#15 On Being a "Guide"
Greetings from a city enjoying a warm, early spring. The weather has been lovely lately, but I’m sort of old-fashioned in that I like winter weather in February, temperate air in spring, and so on. I never complain about the heat in the summer but I can be hot-headed when temperatures unseasonably peak in early May. In March, I’d rather be wearing a down jacket than a T-shirt, because there is meteorological coherence in that. Spring and autumn, those wonderful seasons of metamorphosis and transition, are getting shorter all the time.
It has been a good winter. I did quite a bit of darkroom printing and organizing narratives for projects. I love how some of my ideas are coming together. I’ve been walking a lot, mostly with the dog, but have gotten on the bike for some longer-range cycling. I’ve been lately obsessed with locating shapes and shadows in generic building facades. There has been a tremendous amount of gentrification in the city as Kyoto transitioned ten years ago into a tourist boomtown around the same time that smartphone technology made traveling so much easier. Much of the city’s architecture has been replaced with hotels, convenience stores, parking lots, and faux-kitschy shops piggybacking on the city’s millennia of history. I am not an archivist by any stretch, but I have found searching out genuine artifacts of attractive decay have given me something to look for on my peregrinations.
This has been an important outlet for me, as I remain uninspired photographing random scenes in Kyoto because of the ubiquity of folks wearing masks and staring at phones. I don’t like masks in images because they suggest the pandemic, which I hope will conclusively end someday so that this era might be an aberration. And people looking at phones are disengaged with their environments. Meanwhile, scouring walls, pavements and backgrounds for geometric patterns in substance or shadow cause me to be in a higher frequency with my external world. These prosaic scenes are easy to overlook because of their sundry aspect, and I ignored all but the most conspicuous backgrounds for most of my life. Nowadays, I’m learning myself to see where once I was blind, and it has made everyday living more interesting. I never knew I could find such enthusiasm for squares and rectangles and Rothkoish tri-color patterns, but I guess I’ve come a fair ways from the doldrums of High School geometry.
British Journal of Photography: British Journal of Photography has an “on location” section in its print issues that focuses on photography-related particulars of a city (past stories have been on Bristol, Venice, and Lisbon, among others). The purpose of the article is to create something of a “guide” to the photography community beyond what you’d hope to find in any sort of internet search. I was both flattered and humbled to be offered the assignment.
Arguably, the most important photo-related thing about Kyoto is the annual KYOTOGRAPHIE festival. The month-long springtime festival has around sixteen main venues with dozens of cafes, galleries, bars, and various businesses holding satellite exhibitions. It’s a wonderful thing getting on a bicycle and riding around the city visiting the different installations, which in years’ past have included zen temples, the kitchen quarters of Nijo Castle, and the redundant printing press factory of Kyoto’s main newspaper. If you’re in Kyoto from mid-April through mid-May you really must partake.
While Kyoto has arguably the best photography festival in the country, it is a comparatively small city to Tokyo and does not have as many galleries and bookshops as would a metropolis. However, there was more than enough else to feature, including Purple Gallery (run by publishers Akaaka and Seigensha), Gallery Main (an inspired community-run gallery that also has a publicly shared darkroom), Benrido (the world’s last atelier capable of full-color collotype printing), Villa Kujoyama (the French arts residency program), RPS Paperoles (the bookmaking workshop/gallery space run by Yumi Goto), and the shops Books and Things and HoHoHoZa (the former specializing in out-of-print collectibles and a number of international publications, the latter focused on niche Japanese movements and trends). I was able to put some of my photographs in there as well for a section advising how to photograph Kyoto by season, as the light indeed has elemental distinctions.
The initial draft of the introductory essay I sent to the editors had me conjecturing on the first camera to be imported into Japan in 1848, imagining a curious customs agent handling this newfangled machine, daydreaming about what he might do with the equipment in faraway Kyoto, this mythical city in the Japanese imagination (before mass communication and mass transit everything was more mythical because nearly everything for everyone could only be fantasized). The editors preferred I rewrite it with a personal angle— this was a challenge at first: what feature of my life should I focus on since I’ve been living here for more than ten years? Then it occurred to me to take something of the same wonder as my over-awed hypothetical customs agent, and write about the first time I’d ever heard of Kyoto, which was in a bar in Santa Barbara, California, in the late 1990s. The writer, Laird Koenig—who would go on to be sort of a mentor to me, encouraging my attempts at long-form writing in my early and mid-20s— had enjoyed a well-traveled, fruitful life with many a quality anecdote, and his eyes would particularly light up whenever he spoke of Kyoto. I loved his stories and the place took a hold on my imagination. At the time I had absolutely no idea that this emerging fantasy would one day become an everyday reality, one so firmly established that I should be able to write a guide for British Journal of Photography. But that’s life for you. Nothing is certain and everything is possible.
