなりにくいようです。

From society’s standpoint privacy concerns have been growing more important over time. But when you interact with people one on one on the streets it’s less about society and more about individuals. Since I am often able to interact with my subjects and get their permission before I photograph them I personally haven’t had much trouble with privacy issues.

JE: ストリートで写真を撮ってる人にはどのような責任があると考えますか？

What responsibility does a street photographer need to keep in mind with their subjects?

SA: 撮らせていただいたからには、自分の望む作品に仕上げる事。私自身はネガティブなイメージが好きではないので、作品が観客にそのように捉えられないように注意を払っています。

When I’ve been granted the right to make the photograph I want to match in respect the desire I have to make the work as well as I can. Personally I don’t like photographs that are negative, and I take care so that I don’t catch my subject in that sort of way.

JE: 仕事についてですが、写真学校での講師の仕事以外にコマーシャルの撮影もしてますか？

In addition to teaching photography, do you do much commissioned photography as well?

SA: 20代は仕事の撮影も積極的にしていましたが、今はほとんどしていません。以前から付き合いのあるクライアントから依頼があれば行っている感じです。

When I was in my 20’s and 30’s, I did commercial work, but now not so much. If I do it’s by request from a former client from a previous relationship.

Shinya Arimoto from Ariphoto 2013

JE: I’d like to talk about your teaching experience. What do you feel is the most important part of photographic education?

「有元先生」につい少し聞きたいです。写真の教育において一番大切なのはどのような事でしょうか？

SA: 「写真」とひとことで言っても、その内容は多岐にわたります。様々な写真のあり方を伝えた上で、各個人が目指すべき道を指し示す必要があると思っています。私のゼミ（写真作家専攻）ではテーマやコンセプトの設定や、自作を言葉にすることを大切にしています。技術、知識、経験、の三つの柱の中で「経験」を積むことを重要視します。

Even a though “photography” is a simple word, the content of the term is wide-ranging. In addition to lecturing about the various ways photographs are made and work, it is necessary to help students find their personal way of working that they should aim for. In my classes students need to value the setting, theme and concept of their photographs and also be able to articulate about it in their own words. To gain experience one needs to understand the three pillars of technology, knowledge and understanding.

JE: なるほど。ビジアルアーツの学生は他の学校の学生よりも積極的にストリートスナップを行っているのではないでしょうか？　現在のアート世界ではスナップ写真あるいはストリートフォトは主流ではないが、その事についてどう思いますか？

I see. I get the impression that Visual Arts students do more “street photography” than students at other schools. It seems though that “street photography” is not so popular in the Art World now though…

SA: 東京のビジュアルアーツの学生もストリートスナップしているのはごくわずかです。写真作品が美術作品と認められてゆく流れの中で、写真作品でもコンセプトを示すことが重要となっています。確かに現在のアートの世界ではストリートフォトグラフィーは少ないですが、ストリートフォトグラフィーにおいてもコンセプトを示すことが必要ではないでしょうか。

The number of students at Visual Arts shooting on the streets is negligible. As photography flows more and more into the Art realm, one’s concept has become more important. In the current world of Art there are very few street photographers- so it seems that I think that conceptualism is important now even in street photography.

JE: 有元さんの写真のConceptは何だと思いますか？

What do you feel your concept is?

SA: 「ariphoto」のシリーズのコンセプトは「路上を彷徨いながら、変遷を続ける都市のなかにプリミティブな生命の営みを探し求める。」です。私は都市も人間という生物の作った、一つの生態系だと考えています。生き物としての人間と、その住処としての都市が写真に現われるように工夫して作品をつくっています。また大きなテーマとしては「人間とはなにか？」という疑問が常にあります。かつてチベットの広大な自然の中で、その自然と闘いながら、またそこから恩恵を受けながら生きる人々を撮影してきました。そして今は東京で、その都市機能の恩恵を受けて生きる人々を撮影しています。その両者のなかに、人間としての共通項を見つけたいと思っています。

The concept of my “ariphoto” series is to “Wander the streets seeking out an unrefined or rudimentary, even primitive, kind of life among the city that is always in transition.” I believe that the human organism is of the city and it’s all part of one ecosystem. I create these photographs which formulate that the environment and habitat of man is the city. Of course there’s always the big question “What is Man?”. I have photographed people both struggling against but also benefiting from the vast nature of Tibet. Now I photograph people struggling against but again also benefiting from their environment here in Tokyo. I think that among the two, I’m interested in finding common denominators as human beings.

