Beginnings

And so we go...

View from our darkroom studio, Kyoto, August, 2020

Friends,

I hope this finds you in a good, safe place. This has been an extraordinarily strange year, one most of us likely never conceived we would live through. Before I talk about what I’ve been working on myself, I would like to express my hope that you are all as healthy as can be, in body, mind, and spirit, and that the pandemic has not taken away from you loved ones or your livelihood. The American custom of Thanksgiving passed recently and it catalyzed some introspective consideration regarding the qualities in life I am thankful for, namely good health, well-being, family, friendships, and some inspiration. It’s very easy to take for granted what is always there nourishing you.

Personally, this has been a very strange year, very yin/yang, setbacks and ambitions, love and rage. The year began with Ariko and I having a duo show with our gallery in Antwerp, seeing friends in Europe, and preparing for a productive year when the virus interrupted many of our plans. I’ve been more fortunate than many to fall back on savings and not worry too much about getting sick and such. There have been two distinct seasons for me in 2020, one involving parenthood, the other in darkroom enterprises. Because this letter is sort of a surrogate for getting back in touch with some of you I haven’t spoken with in some length of time, I’ll touch on both periods.

In March, Japan shut down its schools and for the next three months I became a full-time father, as Ariko had her hands full taking care of the family restaurant. At first, a little bit overwhelmed at keeping a five-year-old satisfied every day, the spring turned out to be one of my favorite seasons. Tennbo and I built these elaborate tableaux of aquariums, zoos, bowling alleys, museums and towns utilizing drawings, blocks, Duplo, Kapla, and action figures. We read all of the Dr. Seuss catalog many times over, and I introduced him to The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes. He discovered GarageBand and for a while had a thing about making beats. I gave him his first camera, an old digital FujiFilm from ten years ago that I’d never used. I taught him how to ride a bicycle. We got a dog, a Kai Ken named Monk (after Thelonious). Long walks and picnics and socially distanced zoo excursions. We watched many old movies— lots of silent films by Chaplin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd, the core Marx Brothers pictures like Monkey Business, the majority of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone episodes, as well as Kubrick’s 2001 and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Like most little boys, Tennbo has a thing for aliens. Until the Covid shutdown he never enjoyed drawing, being too perfectionist. He was also a very young kid so of course his drawing of an elephant does not look like the elephant in photographs. But we started sketching aliens together and this was the perfect inspiration to get him drawing, because there really is no consensus on what aliens are supposed to look like. I’m laughably untalented at drawing, so perhaps Tennbo felt comfortable composing extraterrestrial life with me.

I’m his father, so I’m naturally biased, but I loved his drawings and how he described them to me. I remember reading in Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking how Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne kept a box of paper scraps recording their daughter’s childhood remarks, misspoken charms like calling butterflies “fly-butters.” It reminded me that it would be well worth recording Tennbo’s own peculiar speech patterns (despite dozens, if not hundreds of corrections, when Tennbo asks for the time he still asks, “What o’clock is it?”). I learned to read around his age, but was struggling to get him interested in the alphabet (his attention often wandered with Dr. Seuss, the iPad, and Scrabble letter tiles). So I dusted off my 1937 Remington typewriter and asked him to describe the narrative of his drawings, which I typed out on the origami paper that he used for sketching. (The old typewriter, with its gunshot keystrokes and obsolescent curiousness was a great tool for introducing him to the QWERTY keyboard, something he takes for granted when impatiently clamoring for something to watch on my computer). I’d lay out five or ten drawings and he would choose one to conjure a story from. He’d start talking and I’d start slapping keys. Sometimes his descriptions for the drawings would be matter-of-fact:

On the other hand, while some of his drawings attempted complexity, his summary could be almost haiku-like beautiful:

He probably did about sixty of these “Alien Stories” (our name for the project) and it is wonderful to take them out and reread them. Unlike video or even audio recordings, to read the unfettered speech patterns and descriptions of a five-year-old channeling his imagination is a wonderful thing. (I actually wrote an essay about this time with my son for the Japanese magazine Neutral Colors to be published early next year. If you’d like to read the essay in English feel free to contact me directly and I’ll send it along.)

In mid-June Tennbo returned to school and I regained some time for myself. Strangely, in spite of being such a terrifying, life-altering season rife with uncertainty I sometimes feel acute nostalgia for the spring. I hope that I can have some kind of long-term creative periods with my son again, though I’d prefer next time it’s under our own volition and not due to extenuating environmental dangers.

