the space in between

that which moves and shakes

while trained as a photographer, and while i largely use this space as place to meditate on Things Photographic, truth be told i do partake of other genres, other modes of representation and visual thinking.  in fact, there are many times when the spate of photography i take in, grouse and ruminate over will be like so much inelegant sputtering, a hacking cough of hackneyed notions and cobbled or predictable presentation, when compared to the quality of making, question-having and solution-seeking that i am blessed enough to stumble upon from time to time, often in genres that i have less of a frame of reference.  is it ridiculous to feel like i'm cheating on photography when i find myself swooning over something that is decidedly not?  does photography care that i'm ignoring it for a time, because it hasn't done anything for me lately, and meanwhile  i'm having drinks and long, meaningful looks in a corner with this something else over here?

one of the most influential mentors i have ever had was a drawing instructor .   well, to be precise, he taught and knew how to do all manner of media and things--so much so that it scared the shit out of his peer faculty members during the faculty biennials, when he would exhibit finished, accomplished works in no fewer than five media while the rest struggled to pull something together in a month or so because they had failed to make much over the previous two years (that in itself was a kind of important lesson).  but what he really excelled at in teaching was getting to mold minds at the "fundamentals" stage.  help you unlearn preconceptions that you brought with you into the classroom haughtily, in ways that only eighteen and nineteen year old aspiring art students can.  i remember that he had a universal ban on pencils of any kind, and taught us to use the magnificently messy vine charcoal and pastels instead; that we were never allowed to turn anything in that was drawn on less than 16x20" size sheets (and that he encouraged us to buy big rolls of drawing paper); that he was a master at teaching our eye how to see and prioritize; that in drawing it became important to realize that the center is not everything and consequently everything outside of it of less importance--that instead intention and deliberate consideration should be given to every mark, to the weight of each line.  through hours and hours of my drawing badly,  i learned that drawing is done with the entire body, standing up:  that you draw with yourself in a sometimes-dance, sometimes stand-off to your canvas, or torn off sheet of oversized paper.  that there is relation and negotiated space between body, arm, instrument and media.   

i am reminded of this formative, humbling experience, and its twin memory of being in proxy to a charismatic maker-of-things who cannot stop making, stop drawing, as i have been trying (for months now) to find the words to best describe the astounding work of artist william kentridge.

i wish that i could show you, in a cupped hand, the single most moving piece of art i saw in the last year.  in a dark, hushed room in a cramped banking space; i wish i could take you to the slack-jawed wonder that is kentridge's black box .

I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending - an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.

and:

The drawings don't start with 'a beautiful mark'. It has to be a mark of something out there in the world. It doesn't have to be an accurate drawing, but it has to stand for an observation, not something that is abstract, like an emotion.

--william kentridge, quotations from william kentridge by carolyn christov-bakargiev (1998), societé des expositions du palais de beaux-arts de bruxelles (with thanks to art throb) .

and one more:

I once did take some advice. I was told by many intelligent people who only had my best interests at heart: "Do one thing only. If you do everything you will always be a dilettante, unable to master any field. Either be a filmmaker, or an actor or an artist, and you will do it better." For many years I tried to keep to this good advice. I sold my etching press when I went to acting school. I stopped doing theatre when I started working in film. It was through hard work and good fortune that I escaped that advice.

kentridge is an artist who has found work-around solutions for many things that defy the logic of how things progress.  what i mean by that is this notion that there is some prefabricated map or plan of way of getting to somewhere or something, of getting to become something, and that kentridge's m.o. in life has been to do ten or ten million other things than those prescribed tasks, and arrive at That Place, whatever and wherever it is, with more authority and finality than most.  his primary working media is drawing, specifically charcoal drawing, considered a "minor art" of the traditional variety. these drawings, while sometimes fodder for other things, do not exist solely as preparatory work for something Else, often they are the finished product.  His drawings are huge, messy things with histories.  his mark-making describes his subjects as having made choices, as things which move within the white space of the paper, and settle back down again.  i don't know that i have ever seen a drawing of his that did not show a characteristic pentimenti, traces of movement or suggestions of a previous movement  that has been overlaid with another choice, another more final line.  

drawing from Felix in Exile, 1994.

the son of lawyers, a student of politics and african history, and an artist who does not believe in sole, dedicated practice to one media or medium only (he has training in puppetry, theatre and film), kentridge is the living embodiment of getting to one's destiny despite the good intentions and advice of everyone around you.  kentridge actually gave some words of advice on the act of getting and giving advice.  he said:  

We do not hear advice.  We do not want advice.  We particularly do not want advice we haven't asked for.  The only advice we register is when something is said that we already know but need someone else to confirm...I am wary of advice.  But more than that I am wary of the certainty that lies behind most advice.  I am mistrustful of certainty. 

which is not to say that kentridge puts stock into uncertainty either.  his process, both in his writing and his visual work, is one that resists binarization.  he prefers open-endedness, and his position, as has been ventured forth by some, is rather a non-position, a "negative critique of a lived and unresolved contradiction."  (ashraf jamal, co-author of art in south africa: the future present) 

black box/chambre noire is a work commissioned by the deutsche-guggenheim and exhibited in 2005.  the space in berlin is a smallish-gallery room housed in a larger building which is a bank.   i was chagrined by my own expectations being subverted, realizing that i had come with a preconception of what a "guggenheim" space was supposed to be like.   on the walls hung drawings that were used in the production of the finished piece, which was set in the center of  the room, with a few small rows of chairs in front of it.  the "black box" was a mini-theatre, like a puppet show box except that it had several (six, to be exact) receding tracks.  and each layer was heavily worked, with drawings and media affixed and waiting for you to begin to unpack and absorb.  when the lights dimmed and the "show" started, a projection began to play onto the theatre, and hand-made "puppets" began to move across the tracks through a rigging in the black box.  music that at turns were 19th century recordings of mozart's the magic flute were interspersed and overlaid with traditional namibian songs, and the "play" itself was at turns part history lesson, part cultural critique, part freudian psychoanalysis.  

kentridge at work on black box/chambre noire in his studio in johannesburg

there are characters in kentridge's piece, and their manifestation turns the viewer, no matter what the age, into a child learning how to make associations and meaning from the abstractions they see in front of them.  kentridge has said of his cast :

The six characters are a Megaphone man who’s the narrator; a transparent Herero woman defined by the head-dress: she’s actually a spring with a piece of transparent gauze on her head. A mechanical running man: a cut-out piece of paper that runs; a pair of dividers, that’s the measuring arm, measuring skulls and geography; an exploding skull that makes a brief appearance; and a second Herero woman based on a German postal scale from 1905, a scale for weighing letters.

and what of the content?

that is a little more of an involved answer, and one i will have to rely heavily on the artist to explicate.  put simply, kentridge was commissioned by the deutsche guggenheim to produce a work of art which dealt with germany's colonial history in africa.  kentridge was given this commission as he was entrenched in a project about mozart's the magic flute.  part of the work he was doing involved a 1:10 scale of the stage setting for the opera, which he transformed and incorporated for the purposes of black box.  the specific history that kentridge chose to deal with was the german massacre of the herero tribe in southwest africa, which is now namibia.  the massacre, conducted by general lothar van trotha, was a retaliation for the tribe's uprising against the increasing encroachment on their land, seizing of cattle and livestock, and the continual breaking of treaties.  the herero had carried out a directed attack on the ruling germans, killing about 150 farmers and reclaiming their cattle.  the german solution was to enact what some historians conclude was the first genocide of the twentieth century, nearly annihilating the tribe by killing over 75% of its population. 

of the intersection of his magic flute project (which was recently on view at the marian goodman gallery) and black box/chambre noire,  kentridge writes:

Transforming shadows, the early cinema, the vaudeville of the time, which was practiced throughout Europe and even in the United States--these are some of the forms I'm going to examine in Black Box.  But I will consider these early forms with hindsight, looking back on them as if they were an Enlightenment project.  I will ask: What knowledge do we have today, and what lessons have we learned--now that it is no longer 1791, when Mozart wrote his opera, but 2005?  (from Kentridge's forward to the exhibition text)

and of his specific sets of references and associations for the commissioned piece in berlin:

...I'm playing with three sets of associations in Black Box.  The first is the black box of the theatre.  The installation consists of a model of a theatre, which houses projections and characters.  The characters are small automatons--mechanized (and not necessarily anthropomorphic) objects that perform, together with the projections, within the theatre space.  So the first reference is to the "black box" of the performance realm. 