JE: 最近インターネットの世界ではストリートフォトが再び注目されているそうです。ストリートフォトはこれからどこに向かうべきでしょうか？。新しいことを産み出してゆくべきですか？。それとも「新しいこと」は必要ないと思いますか？

There’s been a resurgence interest, at least online, in “Street Photography”. Is there any place that “Street Photography” can or even needs to go in the future? Is there anything new that this kind of photography can do, or is “new” even important anymore?

SA: 新しい試みはもちろん必要だと思いますが、新しければそれでよいという訳でもない。過去の作品をリスペクトしながらもエピゴーネンにならないように、常に挑戦的であることが大切です。インターネットの世界では多くの人が挑戦的な作品を発表していることに期待が持てます。まだそれは萌芽のようなものかも知れませんが、その中から突出した作品が出てくることにより、今後大きな潮流になってゆくことと信じています。

I think there’s importance in attempting new things, but just because something is new doesn’t mean it’s good. Photographing while respecting the work which has been done before without becoming an inferior imitator is a very important challenge. Regarding the internet, I have an expectation that challenging photography will continue to be shared online. It might still only be something like a sprout, but I believe that from all these pictures a greater trend will follow.

JE: 「挑戦的な作品」という言葉は人によって捉え方が違うと思います。有元さんにとって「挑戦的な作品」とはどのようなものでしょうか？

How would you classify “Challenging Photography”? It seems that this could vary widely from person to person…

SA: アイディア、行動力、テクノロジーの全てにおいてです。特にインターネットの世界ではテクノロジーの進歩が目覚ましい。
例えば従来の「決定的瞬間」のような写真は、高解像度ムービーをキャプチャーする方法に変わっていくでしょう。

It concerns the idea, movement, technology, all of these things. Especially with the internet, there’s been remarkable progress with technology. For example, with “Decisive Moment” photos, they’ll probably be come to be captured through high resolution video.

JE: ですが、有元さんの撮影方法はかなり伝統的でしょう．．．。　暗室でプリントして、マットに入れて、フレームをギャラリーの壁に貼って展示している。

But you stick with some pretty traditional gear for your own photographs… Not to mention you print in the darkroom, mat your prints, and hang them on the walls of a gallery.

SA: 暗室＝伝統的、デジタル＝挑戦的　とは違うと思います。新しいとか古いとかいう概念は、ある程度時間が経てば意味をなさなくなります。
私はこの7年間に23回新作の展示を行いました。もちろんこれは今後も続けてゆきます。手法はこそは新しいものではないが、自分にとってそれは挑戦的な試みであります。

I don’t agree with the idea that the darkroom equals “tradition” or that digital equals “challenge”. As time passes the concept of “old” or “new” has less meaning. Over the past seven years I’ve held twenty-three solo exhibitions of my work. Of course I plan on continuing with this. I’m not after a new approach, the main challenge is with myself.

JE: 写真生活や日々の撮影を継続させる為に重要な事はなんでしょうか？

What encourages you in your work to keep you going?

SA: 街に出て撮影をし、ギャラリーで定期的な発表をすることは、私にとっての日常になりつつありますので特別な思いはありません。
しばらくはこのようなスタイルにこだわってゆきたいと思っています。

The cycle of shooting out on the streets, then exhibiting the work in the gallery is what keeps me interested. By now these actions are so engrained I don’t differentiate photography as something separate from my daily life. This is the lifestyle which I’m going to continue living.

Review

Discovering the Sensei Through the Pupil

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Whenever I stumble upon, through old books or more often than not these days online, photographers of the past that were previously unknown to me, I feel a heightened sense of excitement. Excitement is of course common to the discovery of new up-and-coming photographers, but there’s an added thrill to come upon photographers who for one reason or another weren’t on my radar, yet who amassed long careers, were published, exhibited, written about at one time. It’s as if they were right under my nose but I went right when I should have gone left, or put the book back on the shelf instead of flipping one more page, leaving them to wait a bit more in obscurity.

