Generals & Particulars
Photo book stuff, making movies with your kid, and saying goodbye to parents
Friends,
We had a genuine snow day in January. Having grown up in Southern California and spent most of my first 27 years there, a heavy snowfall remains a novel thing for me. I dropped all plans and headed out with two film cameras to the Imperial Palace for a long, leisurely walk. I think what I like most about the snowfall is that it’s nature’s way of guiding us to reinterpret our environment visually as well as aurally: the crunch underfoot marking new footpaths, the poignant silence when standing still. And knowing it’s so ephemeral, that the sun will burn up the layered landscape by late afternoon makes the experience that much more exhilarating. Life is short. Make that snowball and throw it with all you’ve got.
I really needed those three hours wandering in the snow. As I’ve written in previous newsletters seeing has become something of a challenge for me. I used to love long walks photographing street life, but I don’t want to photograph people wearing masks, as these sorts of pictures will eventually signify our Covid era, a challenging time which many of us (understandably) will want to move away from. I’ve also noticed that most pedestrians in Japan are staring at their phones. Some of them are likely looking at maps or texting loved ones about dinner, but a number of them seem content to be completely disengaged from their physical environment. That makes for boring photographs because people staring at their phones is a boring vision.
This shift in seeing for me has been ongoing for several years. It takes a long time for me to finish a roll of 36 frames, sometimes months. A lot of the images I do take are of my son or are of abstract photographs related to ideas in bloom. Increasingly, narrative is foremost in my mind when considering my archives and what to print in my color darkroom. Also experimentation. As I’ve mentioned, limits on work and travel necessitated by the pandemic caused me to spend more time in my darkroom (as socially distanced a place you can imagine) and see how far I could take a negative from its most basic information to something that defies the color palette which our senses perceive. It has been wonderful working hard with this challenge in mind. My criticisms of modern streetscapes aside, I’m one of those persons who believes that this is an exciting time to be an artist working with still images, and how they can be utilized in a narrative form for storytelling, imbuing emotions and wonder that could be just as cathartic as experiencing a great film or novel. Hopefully later this year I will be able to share some of these photographs if I am able to publish them in book form. Until then, I prefer to keep the mystery to myself, seeing the work evolve and take shape, exploring the parameters of light and color in darkroom printing.
Amoeba: I’m quite pleased to announce that Amoeba has completely sold out. Neither my publisher nor I have any copies left for sale and I believe the book is now unavailable with booksellers as well. (Those who ordered the book from me but have not received it, I will send as soon as I am once again able to airmail packages to the US, Australia, Canada, and elsewhere.) A big thank you to everyone who picked up an edition. It was really moving to hear back from people who really enjoyed it. Being about how I fell in love and evolved together with my wife, Ariko, over sixteen years, Amoeba was quite an intimate project, and I am relieved I was able to tell the story well.
It’s possible that a photographer’s best work is not necessarily his or her most ingeniously composed pictures but the most personal ones. Readers respond to well-crafted stories and one of the great ironies of our relationship to personal work is how the particular can stand for the universal. Regarding relationships— partners, parents, friends, and kids— we have lived with the good and bad, success and failure, love and heartbreak, and are intrigued when someone else can frame a particular lived experience in narrative form. I have projects in various states of completion about my mother, my son, and my sister, and I would like to delve deeper into my ancestors’ lives. Memoir and biography as art can be an extraordinarily moving experience. And the thing about it that is really nice is that by exploring these relationships and finding visual and narrative structure in their makeup, we are knowing ourselves better and what it means to be alive.
Middle Life Notes: In 2019 I made another book with my Tokyo publisher called Middle Life Notes. It’s similar to Amoeba in that it is something like memoir, literally about being at the middle point of my life, living in Japan, wondering how did I get here. There are 28 photographs of Japan, all darkroom prints made with a Diana f+ Toy Camera, along with an essay and twelve haiku and waka autobiographical reflections. The publisher had it bound in spiral (as would be the case of a notebook), imagining it as something you could slip into your coat pocket and ride off on a bike to some riverside spot to read and reflect on a patch of sun-drenched grass.
When we published the book our arrangement was that I would buy a third of the books printed. I sold out that share of books a long time ago, but we recently spoke and he has some left in inventory. If anyone is interested in picking one up, it’s a steal at $30US (plus shipping). Since I do almost no markup from the wholesale cost of the books, I make almost no money with the sales. What’s important to me is helping Katoh-san (the publisher) move his remaining stock, as I’m grateful to him for having believed in me as a storyteller.
If you might be interested in a copy (there aren’t many) please let me know and I’ll order directly from the publisher to send you. More than just supporting me, you’ll be supporting independent publishing as well.
BOP Photo Analogies: Recently I was interviewed by my friends Arnaud de Grave and Jon Ellis for their latest issue of BOP Photo Analogies. They are both in Europe so the interview was a series of emails back and forth over a period of several weeks. I talked about how I found my way into photography, my thoughts on its narrative potential, color printing, my books, and the influence of prose fiction and cinema in my work. It’s a really nice magazine made by photographers for photographers. There is nothing about gear or commercialism— the focus is on interesting photography and photographers elaborating on the how and why of what they do. BOP really should be better known and appreciated as a quality magazine for those feeling passionate about art photography and reportage. It’s a true labor of love for its chief editor, Arnaud. The issues are affordable and in-depth. Their site does not yet have #5’s sales page up yet, but I know they have issues available if you reach out to them on their contact page.