Up Photography Interview: I recently answered the interview questions from the photography collective, UP. No matter who they interview, it’s the same “just the facts, ma’am” template of who, what, when, where, and why (I think they could additionally ask “how?” as everyone has different approaches to photography, but that could lead to gear talk or already hashed-out digital vs. analog debates; on the other hand, “how” could lead to questions of how you see, how you approach, how you conceptualize, how you fell in love with this medium…) My responses are here.
News on The Sniper Paused: Recently there was a review of my photo book The Sniper Paused So He Could Wipe His Brow published at F-Stop Magazine. And the project was featured in the Berlin online magazine Safelight Paper. There remain copies available with my publishers, The M Editions and IBASHO Gallery.
What I’m reading: I’ve made it a goal to read more books this year, especially fiction. Lately I reread J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Albert Camus’ The Stranger (which resulted in me having The Cure’s controversial song earwormed in my in-between thought space for some days). Rereading books is so good for better story retention and understanding. However, the best book I’ve read thus far was something I had never heard of before it was given to me by my brother-in-law, Colin: Claire Oshetsky’s Chouette.
Chouette is a very strange novel with an unusual premise: a woman gives birth to an owl-baby. Literally. The book begins with conception:
“I dream I’m making tender love with an owl. The next morning I see talon marks across my chest that trace the path of my owl-lover’s embrace. Two weeks later I learn that I’m pregnant. You may wonder: how could such a thing come to pass between woman and owl? I, too, am astounded, because my owl-lover was a woman.”
I have to admit that at first I was slightly put off by the book’s concept. Magical realism can be a hard sell for my tastes. But the beauty of the novel and its genius is that the story of raising an owl-baby (Chouette) is emblematic of all the wonder and horror of being a parent. Anyone might enjoy the story— the writing is terrific in its musicality— but the story will be particularly poignant for those who have expelled a considerable amount of life force raising a child. The mother of the story, Tiny, loves her baby unconditionally even though motherhood irrevocably changes her life. She no longer plays in a string quartet, sees friends, and her husband, disgusted by the spectacle of an owl-baby reacts by working longer hours and sleeping alone in a room upstairs from the garage. Tiny is isolated not just from her old communities and lifestyle but denuded of her personhood. Her entire raison d'etre becomes protecting Chouette from everyone who thinks she’s a freak, especially her husband, who when he finally accepts responsibility for being a father cannot accept Chouette for who she is, but will try any kind of experimental therapy on her, even if it destroys her personality, and especially if it makes his child “normal.” Meanwhile, Tiny loves Chouette for what she is naturally:
“You’re coming running to me, owl-baby. You’re running to your mother, to show me your prize. You want me to be proud. And how can a mother not be proud of a child who wants to show her mother something? How your eyes sparkle! How happy you are! And so I moderate my first response. I make a spot decision to let you play with the thing in your mouth rather than take it away. The deed is done, after all. That thing in your mouth looks relatively dead, and its fur, even in death, looks clean and brushed. It’s not a dirty worm-infested creature, as I’d feared. It was probably a gerbil in life, or a hamster, escaped from its hutch. A pet of some kind. I feel pride as you begin to feed.”
Raising an owl-baby is many exponential degrees more complicated than nurturing a normal, healthy boy, but nonetheless, parenting is a challenge no matter your circumstances, which is why the book is resonating with so many readers. Are we as parents too strict? Too generous? Will my rationing of my son’s Minecraft usage make him more liable to be addicted to screens when he will need to rely on his own self-discipline of what is healthy and what isn’t? Is it okay if we watch a movie instead of go hiking? Am I being too nice letting him indulge in candy and not forcing more vegetables upon him? Should I be working on his English literacy more often even though both of us are tired at the end of the day and want to relax? I push him to draw daily because I believe in his talent, but am I inadvertently turning his endeavor into a chore?
So much of parenting is negotiation, self-doubt, and terror that you’re doing everything wrong and your child will lack the skills to thrive as an adult. A child, especially a young one, requires so much energy, love, and attention that making such a gargantuan effort to serve his or her needs can mean an abnegation of self. But the most incredible trick in nature is that love makes this effort not only possible but extraordinarily meaningful. Chouette is a beautiful novel about unconditional love, about accepting your child for who he or she is, and the ambivalence you feel when that child reaches independence: you are so glad for the child coming into his own, but it’s bittersweet because you miss being this vital presence in his world. Such changes are mostly gradual until you’ve noticed that the change has been definitive. Fortunately, I’m still in the middle of this journey and am reminded once again to take nothing for granted.