A couple of weeks ago I clicked one more link on a web page and discovered Taiji Arita, who passed away last year at the age of 70. Arita (1940-2011) was a commercial and freelance photographer who had studied under Yasuhito Ishimoto and had worked in the 1960s at the Nippon Design Center advertising agency alongside other well-known photographers like Yutaka Takanashi and Hajime Sawatari. Arita would continue working commercially as a photographer through the 70s and 80s, but eventually turned his creative energy to painting and woodworking, moving permanently to the United States in 1991 and spending the last 20 years of his life there without returning to Japan.1

The famed Camera Mainichi editor Shōji Yamagishi encouraged Arita’s creative photography and from 1969 – 1975 he worked on the series of family portraits that would eventually be published over 13 issues of Camera Mainichi from May 1973 to September 1974 under the title “First Born”. The photos featured his Canadian first wife Jessica, and eventually the son Cohen they had as well. Now, the extended body of this work is being shown at Gallery 916, a relatively new exhibition space for photography in Tokyo. (If you’re in the city, the exhibition runs until December 28.)

[Please see the accompanying article about Gallery 916. — Editor]

I found the exhibition at Gallery 916 a bit hard to get into initially — the large exhibition space of the gallery combined with the relative smallness of the prints certainly was detrimental here, as was the fact that the early work in the series had a bit too much hippy-dippy-ness for me. (I kept conjuring up scenes from Zabriskie Point, or closer to home, Ikko Narahara’s Celebration of Life (1972)). However, as Arita began to place his wife in more contrived setups, and particularly when their newborn son began to be included, the series started to lose its late 60s trappings, becoming less a celebration of the body and sexuality and familial-ity and more a carefully constructed exploration of a complex triumvirate, Arita the unseen member we end up feeling we know as well as his wife and son. It is those images where the pose itself — that of his family-cum-models, the props, the conceptual thought — and the messy intimacy of family, are indistinguishable.

Photo by Taiji Arita
Photo by Taiji Arita. Taken from the accompanying catalog.

The photos where the son takes center stage are especially powerful, though not without an accompanying irritation at Arita for playing on our emotions. In one photo we see the baby boy in his carriage at the edge of the frame, while the background is a barren landscape with what looks like a massive concrete “A” on fire a seemingly unsafe distance away — with only some of his mother’s winter coat visible to let us know he’s not alone. (In fact we reasonably know he’s never alone — after all his father is taking the photo.) In another he’s in his child seat, this time mother nowhere to be seen — though one has to look carefully, for Arita loves the subtle inclusion of figures through reflections and shadows — and almost completely obscured by a curtain that looks to have blown on top of him. The image is at once serene, the translucency of the curtain showing a swaddled, calm toddler, and violent, the curtain ready to strangle a trapped, defenseless boy.

Amidst so many dark, carefully crafted photos, the most affecting image for me is one of the relatively few color ones in the series, a photo of real aching and tender beauty. Jessica is outside of the house in a rustic setting, hands on the glass window, looking in on the sun-dappled room as her baby boy is caught mid-crawl, his oversized head looking away, but with an expression almost uncannily similar to his mother’s. She temporarily outside her life, outside her model-ness, her motherhood — we can’t even be sure she’s at that moment actually looking at her child, so deeply in thought she seems — gazing in on a life (her’s, his) already beginning to recede away from her.

Photo by Taiji Arita
Photo by Taiji Arita. Courtesy of Gallery 916.

It stands out from the other photos in part because it seems one of the least staged — it can’t be staged, one feels the need to assure oneself. We’ll never know of course, but perhaps to wonder is to miss the point: Arita’s ultimate staging ground is not the rooms or the props, but the four walls of the frame.

The critic Kotaro Iizawa has written an excellent introduction to the exhibition which the gallery has made available on their site in both Japanese and English. Iizawa speaks to what must have been a creative relationship fraught with conflicting roles, especially as the series entered its later period:

Particularly among the later “First Born” shots are a number marked by a palpable tension, and an excessively staged look in reaction to it, to the extent that some of the images verge on the painful. Conversely, the feat of strength required to negotiate such a tightrope of emotions is perhaps the series’ greatest attraction.