With my son back in school most days since early summer I have been able to devote myself to my work. As most of you know I’m a photographer, but that I’m also something of a 20th-century man, in that the most important aspect of my work is color darkroom printing. Since I began working in the darkroom in 2013, I have gone from learning how to properly dodge and burn to active experimentation. I want to make the photograph great, of course, but often there’s a voice in my head saying, “Yes, that’s good, but what if we try this!” The experiments occasionally fail, but sometimes they can produce an altogether strange vision.

I’m often asked why I shoot film when digital is so much more affordable and convenient. It’s a valid question— while digital looks great and there are many wonderful photographs being made digitally today, film has become so expensive nowadays that between cartridge rolls and lab development, it’s nearly $1 every time I snap the shutter. The reason I persist with Old World technology rather than evolve is because of the darkroom. I know many will disagree but I believe the kinds of experimentation I do while darkroom printing are more mimicked rather than replicated with digital editing software. The darkroom is so important to my aesthetic that I would almost describe myself as a printer rather than a photographer, especially when I consider time spent printing vs. time spent photographing over the past five years. Essentially, I print therefore I am.

I’ll often go through my old contact sheets shot over the past fifteen years looking for patterns. Perhaps because my background is in cinema and literature—both in appreciation and in attempted projects— I believe narrative is essential to photography. And perhaps because I’m a lifelong reader, I think the most ideal fruition of a project is the photo book (exhibition shows are wonderful too, especially when curated with creative atmosphere and utilizing space to express attitude, but a book outlives its author and persists in its influence). Photo books are an interesting species of art. Mostly they are narratives composed solely with images with little or no text, akin to something like a silent film. Perhaps I’m giving away my upbringing in Southern California, but because images represent the language of storytelling, I attempt to craft a project’s story with a vibe.

But what do I mean by this? A vibe can be manifested in color schemes, subject matter, time and place, feeling. I’m mostly a street photographer, which is a very general description of a person who takes pictures of the world around him. In a sense we’re all street photographers, whether we label ourselves thus or not. It’s a world of amateurs, of attempting to make sense of the world around us with pictures— pictures of our neighborhood, pictures of trips abroad, pictures of our everyday existence, sometimes extraordinary, often mundane. In the process of taking these pictures, some of us become obsessive about photography, wandering for hours on tired feet much like the insatiable hunter might in the forest, searching for unique environmental patterns, human comedy, characters and hustlers, and all of it with preferred beautiful, measured light.

I have tens of thousands of photographs and hundreds of contact sheets in my archives. When I am not sure how to move forward I will comb through these pictures, looking for patterns that might help sequence a feeling in physical book form. It is difficult to explicate this process, it is so much more intuitive than intelligent for me. My first book, Sunlanders, was composed thus: I knew how I wanted to assemble the book, but did not know exactly why it should be this way. The one principle that guided me in editing the layout was that it had to have a sense of timelessness. If anything, the book might feel late Showa (1970s-era Japan), but importantly it would suggest not Japan, but a dream about Japan. Sounds strange, right? And not particularly interesting perhaps. Thus, I had to compensate for this quite general aim by making sure the photographs fit this aspirational aesthetic.

Anyways, to do this I consciously edited out and cut any corporate or technological references to our contemporary era, especially smartphones. Regarding the subjects in the book, many of them are masked or disembodied, faces are shadowed, eyes are closed or sometimes it appears people have no eyes at all. Almost like when a person is sleeping, they are there, they take up space, but they are not present. Japan is famed for its uniform society— by uniform, not only do I mean homogenous, but that its costumes are so famous they have nearly archetypes of their own—kimonos, geisha, salarymen, sumo wrestlers, sailor-suit students. They intrigue the visualist in us. What I hoped to do was drain these archetypes of their personality, so that all that was left were the ghosts of their symbolism. I’m not sure if that makes sense, but as I mentioned before, this process was pure feeling and that I was actually only able to understand and better explain my intentions once the book was published. The assemblage of the photographs and the sequencing of them to make a narrative with atmosphere was instinctual. A method with a hunch is still a method.

I guess what I’m trying to say is you need to trust your imagination. Your process as a thinker, as a human being, as a composer of stories really is a matter of absolute personal expression. We are composites of all the life experiences we ever had, childhood and teenage and youth and middle age and autumn years, the books and films and music and paintings and places and journeys and loves and losses and adulations and addictions, tens of thousands of days, millions of thoughts, several dozen landmark life-changing moments, all of it compressed together to make us this individual in the present moment. If you are a photographer your personhood is arguably made manifest in your pictures. Breaking the code to discover the patterns that reveal a wordless narrative is the most challenging and the most reward you will have as an artist.