The second association of the black box is the chambre noire--the central chamber of a camera between the lens and the eyepiece, into which light enters and where a kind of meaning is created.  Here, the infinite possibilities of the outside world come in, but a single image is chosen, fixed upon the plane.

The third reference is the flight-data recorder that is used to trace the last moments before an airline disaster.  And the disaster I will be referring to--although I will not necessarily describe it nor didactically enumerate its stages--is the German massacre of the Herero people in Southwest Africa.

...If The Magic Flute suggests the utopian moment of the Enlightenment, Black Box represents the other end of the spectrum.

the entire production was 20 minutes long.  in one visit, i sat through it twice before the museum closed.  and when i returned to berlin a week later, i attempted to see it again, banging on the closed bank doors like a... well, like someone who knew that the most extraordinary thing she'd ever seen was on the other side of that door and she was going to be fleeing 7,000 miles away from it without getting to see it again.  that's what it was like.   

what was so extraordinary about black box was that it managed so many things that art usually so stupendously fails at dealing with: things that have to do with politics both past and present; cultural guilt and grief; memory and forgetting; the evocation of universal themes and then the subsequent questioning of what those themes are, what their validity is in the face of changed contexts, agency or audience; and it did all of these things while still managing to be startlingly, breath-gasping-and-all beautiful.   it doesn't try to do or invoke any of the above tropes or themes, but it fully realizes them all.  seeing this piece set me about a mad rush to find, see and ingest as much of kentridge's words and works as i could find. 

what i found was a dearth of production that continually builds on its questions; a rare clarity of purpose and intent which belies an artist who is fully aware of his artistic project (and i don't mean that in the same way that m.f.a. programs plague students with the assignation of a "project" that is to be their life-long noose) and his own existential boundary conditions.  kentridge is wildly smart: well-read and with a wide berth of interests across the field of the humanities.

in a rather fabulous interview with bell hooks kentridge and she discuss race, history and particularity, with hooks asking poignant questions which elicit thoughtful responses from kentridge.  an excerpt:

bh:  I grew up in a small Southern town where there were certain places black folks couldn't go.  in fact, one of the lingering memories of my childhood is of this place that made wonderful hamburgers, but we knew black people would not be served there.  and when we walked by as children, those burgers smelled so delicious, and the smell awakened longing, but as a black person you could not satisfy this desire.  what's interesting about the u.s. is, people have so quickly forgotten the intensity of that legislated apartheid here.

wk:  that forgetting is already happening in South Africa, too.  the system in South Africa is only four or five years old, and memory is gone.  In many cases, it's already difficult to hang on to what we were.  there is sort of a willful amnesia, a refusal to accept accountability, that comes from the naturalization of outrageous systems in the world.  but i'm more interested in the question of historical memory--of what happens when people forget so quickly. 

bh:  an intriguing aspect of your work is its immediacy: you use popular forms--cartoons or poster graphics--and defamiliarize them.  at the same time the pain is more accessible.  it becomes an intimate trauma.  in the installation ubu tells the truth, a narrative of daily life unfolds that is ordinary and mundane, and then suddenly traumatic events happen, transforming the experience.

wk:  a question i eventually ask is, how does one relate a private experience of a public trauma?  for example, when we see images on television now, of people killed or starving, it's not that they aren't shocking, but that they fit into a sort of bank of images and are dulled.  the hard part is to try to get back to the first sense of shock one had...the hard part is to try to hold onto that sense of outrage because that is the truest response.  all the other ways of living with it dilute and normalize.

bh:  a willingness to receive the truth of images has to be there as well.  when i read about your childhood it was evident that actually witnessing cruel acts gave you a heightened sense of awareness.  lots of other little white boys saw these things.  what enables one person to resist while many other people collude?

wk:  a whole constellation of facts.  for me it actually has to do with the house i grew up in.  i was raised to be aware of the nature of the society we were living in.  kids i went to school with grew up in a world where hatred and terror were normalized.  what are the things with which people blinded themselves to find all that acceptable?

bh:  they have to construct a wall inside.  your work exposes the layers of these walls.  for example, there is a recurring image of someone turning their back.  whether you are white or black, the demand of white supremacy and apartheid is always that one split oneself--to normalize.  a white person like you, who resisted normalization, stands out.

wk:  i always assumed that splitting was just the way one exists in the world.

something bell hooks says about kentridge in the preface to her interview sticks.  she says that kentridge is always "...acknowledging that we are always more than our pain." a major--and moving--theme of black box  has to do with what one does with such pain.  the narrator megaphone man rolls out into the stage area, with a torn-sheet placard affixed to it reading trauerarbeit.  

the word refers to freud's conception of grief work, conceived of as a necessary labor, a mourning one undergoes which has a finite endpoint (mourning and melancholia, 1917).  with the introduction of this word and, indirectly, this historical peer working on these themes at the time of the massacre, kentridge opens up a dialog about what it is to be guilty, to be complicit, to be the inheritors of psychic pain.  maria-christina villaseñor, the curator of black box, wrote that among kentridge's questions are:

...does trauma ever really recede?  can it be contained?...the history that looms largest in kentridge's work is the complex, deeply intertwined relationship of between Europe and Africa, the rhino in the room, so to speak, a presence that can never be ignored...there is no standing outside in kentridge's work.  black box implicates us in our belief and disbelief, in our wonder and cool knowingness, in darkness and in light.

notably, after wwi, freud radically revised his work about grief in ego and the id, asserting that grief is continual and ongoing, a sisyphean labor without end. 

with all the issues kentridge skillfully touches upon in his work black box/chambre noire, with his address and redress of western white history at the bequest of the penitent authors of such histories, kentridge has given us a work that is implication, absolution and everything in between.  black box is full of pointed, unanswered questions; the practical realization that nothing can be done to recover or correct the excessiveness of a punishing past; that we are always more than our pain but never without it; and that, like the multi-part media chosen to depict it, history and its retelling is messy, overlapping, conflicted and consisting of multiple voices. 

though his animated films are rare and hard to come by (shown mostly at festivals and rare museum screenings), a short 6-minute excerpt of the documentary art from the ashes can be seen here.  black box/chambre noire is currently being shown at the johannesburg art gallery through july 9th.  hopefully then it will tour to at least one of the guggenheims in the  u.s.  a production of kentridge's full-length stage opera of the magic flute will run at the brooklyn academy of music in the spring of 2007. 