According to the gallery, the original intention was to mount Arita’s own prints from the 1970s. However, they were deemed not sufficiently preserved enough for an exhibition of this size.2 Instead, in an interesting twist, photographer Yoshihiko Ueda, who along with G/P Gallery director Shigeo Goto serves as Curatorial Director of 916, and who had served as an assistant to Arita in the early 80s before striking out on his own (he refers to him as “sensei” in a note in the exhibition catalog), took it upon himself to reprint the photographs that ended up in the exhibition. Ueda’s personal dedication to this task is of course admirable, but not necessarily dilemma free. He is not a hired craftsperson approaching this with a detached professionalism, but rather as a successful photographer with his own distinct vision mounting a show of the prints by his former mentor in a gallery he co-curates. “He was a photographer I loved,” writes Ueda.

Quinault is perhaps Ueda’s best known work outside of Japan, shot in the early 90s in the Quinault Rain Forest west of Seattle. It is not taking anything away from the work to describe it as one that works with limited tonal variations. His black and white portrait work that I have seen has a similar flatness to it, faces and figures barely raising themselves off the paper they’re printed on.

The prints on show at Gallery 916 do seem to have a distinctive Ueda-esque quality to them, a lovely subtlety of tonality to them where the figures, the faces, and above all the small details in the scenes are slowly discovered by the viewer over time. Not having seen the original Arita prints, nor any of the Camera Mainichi issues the work originally appeared in, I can’t comment on whether Ueda has enhanced the original work or hindered it in some way — whether, in the parlance of adaptation, Ueda has been faithful to the original, and to his sensei.

To speak to this tangling of sensei and student roles, and the intermingling of styles, it might be illustrative to look at Ueda’s series at Home that was shot from 1993-2005 and collected in the 2006 book of the same name. Spanning 13 years, from when he married actress Karen Kirishima through to the birth of their 4th child, Ueda documented his family. Document is perhaps too strong — these were family snapshots first and foremost (albeit taken by a very accomplished photographer). As Ueda writes,

The compulsive quest of my youth for total perfectionism, power and beauty was giving way to a need to engage with the uncontrollably boisterous glow of daily life, to notice, accept and above all to treasure the ordinary yet unrepeatable events before my eyes, to capture small slices of the fun.

Yoshihiko Ueda -- at Home
Yoshihiko Ueda — at Home. Published in 2006 by Little More.

It was only much later that the work formed itself into a series as such and became a book only at the behest of a publisher. There certainly isn’t the edge you find in many of Arita’s photos, and yet for all of Ueda’s “boisterous glow of daily life”, it isn’t without sadness and pain. (This comes through much more in the heavily edited set of photos presented on Ueda’s site than it does in the far larger selection of photos presented in the book, it has to be said.) But it isn’t anything remotely like the contrived and artful darkness we find in Arita’s series.3

So in terms of intention and approach, Arita’s and Ueda’s two “family” series couldn’t be further apart. Nor is it a given that Ueda was in any overt way conscious of his mentor’s earlier series as he took his family snaps. But the terrain is common enough to both to make one intrigued as to how Ueda must have felt as he negotiated this re-printing of Arita’s “First Born”, no doubt with the best intentions of paying homage to his former sensei and doing the original work “justice” — another loaded term like “faithful” that implies a value judgment.

Sacrosanct notions of “original” and “faith” seem misplaced here. Rather than sifting through the messy intersections of influence and inspiration, reproduction and reworking, I prefer to view this convergence of styles, themes, and teacher-pupil roles more as a collaboration, unwitting obviously on the part of one — or perhaps both, for this balancing act could not have been easy for Ueda, who says as much when he writes that he “battled for almost two months in the darkroom with photos left by my teacher.”

In his essay Iizawa expresses regret that Arita never really went further than his “First Born” series, or pursued photography in any meaningful way in subsequent years, while at the same time wondering if “the very absence of such a follow-up offering could also be what allows this series to retain its rare brilliance.” That last bit seems overly fanciful to me, suggesting as it does that Arita spared us from being let down by ending on a high note. That he didn’t do more with photography is perhaps regrettable, but rather selfish on our part. By all accounts Arita suffered no similar regrets as he channeled his creativity into painting and woodworking, leaving his “first born” to the past as he moved on, both in the context of family — we know he remarried in 1984 — and art. Fortunately for us, this hasn’t stopped the work from being re-discovered, or discovered anew, and his former pupil Yoshihiko Ueda deserves our gratitude for his part in that.