I recently watched a documentary on John Szarkowski, the legendary curator of photography for New York’s MOMA in the 1970s (over thirty years there he helped establish Arbus, Winogrand, Moriyama, Eggleston and many others). Szarkowski said, “In real art you never know what the real answer is. You have to work toward it and finally when you can’t go any further you think, that must be the answer.” That reminded me of what my writing mentor, Laird Koenig, told me in my early twenties, “A novel is never finished, only abandoned.” Really, they’re both right: your work, your concept of what you do is always evolving and you approach and retreat until finally it feels right. And then you have to let go, put it out, and move on.

In the next newsletter I’ll talk more in depth about some projects that I’ve worked on this summer. Forgive me, but I want to take this slow, revealing a little here, a little there.

Before I go, some news:

Sold out: Neither my publisher, nor myself have any more available copies of my second photo book, Middle Life Notes. There might be a few left in Japanese bookstores, but I don’t have any for sale (though my galleries might have a couple signed copies). Thanks to everyone who bought one. It really brings meaning to the work when people invest in my books, whoever you are, friends, acquaintances, strangers. And I’m so grateful that people really responded to the book’s content. Middle Life Notes is a lot more personal than Sunlanders, and in a future newsletter I’ll try to describe the somewhat tricky procedure in putting out an autobiographical photo book.

New Zine: I recently collaborated with a wonderful photographer, Alberto Ferrero, on a zine published by Zerofeedback. Alberto is an Italian photographer based in Berlin, who shoots in Black and White. His photo book, Dawn Town, definitely has its own character. It’s very funny, playful and strange, and is really an amazing body of work considering he has only been here as a tourist.

Dawn Town (c) Alberto Ferrero

The zine Alberto and I collaborated on is inspired by the Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse, in which each photographer builds on the previous image with connected imagery, sometimes obvious, sometimes tenuous. I was actually late to learning this game. My sister, Jennifer, who taught me much else about life, showed me the game when I was visiting her in France’s Larzac region fifteen years ago, only it was not image-drawn, but literary. You write a line or two, fold it up, leaving a few words exposed for the next person. Haven’t engaged in years, but there were some great drunken nights with friends playing Exquisite Corpse in bars and parties, unwinding a finished scroll of strange and hilarious ramblings.

PRINTS SALE: Last bit of news is about prints. I’ve had a bit of a rough year financially. Most of you probably don’t know this but I’m in the tourist business in Kyoto, Japan, running a design space guesthouse, two rooms, downstairs in the building we live in downtown. Over the past seven years, more than 99% of my guests have been international visitors. With borders mostly shut since March and into the foreseeable future, I’ve had something of a significant drop in income. In the long run I’ll be fine, but a friend and wonderful photographer, Karen Knorr, advised me to improvise with #artistsupportpledge.

Basically, #artistsupportpledge has been a way for artists and friends to help each other during this difficult year. To help get through this period of temporary adjustment, I’m selling each of the following five prints for 200 Euros, an edition of ten, all sized at 8 x 10 inches. When I’ve sold ten prints, I pledge to buy a print or painting from an artist participating in the endeavor. Each print will be signed and numbered, and importantly handmade by myself in my darkroom. Because gallery prints are rather expensive, I see this as a good opportunity to get my work to folks who might not be able to afford gallery prices. Ideally next year we’ll have some semi-return to normalcy (I’m optimistic) so this hopefully is a one-time thing.

I’m very lucky to be represented with IBASHO in Antwerp and La Galerie Rouge in Paris. If you are a collector or keen on owning a large print related to Sunlanders, Middle Life Notes, and other future projects, they are very kind and helpful people.

These are the five prints I have for sale (they look much better as prints than scanned or shot with an iPhone):

Empyreal Efflorescence (2015)

Contours & Citizens (2014)

Taxi Smile (2011)

Two Horsemen (2010)

Good Friday (2012)

If you are interested, please be in touch and I can give you more details. It would be like a Christmas present for yourself (or someone you love… certainly it would be a gift you give to me). Absolutely no worries about not getting one either. This has been a tough year for many of us, and having not heard from some of you in some time, I can only hope you have had more health and happiness than sorrow and sickness. I feel that the situation, while very painful in the short-term, might improve situationally in the spring. I have great confidence that for many of us next year will be better than the last.

I welcome any feedback, comments, or letters in return. Thank you for reading and I’ll be in touch again soon, hopefully around the New Year.

Sean