 

influences and confluences

to have the knowledge that you seek a particular vein of something is to be aware of not only your tastes, but what influences you, creates bias and division, separates one set of concerns from another.  connoisseurship, perhaps, but also a little bit of greek wisdom: to know why you are drawn to specific things, people, situations or a kind of aesthetics is a form of knowing thyself. 

i have been swayed by a particular kind of representation of birds.  for years i've been made aware of this imagistic longing which i posses.  it is very specific.  when i say to someone, "i'm interested in making photographs of birds," to the addressee that immediately creates some presumptions that become harder to correct if the conversation goes much deeper than this.  "oh, so you're into landscape photography then?"  no, not exactly.  not the way you perceive what that genre is, nor, probably, the way that i do. 

when i search for ways to describe this, even to myself, the vocabulary comes up lacking.  the best way i can find to describe what i mean and to describe it absolutely is to pull a photograph or a book from somewhere and physically give it and then in turn my meaning to someone.  to you.  my clumsy visual lexicon:

a certain awareness of grace:

camille solygua

starkness:

michael ackerman

a love of form and play with space:

katsushika hokusai

masao yamamoto

smallness.  delicacy:

ibid 

 

  superstitious:

jim dine : birds
 

from multiple sensibilities i become aware and attuned to my own.  i define what bird is to my own eye, and i redefine each adjective i found to describe each form; meaning becomes expanded and at the same time compressed.  i also define by negation what the image i seek is not.  a healthy respect for both these image makers and what they pulled from within them begins to emerge within me.  awe is balanced by fright which is balanced by play which is balanced by tea-stained memories that never were.  the influences become confluences when i take my camera into a scene with a mind full of birds. 

these were taken a much warmer season ago, in a much warmer clime than i inhabit now.  before i left the south:

 

 

these are sketches of thoughts, really.  the diet of one who intends to make more images which will evoke the lexicon she's using to go by for the moment, and then expand the meanings she had previously described.   more work in the works.  both the written and the seen.

 

the thing of the thing

a blog is a funny thing. 

in the beginning, it is a tabula rasa, a place where you can project onto all that has needed a very particularized and niched space to simply be.  because of its newness, you are able to create and alter at will the tone, the subject matter, the seriousness and the obsessiveness of your own little piece of the self-publishing cyberspace pie. 

given time and diligence, some of the reasons you carved out your little niche begins to come manifest: you receive responses to posts, emails and find through your statistical log that other people, other blogs, are discussing your posts.  sending people your way.  creating community, audience and critics in a seemingly fast amount of time.

it is when this above mentioned occurs that something about how you think about writing takes a subtle shift.  before response, we'll say, you wrote thinking that maybe somewhere someone might be reading, but it wasn't a given.  after response, you know empirically that people are, and you might even know, in that indirect way of the internet, who some of them are.  it's like heisenberg's uncertainty principle: the observation of the experiment begins to change the quality of the actual experiment such that you cannot know if, or to what degree, the observation taints the experiment being observed.

i bring this up not because i have become stymied and inconsistent in my writing due to the fact that i know someone is looking, but because i find it worth mentioning that when one hesitates in the face of their experiment, and then when something outside of that niched out, projected-place she created fundamentally shifts--say, a job, a relationship, a move or all three--the blog is the first thing to go. 

at least, that's what introverts like me do.  i become exhausted at the thought of producing the very sorts of things that it gave me great satisfaction to produce not for you (solely), dear reader, but for me.  and like the garden in my yard which is slowly being prepared to weather the brutal winter that will undoubtedly be coming soon to my new locale, i have had to take a long meditative breath away from this space and communicating these things which i ponder on a greedy, constant basis.  my neighbor is laying cardboard on the ground, and then hay on top of the cardboard, so that the ground underneath stays warm, moist and fertile through the frosty, biting winter.  i feel i have been preparing myself much the same. 

so, with renewed purpose and a clearer mind, i return to this too too neglected space.  perhaps some redecorating is in order.  since i would like to be more frequent in my musings here, it may be appropriate to open up the floor to writing that is not only the full-length artist psycho-biography--though i do adore that and will keep writing them--but some more fractured and fleeting writing.  sometimes i forget about the gems that can be found in fragments; truer thoughts which rise so quickly to the surface because you imagine you care about them less. 

speaking of fragments, i offer you this one.  it swept all the art pretense from underneath my feet and knocked me sideways:

at the met this month i was rushing back and forth between galleries trying to get my one-day-in-the-city special exhibitions fix.  i had gone to look at the the spirit photography exhibit that was showcased, and was excited as i'd never laid eyes on these types of photographs in the flesh.  the show was packed with people, and i seemed to be eternally in line behind these two loud women that kept pointing and saying things like, how could anybody ever think these things were real, anyway?" over and over again.  anxious to leave and visit another part of the museum, i rushed between the hallways which connected their photography wing to their painting wing.  the hallway that has the oft-changed permanent collection of photographs, and, as you near the exit, a gallery of drawings.  i almost missed it, and then i stopped.

it was a drawing of hokusai's the great wave at kanagawa, copied by van gogh.  his familiar ink stroke, those wobbly lines on yellowed paper.  next to the drawing was an excerpt printed from a letter by van gogh, discussing it.  the image of this wave, which has been co-opted by every new age purpose known to man, has been commodified to symbolize an experience of serene zen calm.  it used to be the advertising symbol for a holistic health care place i worked for in grad school.  to van gogh, however, it did not embody any of those fuzzy warm things.  look at the foam, he wrote, you can see that they're really claws, they're clutches.  and that they're coming for the fisherman in the boat.  i'm paraphrasing from memory, but that's the gist of it.  and it was astonishing to me.  this ubiquitous image, this famous woodblock print that i've only ever glanced at, apparently.  how could i have missed the danger inherent here?  the vulnerability and tinniness of those wooden boats caught underneath the crest of that great--as in inspiring fear and awe--wave?  those clutches?

i wasn't even looking to catch a moment like that, and out of all of the ones i was seking in my art hiatus weekend, this was the most stunningly felt and realized. 

perfect images, written photographs and the absolute

this picture has been lost and i will never again feel that same emotion...i suspect that [a] recomposed image will no longer please me in the same way, or with as much force, since it  will have had time to make its way to my head, there to crystallize into a perfect image, and the photographic abstraction will happen by itself on the sensitized surface of memory, to be developed and fixed by writing, which i resorted only to free myself of my photographic regret.

---hervé guibert, ghost image

i may know better a photograph i remember than a photograph i am looking at...ultimately--or at the limit--in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.  "the necessary condition for an image is sight," janouch told kafka; and kafka smiled and replied: "we photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds.  my stories are a way of shutting my eyes."   

---roland barthes, camera lucida 

i often think of the image only i can see now, and of which i've never spoken.  it's always there, in the same silence, amazing.  it's the only image of myself i like, the only one in which i recognize myself, delight...

...so i'm fifteen and a half.
it's on a ferry crossing the mekong river.
the image lasts all the way across.

---marguerite duras, the lover

there are photographers who are manic beings and photograph constantly, using the camera to mediate life and the experiences that cross the path of their lens.  there are writers who do the same thing with words; as they are in the midst of an event--either mundane or profound--there is always something in them thinking of the most perfect way to describe the thing they're experiencing that very moment, which word or phrase is not too heavy or too frivolous, in short, the sentence that goldilocks ate.  for these writers and photographers alike, experiences somehow only become valid and real once described, and whether in words or in a cropped field of vision, experience and event are complete when treated and translated through their respective media.  and for these types, there are always two experiences being had: the actual event that is happening that very moment, and the description/transcription of that event.  to live with this duality is nearly an unconscious thing, it becomes second-nature, a non-event, and indeed is a more difficult thing to unlearn to do than to pick up and begin doing.