1. This period of Arita’s career is covered in a recently-published book entitled PURE – Taiji Arita in California: Life and Work.

2. Incidentally, the “First Born” portfolio of 68 photographs is owned by Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, Japan, as part of their permanent collection.

3. I think an argument — and further investigation — could be made about the difference in tone having something to do with Arita’s first wife being a Canadian, an “other”, whereas Ueda’s wife is not only Japanese, but a well-known actress at that.

Review

The Spacious Warmth of Gallery 916

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The other day I was surfing online and I came across a new to me photography gallery just by chance. I was intrigued because one, it had earlier this year staged a Ralph Gibson exhibition, and two, I noticed that Yoshihiko Ueda, who is a well-established photographer both commercially and artistically, was serving as co-curator along with Shigeo Goto, a figure I’m familiar with through the G/P Gallery in Ebisu where he serves as Chief Director as well as a previous association with Gallery Punctum Photo+Graphix Tokyo(sadly no longer open). Seeing as their upcoming exhibition was work by a Japanese photographer I had not previously heard of, it seemed the opportune time to tick off two boxes in one shot.

Gallery 916 -- The building exterior
Gallery 916 — The building exterior. Look for the shell.

Opening its doors in February of this year, Gallery 916 is in the district of Tokyo called Hamamatsuchō, an area not normally associated with galleries. The space is on the 5th floor of a big warehouse-y building, and were it not for a small sign for the gallery near the entrance to the building, I would have assumed I was in the wrong place. It’s quite common in places like San Francisco or New York to have galleries in these kind of industrial warehouse-type spaces, but not all that common here in Tokyo.1 The gallery space itself is huge — 600-square-meters apparently — leading me to wonder if it isn’t now the largest photography gallery in Tokyo.

Though admittedly it’s not a place most would consider warm and intimate, especially on the cold and rainy day I visited, the gallery felt heartwarming somehow, knowing that such a large and relatively unadorned, unpretentious space was being given over to photography.

Gallery 916 - Building entrance
Gallery 916 — The building entrance, with hard to spot gallery sign.

In size it felt like one of Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography’s exhibition spaces, but sans the obligatory museum shop, coat check, silent black-suited watchers making sure you don’t touch anything, and most importantly, any admission charge, much more relaxing.

Exhibitions held at the gallery so far have been one-artist shows running between six to eight weeks in duration. Both the Gibson and Arita exhibitions have been accompanied by substantial exhibition catalogs normally not seen from galleries2, and in its catalogs and on its clean, well-designed website, English translations of critical essays and biographical information are given equal footing with the Japanese. (Well-translated English it should be noted, which is far from a given in Japan). [Both the Ralph Gibson and Taiji Arata exhibition catalogs are available in the Japan Exposures Bookstore.]

Of course such a large space does not come without its challenges, number one I’m sure being to remain a financially viable concern for its backers. But there are challenges for the Ueda/Goto curating team as well.

Gallery 916 - Interior
Gallery 916 — The main room.

On view when I visited was a series of photos by the relatively obscure Taiji Arita from the late 60s/early 70s, for whom Ueda once served as an assistant. The prints were not large, and it felt a struggle sometimes for the photos not to be completely dominated by the space. No doubt the curators are aware that a space this large will not be appropriate for just any work, and care will be needed to select photography that works best in the space. Alternatively, perhaps occasionally the space will need to be changed — closing off the two spaces in the back that lead off the main hall, for example — for some exhibits.

[See our accompanying review of the Taiji Arita “First Born” exhibition being held at Gallery 916. — Editor]

Gallery 916 -- Interior two
Gallery 916 — Lots of room to play with.

In its first year, two of the five exhibitions were of Ueda’s work. This may well be part of the arrangement, for all I know. But certainly from the neutral’s perspective, one will hope that this is more a gallery served by Ueda’s creative vision rather than the other way around.

That said, having co-curators of Ueda and Goto’s standing, approaching the gallery from the differing perspectives of photographer and curator respectively, leaves what appears to be have been an excellent start in good stead. It remains to be seen what will come in 2013, but I for one am looking forward to it.


1. The Kiyosumi Gallery Complex, which houses Taka Ishii, Hiromi Yoshii and ShugoArts, among others, is an obvious exception.

2. The old Min Gallery and the current Zen Foto Gallery being two worthy exceptions that come to mind.