(in fact, when photographers and writers are "taught", they are told to photograph constantly, record everything, write everyday, even if it's nothing.  that to practice this is a way to inscribe it into your life, to make it a natural extension of yourself and your artistic expression.  i am reminded of the story "a pilgrim's progress," in which an earnest religious acolyte is bade to find a method to "pray without ceasing" and when he has done so, he will have attained enlightenment and peace.)

i happen to practice a very different method of both of these things.  and the manic version (of which i have an internalized voice of one that lives within me) scolds me and calls it laziness, but i only think that this is partially true.  the other method of experience and description views the manic's method as anathema.  the rapid fire of the shutter being able to capture moments at 1/3200th of a second, or in eight frames a second, becomes a vulgarity to both time, memory and experience itself.  when one is already thinking of how something will look or sound or read before one has even looked or tasted or felt is to have a record and not a memory, a version without meaning.  i read, listen and look widely.  i believe instead that to experience anything, it must be felt and wrung through body and mind utterly before thinking about thinking on it.  only when the moment has passed will i allow myself another new moment, the one that shuts me in a room alone and quiet to write about it. 

of course, not carrying pen or camera around everywhere does leave you without the tools to sometimes finish seeing the thing you were open to and only you could see, or to remember all the details of something after the moment has passed.  every writer or photographer, whatever their persuasion (and an infinite variety exist between the two points i have described above), know and have felt this.  the lost moment.  the perfect image gone forever, the beginnings of the great story lost to the overcrowded mind.  i have been meditating lately on these lost moments, and wondering how they affect both memory and experience.  are we nostalgic for these images lost to us, forever shifting details in our memory?  are they made more perfect as we recount or remember them precisely for their not becoming document, and thus, concrete thing?  are these imperfect moments more precise because of their changeable ambiguity?  what is that ache we feel for what we did not encapsulate, this different memory we have, different from the kinds with contour and light and shade, made somehow unchangeable because of their definiteness, their recorded existence? 

i have come and come again to hervé guibert, roland barthes and marguerite duras, who all have much to say about memory, regret, experience and selfhood.  i have visited them each differently for different reasons, but as i write here now i imagine a situation where they are all three in the same room together.  i don't imagine they all get along.  but they are all sympathetic to one another.  all of them go to great effort to articulate a particular lost moment, and what losing that moment does to their memory of it, and of themselves.

hervé guibert, self-portrait:

   

guibert wrote a tome  (which i am forever indebted to james  for introducing me to) of amazing essays on photography, ghost image.  the book is a series of informal essays, conversational and diaristic, which treats fragments concerning photography, what it is to photograph, what it means to look.  it has become one of my favorite meditations on the subject, and guibert's voice is clear, lyrical and embarrassingly honest.  in it, he describes his ultimate "lost" photograph, a moment he missed camera-less while vacationing on the island of elba.  the image, that of, "four young boys stood in a row beneath the great foaming mass, a small distance from one another, facing the water, braving the waves that washed over them, allowing themselves to be rolled around by them," was glimpsed for a few moments, enough to have had captured had he the proper equipment.  instead, he looked out on it, noting its ordered perfection, ephemerality and particularity.  he seethed in anger because as he watched this perfect image, unable to record it, he knew he would also watch its passing, the moment in which it, "decomposed and crumbled into pieces before suddenly transforming itself into a regret."  he has the passing flirtation with the possibility of coming upon the scene again the next day--the light will be the same, the boys may return to the water, but he soon abandons this for the only course that may do the scene justice: he locks himself in a room and writes about it.  but with a difference.  the writing for him does not do what was missed in the act of photography, it instead reminds him of the limits of the image and of memory:

if i had photographed it at once, and if the picture had turned out "well" (that is, faithful to the memory of my emotion), it would have become mine.  but the act of photographing it would have obliterated all memory of the emotion, for photography envelops things and causes forgetfulness, whereas writing, which it can only hinder, is a melancholy act, and the image would have been "returned" to me as a photograph, as an estranged object that would bear my name and that i could take credit for, but that would always remain foreign to me (like a once familiar object to an amnesiac).

guibert asserts that if he had been able to capture the moment on film, he would have "owned" it, and it would have "become" his.  added to the catalog of images, it would have been a pleasing visual arrangement, "the perfect image," but, he admits, he would have not had the memory of the event had he not conjured it through writing, through trying to relive the image in his mind once deprived the relic of the photograph. 

if photography provides the  visual "proof" that we were there, and we saw what is depicted, does writing give us back our memory of the event lived, or at least a version that cannot be alluded to in images?  if the photograph is evidential, is writing the emotional? 

roland barthes and his mother:

 

roland barthes was not a photographer, nor even a maker-of-things, but he accomplished in his writing what every good philosopher aspires to in their thinking: he began to understand something of the thing itself, and for barthes that thing would be how images and the visual function, and how this intersects and necessarily affects the personal.  in camera lucida, he spends a good portion of time parsing out both general assumptions concerning photography as well as his own very individual response to a highly charged and personal photograph which he will describe in great detail but in the end, refuse to show his reader.  the photograph is one of his mother, referred to simply as "the winter garden photograph," and she has just recently died and barthes is in mourning.  he is scouring the image reservoir for an image, the image, that will give back some essential quality of this much-loved person to him, that will show him something that will signify as "real" visually for something that is felt "real" emotionally. 

but it is a frustrating task.  because photography is slippery.  because memory second-guesses and doubts the veracity given in images.  because what we see does not always correlate to what we remember, and barthes is wary of images becoming memory.  he wants to reclaim his memory from the visual repertoire, not have it given him from it. while looking for the image that will inform memory, he writes, "...a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see."  what he is searching for, instead, is something which causes a disturbance, something that will prick memory, wound it and him in some way.  it is in this essay that he names the idea that became the namesake for this site, where he calls "punctum" that detail in a photograph which renders an image subjective and particular, that which pierces through what we already think we know. 

he is in his mother's apartment looking for a photograph.  he does not know the photograph he is looking for, this is not a searching for something he has once seen and needs to recover.  he will know what he is looking for once he has found it. 

there i was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother...looking for the truth of the face i had loved.  and i found it...

lost in the depths of the winter garden photograph, my mother's face is vague, faded.  in a first impulse, i exclaimed: "there she is!  she's really there!  at last, there she is!" now i claim to know--why, in what she consists.  i want to outline the face loved by thought, to make it into the unique field of an intense observation, i want to enlarge the is face in order to see it better, to understand it better, to know its truth.  i believe that by enlarging the detail, i will finally reach my mother's very being.

satisfied that he has found it, and perhaps drained by what he has come to understand because of the searching for it, he makes another confession: why what pierces him in this photo must, in order to continue to pierce him, remain private.  he will not show us the winter garden photograph; he declines to make spectacle of his memory, or of contributing another "indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ordinary...it exists only for me...in it, for you, no wound."

marguerite duras and her mother:

guibert, barthes and duras were all contemporaries of one another.  guibert and barthes were social with one another (and guibert inhabited the same building in paris as another french luminary, michel foucault); barthes and duras sparred about one another in print; duras was arguably the most famous.  her most famous novel, the lover, tells the semi-autobiographical story about the writer's first love affair as as a fifteen-year-old girl, with an older chinese aristocrat, while growing up in french indochina.  the book is sparse, selfish and spectacle all at once, and written in a signature second-person past conditional tense for which duras had become known.   duras was also a film director, and her visual sense in that media spills over in descriptions in her novels; scenes are succinctly detailed but richly so, and images are described as complete visual realizations.

i found out some time ago that the working title for this novel was originally la photograph absolu.  in interviews she has said that the origins of the novel began as a commission, when she was asked to comment on a family photo album.  inspired by the images, she began writing the novel.  but one image she returned to, as if in refrain.  significant because it is the only image that does not exist, the image of herself before she would become the self familiar to her for the rest of her life.  it is an image of herself on the mekong ferry, the day she would meet the man who would become her first lover.

i think it was during this journey that the image became detached, removed from all the rest.  it might have existed, a photograph might have been taken, just like any other, somewhere else, in other circumstances.  but it wasn't.  the subject was too slight.  who would have thought of such a thing?  the photograph could only have been taken if someone could have known in advance how important it was to be in my life, that event, the crossing of the river.  but while it was happening, no one knew of its existence.  except god.  and that's why--it couldn't have been otherwise--the image doesn't exist.  it was omitted.  forgotten.  it never was detached or removed from all the rest.  and it's to this, this failure to have been created, that the image owes its virtue: the virtue of representing, of being the creator of, an absolute.

i remain struck by her insistence that this image is important because it never became "detached," which i take to mean singled out and remembered as a photograph, a representation of an event instead of something which alludes to a specific memory.  psychic event versus actual one.  that the image of the image becomes more important than the fact of the image itself. 

the above passage shows that duras is in agreement with barthes that photographs act as a block against memory, an aide in forgetting.  perhaps if a photograph of this moment, of duras crossing the mekong existed, the fact in the photograph would speak against her memory of the event, and banalizing it, would diminish what without its existence, becomes seminal in the life of her personhood and as a writer: the moment she sees herself seeing herself--something which could not happen if she were actually able to do so in the act of viewing herself in a photograph.   barthes had written:

not only is the photograph never, in essence, a memory, but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes counter-memory...the photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed.

my thoughts on these three conceptions of absolute, or perfect images, are anything but precise.  i think that more than the example of three articulate and well-spoken writers all reflecting upon their subjective, personal moments-as-image, i am concerned with the recurrent theme of memory-trumping-image, of the notion of taking back memory from images themselves.  is photography the regret we have against experience?  is it like the uncertainty principle, and an event photographed is an event interrupted, tainted, somehow, by its observation instead of its pure participation?  does the act of "taking" the moment in a photograph "take" something from the moment, and the you having the moment, as well?  is it nostalgia or regret that keeps us purveyors of images?  are the two the same?  i've been steeping in these thoughts for a couple of months now, re-reading texts that i've read under different circumstances, different versions of myself.  i only arrive at more questions.  there is no practical application to knowing the whether or why to any of what i've posed here.  i suppose i am striving instead for an awareness: in what barthes has referred to as the "three intentions" of photography: to do, to undergo and to look."

 

 

 

 

correspondences

so it's more of a visual thing than a lengthy-esoteric-discussion thing, but i've been most intrigued by the effect that the institute of design (and, more precisely, its golden-era mentors) have had on the aesthetics of early post-war japanese photographers. i know that yasuhiro ishimoto was studying with siskind and callahan during the heyday, and took his artistic armory back with him to japan, but i've just loved looking at the following homages made in respectful nods to callahan by nobuyoshi araki and masahisa fukase (i was certain there was a furuya one, but i think i was just hoping it existed):

the original:

eleanor, chicago, 1949

and those who wish to treat the matter through their own filters:

yoko araki, undated

yoko fukase, izu, 1973

in the introductory essay to anne wilkes tucker's encylopedic tome the history of japanese photography, the author asserts that araki and fukase both became known to the japanese because they were the first to show the "intimate homelife and personal emotional state of their subjects." as i read more and more about the environment from which contemporary japanese photographers emerged, i see (though as a westerner cannot fully comprehend) more and more how this work must have come as a shock to the viewing public. i also can't help but meditate upon how, in absorbing eastern men reinterpret the tones of callahan's portrait of his wife, they show something else of themselves, of the woman in front of them, and of east contemplating west. it's amazing and a little humbling to consider just how revolutionary something so simple as an unguarded moment of one's wife, captured on film, could revolutionize how an entire generation of photographers began to see, and it's something i've loved thinking about ever since i came across these photographs.

good things in threes

three more for the gold-leaf album:

a few notes-to-self on future process:

*avoid 90# hotpress. it curls too much with the multiple layers of media, and often jams the copier.

*bristol board 2ply curls the least and has the easiest time in the copier, but we also like the radiant white of cold press. leave time to settle and flatten after coating with medium and before your date with the color copier.

*never never never use a foam brush to apply anything again ever. leaves ridiculous bubbles and you waste many dollars in gold leaf.

*kinko's color copiers are better than the lamentable one at the library. and everyone leaves you alone. and you don't feel bad if you break it.

*don't ever think you can shit these out in a week (ever again).

all the pieces in the gold leaf album will be on view beginning saturday, december 4th at the blue ruin gallery in pittsburgh, pa. the fabulous tamara moore invited me to take part in their christmas show "unwrapped", and i thought if the world could use anything this season, it would be a little more naked and a lot more gold.

the kids are done with their finals where i work, and home for the holidays, which means i'm going to have alot more time on hand to concentrate on looking, thinking and writing. cerebral stretching. and the perfect way to end and begin the year.

(further note to self: on the bright side: the ones that got jammed in the copier make nifty presents)

the art of losing love, pt.2: seiichi furuya and christine gössler

To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of any person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.--Alfred Stieglitz

The other person is absent as a point of reference but present as an addressee. This strangely warped situation causes an unbearable presence: You are gone (which I lament); you are here (because I am turning to you).--Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse.

The more one blows on a fire trying to put it out, the larger the flame becomes.
One stops blowing. The cold blue of the flame changes to a soft red.
Why is that I tried to extinguish that warm, gentle fire?--Seiichi Furuya, 1996

i wanted to write something about love and madness. about what it is to love when the futility of its expression is felt omnipresently, and how one's ability to pour love into one so stricken mirrors the futility of love itself. the lover will always find a way to empty love from themselves and into the beloved, and the beloved will always take and take and take.

is it compassion for something we are powerless to affect that drives love into futile places?

is it a recognition of our collective vulnerability, a karmic reflection back to us that if we were to be so stricken, there would be someone there to love us unconditionally, to worry over us properly?

is it just an emotional impulse to try and fix something that is broken?

(or is it all of these things and more, and words further trying to articulate only mess it up further?)

the phrase stultiferous navis emerged in the middle ages when towns, confronted with a mad contingent, did not know what to make or do with them. were they senseless and harmless, non-contributing members of society, or were they "touched" by god, therefore to be feared and/or awed? hedging their bets, the townsmen would collect those so "touched" and load them onto boats that would leave their shores, unmanned. if god wanted them, then he would guide them to safe shores. the townspeople could view themselves as merciful, in that that they did not murder them directly.

later the mad were isolated, and put into the space of former leper colonies, on the tops of hills. where their screams could not be heard, so distanced from the populous.

their madness came to be viewed as a moral flaw, a willfulness of spirit that could be driven out by hard work and good examples. the institutions of tuke and pinel in the 18th and 19th centuries reflected back these beliefs.

now, in the 21st century, we think we know that so-called-madness is chemical. we scoff at the notion of humoral pathology, wandering wombs and inherent moral flaws. we know that neurons misfire, that parts of the brain don't receive enough serotonin, that we can mix together cocktails of things and with enough tinkering, nearly anyone can be made "well."

seiichi furuya was a man haunted by an emotionally deficient past. his younger brother was left permanently mentally ill due to a childhood fever, and institutionalized for life. one night he was pinned under the chassis of a car because of the drunk driving of his father. he moved away from his native japan and settled in austria, where he met the woman who would become his wife, christine gössler.

christine had been through emotionally trying times as well. the year prior, her betrothed had called off their engagement, and she had plunged into a suicidal depression. in an effort to extricate herself, she had slit both her wrists and her neck, the reasons behind which she did not tell furuya until years later.

two wounded and circumspect found one another and bouyed each other's spirits. furuya began photographing her immediately, she became the center of his eye, and of his "i."

if you consider the taking of photographs to be in a sense a matter of fixing time and space, then this work--the documenting of the life of one human being--is exceptionally thrilling...in facing her, in photographing her, and looking at her in photographs, i also see and discover "myself."--seiichi furuya, 1979

the above words were written for the catalog of a show furuya had exhibiting the images he had made of christine over the first year they had known one another. later, of this same writing, he added:

...rereading the translation again and again i feel uncomfortable, i find it somewhat difficult to believe that it is something i myself wrote. since my proficiency in german at that time did not allow me to write it properly, christine, herself the subject of the essay, corrected it for me, and this is probably the source of my irritation. or perhaps it is due to the eighteen years that have passed.

his tone is cynical, like someone who has been overextended and who has fulfilled far too many uncomfortable requests.

seiichi furuya and christine gössler would soon marry, and they would later have a child, komyo. throughout their seven years together, christine would plunge in and out of depressions and psychiatric institutions. and one sunday in october of 1985, she would jump to her death from the 9th floor of their apartment building in east berlin. furuya photographed her throughout, to the very end. and this faithful and macabre portrait making would become his artistic and philosophical project.

is death the manner through which others love?

i do not understand those for whom suicide and death is a great seducer...

what is it to be guided by a death-impulse (wish fulfillment) throughout one's life, and what is it to be one in close proximity to it?

in an essay to the exhibition catalog of a model wife, arthur ollman writes:

she occupies the center of most of the pictures. slowly and intermittently, over time, her intensity, seriousness, and depression emerge. the pictures, even the most pained, are shot intimately and at close range. furuya's distance to his subject is the physical distance of trusted family. this, then, becomes our viewing distance as well, and often it seems too close.

what if you believe that the greatest thing you can know--that can be known--is precisely what you cannot--that which is alien and final and unknowable--death itself?

how does one who loves someone else who is intoxicated--obsessed--with the idea of of their own death--how is that imbalance of drives and values ever reconciled? do we pity the one who dies or the one left with loss (the one who was always left with loss--even when in the presence of the loved one--loss is ever present)?

some time past noon on October 7, while she was supposed to be preparing lunch, christine disappeared. while the parade commemorating the thirty-sixth anniversary of the founding of east germany was being broadcast, and which i was taking photographs of while also watching after komyo, i had a bad premonition. i hurried down the hall to the bedroom facing the living room but did not find her. the door to the flat was half open.

running out of our fourth floor flat, i immediately headed for the ninth floor. as i was running up the stairs i heard a dull thud. it sounded like a bag of cement hitting the ground.

the ninth floor was inaccessible from outside, but there was a connecting passageway which enabled one to come and go between the neighboring residences...one time, muttering to herself, and perhaps making an appeal to me in a moment of crisis, she had said, "if you jumped from here, you'd definitely die, wouldn't you?" I couldn't help but recall that scene, and the sound I had just heard a moment before, when i discovered a familiar pair of rubber sandals at the flung open window.

"ko-chan. mama ist tot."

"papa, has du mama gettet?"

"ja."

there is no way of knowing whether komyo remember that conversation. to this day i have regretting saying, "i killed her."--christine furuya-gössler mmoires, 1978-1985

...one after the other the images--one of the day we flew to japan; of our wedding ceremony in izu; of her ecstatically smiling face when she drew the best fortune at izumotaisha shrine--appear and disappear. as i rapidly retrace the past, my memory becomes confused and fatigued and starting to blame myself, i gradually return to myself...by blaming myself i can find absolution. my awareness of my need to save myself probably comes from this idea.

i first came to seiichi furuya through his most famous image, the contact sheet that shows his wife's suicide, or more precisely, shows him showing us his wife's suicide. and then coming to him through all the questions which follow such a fantastically passive event. is it mediation? astonishment? a need to rely on something normal or everyday in order to understand, or assimilate, something unfathomable and out of time? stop time in order to stop life from happening at that very moment?

and then there is this question: what is he trying to get at in exhibiting these final contact sheets? in mediating that moment amongst the others, mixing frames, choosing one version over another--what does an educated eye do when it looks at a contact sheet if not the most automatic of all things: it edits.

i have been reluctant to post on this photographer since i first knew i wanted to write about him. because to write is to reflect, to know yourself through that which you ingest and infer, and the issues at hand in furuya's pscyho-biography and his philosophical boundary conditions are delicate and emotional ones. it is not that his photographs are the most artfully seen, or those most representative of an era's way of seeing. it is that his photographs are both an image of a wound and its excision, that they are a compuslive need to live with and to exorcise the presence of something the photographer does not understand, cannot ultimately help to cure and is utterly terrified of living without. what would occur were furuya to burn his hundreds of pictures of christine, his thousands of negatives? would he feel release or would it be unrecoverable loss? what does it mean to tie your identity as an artist to a memento mori project on your dead wife? what if all you have to hold on to memory and feeling is your connection to this loss, this absence and lack, and to divest yourself of it is a kind of personal heresey?

what i find myself most drawn to in my investigation of love, loss, japanese photographers and eastern aesthetics in general is that the work often asks more questions than it answers. that there are fewer initial biases or prejudices to confirm, and that you as the viewer are often in the same uncomfortable, unknowable space as the photographer, and further: that there are no apologies tendered for the questions which fall in empty air, or the discomfort felt between the book and your hands, or the image on the gallery wall and the place between you and it.

the art of losing love, pt.1 : words on masahisa fukase

it must be difficult to live with a photographer.

first, you must think you're eternally being spied upon, trying to be caught unawares, that an eye waiting to catch the true-true-you is always present, and always watching. it is only later that you realize that it isn't your essence that the photographer is trying to capture and distill truth from, it's theirs. that each image pointed at you is really just a sublimated view of themselves, and that what they project when they point and click in your general direction is really just a reflection back of self, sometimes twisted and sometimes upside-down.

so it's a perverse kind of attention: they look at you to get a better look at themselves. didn't you know that an essential piece of the camera is the mirror installed inside the casing?

are all photographs made by photographers of those they love just a kind of extended visual autobiography? how much does our conception of the world hinge on how we love? does the dynamic of our chosen relationship(s) begin to define our aesthetic, at least in relation to how we visualize it? and how do we choose partners? do we choose one that keeps us in check by having a world view that complements (does not mean that it is the same as ours) our own? do we choose one that will tear ours down, or constantly challenge it? or do we choose one that we can only grasp for a little while, knowing that love and life (and photography, too) are ephemeral and fleeting?

i've been thinking about photographers in love, and the photographs they make while in that state. and also its shadow-twin: same photographer, making something out of a place of loss from that love. what is it to make a memory out of loss? to distill the precise ache of mourning? in photographs that become about loss—did the losing already happen before the photo? did it happen in the course of it? is the photo then a document of loss? are these then the most documentary of all documentary images?

masahisa fukase's best known work was made while reeling from loss of love. after thirteen years of marriage, his wife yoko left him. while on a train returning to his hometown of hokkaido, perhaps feeling unlucky and ominous, fukase got off at stops and began to photograph something which in his culture and in others represents inauspicious feeling: ravens. he became obsessed with them, with their darkness and lonlieness. his photographs capture them midflight; crouched in trees at dusk with glowing eyes; and singularly and spectacularly depressingly dead, in cold deep snow. in the forward to the book published of this work, akira hasegawa writes, "masahisa fukase's work can be deemed to have reached its supreme height; it can also be said to have fallen to its greatest depth. the solitude revealed in this collection of images is sometimes so painful that we want to avert our eyes from it."

i have posted a few images of this body of work in other posts, and there are others available in other places, but below are a few images taken of what was his primary subject before the ravens, what can be said led directly to his more famous work of ravens: pictures of his wife yoko:

sarobetsu, hokkaido, 1971

new york, 1974

mastsubara apartment, 1968

the body of photographs i've seen of yoko show a multiplicity of moods, filled with both surface and subverted meaning. there are playful, joyous photographs, such as the first one above; sardonic commentary concerning perception, as in the second (the photo shows yoko dressed in formal kimono, kneeling beneath photographs of herself at the opening of john szarkowski's curated show at MOMA in 1974 of new japanese photography, totally and utterly ignored by the hoi polloi coming to mingle around images made of her by her husband, whom the show, in part, is celebrating); and still there are those posed, mastubara apartment, which for all its premeditation, probably says more about power and projection than even fukase could have imagined when composing it.

yoko has said of that time that it was punctuated by, "suffocating dullness, interspersed by violent and near suicidal flashes of excitement." in a move meant to author more control over her own life, she left him in 1976. fukase spiraled into a profound depression, made the work with the ravens over a period of years, remarried, divorces, and then in the summer of 1992, when descending a staircase at a bar he frequented, he fell. the fall was severe and caused considerable brain damage, and fukase lives the next and the rest of his continued days in an institution, where he has no sense of photography, photographic history, or his place in it. yoko, now remarried, visits him twice a month. she has said, "with a camera in front of his eye, he could see, not without. he remains a part of my identity, that's why i still visit him."

when i read about fukase's fate last week i was stymied. struck with the realization that a photographer with such clear, articulated and felt vision was prematurely taken, and that whatever else he might have had to say was taken away not only from himself but the rest of the world to experience through him; then the aftershock that it is not the finality of death that has taken that away, but the murkier waters of the mind which has receded his thoughts and inclinations from both himself and anyone else. fukase has no clue who the fukase was before that made those photographs, or why, or what can be gained in the making. he has no care that an entire lifetime happened before he is where he is now; and further, given how tortured he was over the loss of yoko (even despite the remarriage he reportedly never stopped mourning her), the now obliviated mind might be a kind of gift, a reprieve from too much knowing, too much sight.

less talk, more looking

the manner i've been looking, lately. and what i've been looking at.

birdholes, chattanooga, tennessee

century plant, backyard, savannah, georgia

the house next door used to be a strip club, savannah, georgia

dog person pic, atlanta, georgia

cat person pic (or, the cat that loves me who will not go away), savannah, georgia

i'd like to go back and tea stain some of these, and that's something i haven't engaged in in a long while, anyway. it always seems like so much more of an overwrought process in my mind before i just actually go in and do it. come to think of it, many things are like that: taking photos, reading/writing for a thesis, having a hard conversation, making a meal. is growth really just learning to accomodate a will-to-action?

i took all of the above over labor day weekend, which was spent in part in three places: here, atlanta and chattanooga, tennessee. some i did are in color; i haven't posted any of those yet. staring at so much black and white work of late, color has begun to startle me in an unsettling way.

and i entered two pieces in the atlanta photography group's juried show only in 2004, juried by Anna Walker Skillman, the owner of the jackson fine art gallery in atlanta, georgia. it is my favorite photographic space in the city: it is a tad more intimate than traditional gallery spaces--maybe this has something to do with its being a little cottage house situated on a quiet neighborhood street that you could easily imagine yourself living in. quiet and happy and lush with green all around. aside from that, she shows kick ass work. it was where i first encountered masao yamamoto's work, and there's currently a sally mann exhibit showing. she stages thoughtful shows, and you get the feeling she only puts on the walls things she cares about. i could (and probably am) be entirely projecting that sense, but for what it's worth, that's the sense when you're there and when you return for a new show.

and reading. and reading. more posts to come about musings on more japanese photographers. one recurring theme that visited me today were these photographic elegies that seem to be composed about the relationships of wives and artists. masahisa fukase and yoko fukase, and their split that gave birth to his most known work the solitude of ravens; nobuyoshi araki and his wife (also named) yoko, pictures including their honeymoon, life together and her death; and then the strange strange work of seiichi furuya, who emigrated to graz with his wife christine gossler. i remember seeing his work in chicago, on a tour of the revco collection. the photos are so memorable because they horrifingly show the photographer--step by step--returning home one afternoon to finding an open window, with her slippers carefully placed beneath the sill. as you go with him to the window to look out, he shows you her very dead form on the pavement below, as he mediates his responses and actions through the camera. the pictures--or maybe, more precisely, the act of having not only lived the event but photographing it as one lived it--made me wonder if this was a kind of emotional photojournalism. what else could it be? or could explain the compulsion to photograph such a moment--when that moment is you, your wife, your loss, right now? i still haven't waded through my thoughts on his images, and will sit down with some of them tonight.

and a big beaming thank you to those who've sent the assorted emails and comments i've been receiving regarding this site and my thoughts. it is astonishing to me that anyone wants to read what i'm processing in my head concerning photography and art, and gratifying to hear words and experiences and encouragement from those i've never met or had a conversation with. it's wonderful that writing here becomes its own kind of conversation, and i like how it's pushing me to think more fully about what i encounter, look at and read. i strive to be engaged in a full way, and i've found that writing here has been vastly fulfilling in that regard.

the philosopher and the trickster: daido moriyama and nobuyoshi araki

moriyama: ...but don't you think that using a flash in the American fashion is also exciting?

araki: oh yes. using a massive flash, smoking a big cigar and living it up! a kind of brutality--your pictures are violent in that sense, aren't they? don't you think that it is necessary to have a sense of brutality in photography?

moriyama: yes. envy, possessiveness, and jealousy, followed by violence which is engendered by these emotions.

araki: scary...but this is, i believe, what photography is.

(from an interview moderated by akihito yasumi, shinjuku, tokyo, july 28, 2003)

i've been researching quite alot on two seminal figures of modern japanese photography, daido moriyama and nobuyoshi araki. and i've been paralyzed in thoughts of writing about them here, because as i read and look and read some more, i'm struck with a familiar student's lament: the more i know, the less i know.

at first i thought the two could not be more different and polarized in their approaches to photogrpahy and responses to the world within and around them. and i had prematurely written off araki as a borderline pornographer, which he still is sometimes, but he's also much more than that.

as i read first about moriyama, and then coming across araki's name here and there in that research, i wondered how the two were connected. they are not of the same photographic generation, per se; perhaps solely divided by how old they were while they experienced the end of wwii. moriyama's photographs consistently evoke dark, struggling identity-in-the-making. they are grainy, full of contrast, and seem to be about the eternal underside of things. araki's photos, in contrast, seem to be puerile, joyous reaction against such moribund thoughts, and there is a playfulness evident throughout that suggests a lightness of heart that moriyama lacks. not that either is better or worse for the comparison, but that they are just...different.

daido moriyama, fence, yokoto, japan, 1969

nobuyoshi araki

moriyama's childhood memories are filled with visions of green jeeps from which chocolate and gum would be ejected into the air by passing GI's; the smells of an abandoned rubber plant, to which he would clamber into alone and considered his thinking spot; and the "weary perversity" of the basetown that sat on the edge of his home, in which he would explore and form his own opinions about himself, japanese identity and the occupying army. his book memories of a stray dog includes not only his photos that he made when he returned as an adult to the (now abandoned) base towns of his youth, but wonderfully articulate and unforced writing about memory, photography and a desire to persist in the present--both through lived experience and through the language of photography.

people steadily lose the landscapes they have accumulated. it's not likely that anyone can faithfully recall how scenes appeared ten or twenty years ago... i think people continue to live in the present because we forget most every little thing. the remembrances that sneak up on a tired soul may sometimes stir us, but there is no tomorrow in that... where in the world did the era beyond my memories and the people who lived in it disappear to? after time, which we can actually only see now in historical documents, there are memories we carry. after our time, what memories will be carried forth by the people who follow?
--memories of a stray dog

as i have been absorbing his words and his work, i find myself relegated to the most facile means at trying to breach cross-cultural understanding: compare and contrast. but still, one has to begin somewhere. how different is moriyama's photographic project than such is conceived of by western minds! and not just in this body of work, not merely in this book or any other of his i may procure and read, but his life project, his set of philosophical questions he could no sooner undo or unask than he could change his dna. not to say that photographers in the west don't have their own questions, but sometimes the questions are ignored, or heard/answered wrong, or that one gets distracted by other aspects of the art world.

for example: one is taught by practicing artists and in academia that it is extremely desirable to have a "project." that you will, in fact, have many of them, and that they should be somehow connected. lauren greenfield's girl culture; larry clark's tulsa up through kids; joel sternfeld's on this site, to mention a few that are well known. all of these works are polished and thought through, but where they fail is that that they are often not felt through and throughout. they become exercises, they become the finishing of a "project." they are not chiefly concerned with discovery, but about confirming a bias or a prejudice, whether visual, cultural, psychological or all three at once. moriyama's project is about exploring the gap between seeing and feeling, about a semantic divide that is both verbal and non-verbal. his is an investigation of self, but not for the reasons of western autobiography nor does it use its methodology. his questions and answers (and then the new questions that get asked in the face of those answers) are not of one book or project, but all of them: those made in the past, those being made now, in the present, and the ones that have yet to be asked, yet to be made.

i can't help but think of rilke, and think it incredibly appropriate to apply to moriyama:

...have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. don't search for the answers, which could not be given you now, because you would not be able to live them. and the point is, live everything. live the questions now. perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without ever noticing it, live your way into the answer...

his photographs ask over and over again: who am i in relation to this event, or this person? how is this moment unlike any other i have ever known, or will ever know? what else exists outside this view, the frame i may select, the things i am not photographing? can a photograph ever pretend to know any of this? can i?

moriyama's influences include shomei tomatsu, william klein, niépce, wegee, warhol, nakaji yasui and novelist osamu dazai. from my point-of-view, his inky blacks and grain remind me of bill brandt's documentary work; his manic shooting reminds me of winogrand (with the important exception being that moriyama sees deeply into the ingredients of things, and winogrand sports in the surfaces); his need to mediate experiences through the camera reminds me of warhol (who spent the last years of his life interacting with people via his tape recorder or camera, but not directly). in one of the better reviews of his work i've come across, leo rubinfien writing in art in america said that:

moriyama's best work everywhere implies a trauma that must have occurred just outside the limit of our vision, just before we get to the scene, or just beyond the reach of our memory. we feel that what we are getting now is its residual radiation.

so how are these two, daido moriyama and nobuyoshi araki, even remotely related? one is full of pensive thought and writing, the other full of laughable soundbites. one sees the world in a series of caught moments, another carefully stages his. one predominately in black-and-white, the other predominately in color. moriyama's photographs in moments feel full of existential dread, while araki's are full of...what? existential excess? perhaps one of the easiest ways in would be to examine a subject both of them have trafficked in: the nude.

araki first became aware of moriyama's work through a short-lived magazine project called provoke. the group's last issue showcased moriyama's work, and was published in 1970. araki, who was working uninspired at an advertising agency at the time, saw moriyama's nudes and felt jealousy.

at the time, i was also thinking "photographey=eros" and that images which did not embrace the erotic were not qualified to be photos. moreover, i had the idea that photography was unavoidably associated with the concept of death, therefore, and eros which did not contain aspects of thanatos could not be the photographic expression of eros. that photo of moriyama's seemed to represent exactly what i was feeling.
--interview moderated by akihito yasumi, 2003

moriyama's nudes were many things at once: careful, respectful, moody, intimate and distant simultaneously. while araki has become famous for his erotic photos, they look nothing like moriyama's and yet it seems for that difference in thought and approach were all the more fascinating to araki.

on the bed I, daido moriyama, tokyo, 1969.

araki later questioned moriyama as to why his nudes were either blurred or did not show the face, claiming that a nude photo of a woman should always show her face. moriyama replied that it had something to do with a "samurai's tenderness," meaning that he did not intend to brag about romantic conquests. was it a chide to a younger colleague, then, a judgement of what araki's photos of the same genre seemed to be saying?

if it was, it hardly needed to be said, because araki is a living, breathing extroverted oedipal urge extroidinare. he says everything himself, playfully, before you can come out and accuse him with knives in your voice. his ridiculous exuberance takes all the meanness from you:

I've been taking photographs since I came into this world. I was no sooner out of my mother's womb, than I turned around and photographed her sex! Photography is the first thing I shall do after my reincarnation!

and, on the subject of ropes (for which he is famed):

Basically, I have never been interested in tying up the body of a model. What I was aiming at was the female heart. That was what I wanted to lay in chains. In the course of time, if I can put it this way, the models have tied themselves up, have bound themselves to me ... I work using my entire bodily presence, I reproduce in my photos the space and the time between my models and myself ... The camera is a kind of seismograph here...

rope impressions, nobuyoshi araki

when i first encountered araki i rolled my eyes. i did not think that there was anything beyond his surface voyeurism, and at best i found myself caught between amusement and feminist outrage. but then i questioned: what is it that offends me about his work? is it the subject matter? or is it the fact that it is so commercially successful? or, beyond that, is it that araki appears to have no questions at all?

I have nothing to say. There's no particular message in my photos. The messages come from my subjects, men or women. The subjects will convey what there is to say. I have things to photograph, so I've nothing to express. Right now, I'm showing my enjoyment of life rather than the sadness of death. Some people I know say that life is sad. But today I think the opposite. Death is sadder.
--from an interview with jérôme sans .

from his own mouth. but can he trust what even he himself says?

it may be hard to believe it to look at his photos, but araki was married. to a woman who became his favorite and most studied model. he made a book of photographs of their honeymoon together, which is now shown alongside with the pictures of her illness and death (yoko died in 1990 of cancer, at 42). if araki has questions to answer, or questions he is avoiding, it is resoundingly in these photographs:

from a sentimental journey, taken on araki's honeymoon

yoko in the bath

in sharp contrast to the thousands of other photographs of women araki has taken, the study he made of his wife over the course of their relationship says something much more than can be carefully arranged with ropes, props, leering and provocation. it is a photographic conversation between two people, and it is a document of feeling and relation to feeling. and, more than that perhaps: the failure to completely realize love in a marriage. or of the failure of photography to communicate either love or lack of love. araki has said of this work and of his wife:

Maybe I only had a relationship with her as a photographer, not as a partner. If I hadn't documented her death, both the description of my state of mind and my declaration of love would have been incomplete. I found consolation in unmasking lust and loss, by staging a bitter confrontation between symbols. After Yoko's death, I didn't want to photograph anything but life - honestly. Yet every time I pressed the button, I ended up close to death, because to photograph is to stop time. I want to tell you something, listen closely: photography is murder.

quite different from barthes' assertion that death is imminent in photography--araki says that photography is death itself, and that the act of photographing is to cut oneself off from life... or at l