TKSM Productions: There are multiple responsibilities involved in being a father, one of them being cultivating a sensibility in one’s child. As my son grows older, I find new elements of culture to share with him. Over the winter break I was finally able to teach Tennbo how to read (he goes to a Japanese Buddhist school so the onus of tutoring English literacy was all mine). We have a long way to go, but he finally comprehends how alphabet letters represent sounds that mesh together into words. He used to quarrel whenever I suggested he read to me, but because he’s improved so much and I’ve been careful not to challenge him too far above his thresholds, I’m now witnessing his confidence and capacities evolving with positive momentum. Teaching my son how to read has been one of the great highlights of fatherhood. I’m proud of both of us for hanging in there.
I love the way a seven-year-old mind works, the unexpected poetry of observations articulating a playful imagination. I’m always trying new activities to see how he wants to express himself and he’s gone through a number of phases. We’ve spent weekends taking turns sketching figures in the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse and cutting and pasting collages drawn from ads and old magazines. At one point he became enthusiastic about poetry, dictating to me visions of fragile, surrealistic narratives. From that typescript he would draw figures illustrating those poems. Last year, I bought him an Instant Camera for Christmas and a MOOG synthesizer for his birthday. I taught him how to double-expose his pictures with the camera and some of the images turned out brilliant. Occasionally, we jam together on instruments, one of us on the synthesizer, the other on the metallophone, improvising absurd choruses. More than anything over the past two years, he has developed an extraordinary gift for drawing aliens and labyrinths. At this point, he’s so detailed and perfectionist in his craft that it’s hard talking him into drawing anymore because the standards he sets for himself are so high.
Recently, Ariko asked me to learn digital video so I could shoot and edit scenes of her restaurant to use as promotion on social media. For starters, I bought a gimbal for my iPhone (a gimbal is basically a contemporary Steadicam) and for practice went to the Imperial Palace with Tennbo and his cousin, Kaiyo, and our dog, Monk, and pretending I was Bigfoot, chased them around a forested area of the Palace while filming their escape. About a month later Tennbo and I finally edited the video into a story (with iMovie). He illustrated the title cards as well as drew a logo for TKSM Productions (Tennbo Kaiyo Sean Monk). Somehow he intuitively knew how to make good horror-film music for the piece’s soundtrack with the MOOG (or perhaps the MOOG naturally complements horror stories). I loved doing this collaboration with him and am hoping we do more. If you’re curious about our first father-son production, it’s here. Bigfoot is truly the work of amateurs, but maybe that’s why we had so much fun making it. Because there were no expectations.
Tales of the Print: In November, following Paris Photo I took a train with my friend, Glenn down to his country home in rural Burgundy. I was looking forward to decompressing in a quiet setting after all the glad-handing at the photo fair. Glenn’s an excellent cook and a great conversationalist, but besides all our gabbing and eating, I wound up taking a series of very long nature walks in the countryside. Burgundy is famous for its wine but there are also a lot of farms, including wheat and dairy spreads, covering gently rolling hills between 16th century-circa villages. As I mentioned earlier in the newsletter, I’ve really come to enjoy photographing natural elements and these long walks really invigorated me. The weather was cold but fair and lovely, conducive to both morning and afternoon excursions. I generally had the natural world to myself and even the villages were quiet and seemed nearly abandoned.
After nearly a decade of commitment to Ektachrome, I’ve begun shooting nearly exclusively with Portra 400. It can be more challenging achieving the dream-like qualities I seek but at this point I feel like I know my way around color printing well enough to convey an intended atmosphere if I work hard enough experimenting with the colors and burning. But I also feel myself mellowing, finding beauty in simple tranquility. I’m grateful for whatever inspiration I can find.
A well-loved book: For the last eighteen years of my mother’s life she lived on the other side of the world. She left Los Angeles in March, 2001 for Fredericksburg, Virginia and I left Los Angeles for Japan a few years later. Beginning in the summer of 2001 I visited her nearly every year, sometimes several times annually, no matter how far the journey was. I love traveling but declined multiple adventures so that I could be sure to visit her for around three to four weeks. We didn’t do much during these visits— a lot of the time we watched films or went to the cinema, cooked together or ate out, and did the Washington Post crossword puzzle on the terrace of The Hyperion, a local cafe. We would read together. We could do absolutely nothing— she just loved having me there. But within moments of every visit, she would become sad because the hourglass had tipped and slowly at first, then rapidly, time would accelerate and it would come time for me to leave again.
Having to say goodbye to loved ones is one of the most bittersweet feelings in life. Most of us in the 21st century live quite far from our hometowns and thus only see our parents around holidays like summer break and Christmas. It’s usually a long goodbye, loitering at an airport terminal or a station gate. In Deanna Dikeman’s Leaving and Waving (published by Chose Commune, 2021), she’s waving goodbye to her parents from the driver’s seat pulling out of the garage of the family home in Sioux City, Iowa. Each photograph is dated by month and year, beginning in July, 1991. Some of the photographs are in color, most of them are monochrome. It’s a story generated by repetition, one goodbye after another as the years accumulate. We don’t know anything else. It’s two people, a mother and father, waving farewells to their daughter.
Time, of course, is the player in this story. In the late 1990s Dikeman’s son is a baby, but we see him as a teenager sitting in the passenger seat 15 years later. The parents are already old in 1991, but as the years pass you can see Dikeman’s father grow increasingly more frail until sometime in 2009 or 2010, when it’s evident he has passed on and the mother is the only one left to say goodbye. The images from the last few years are of Dikeman’s mother seeing her off from the door of an assisted living facility. And the last image, the most searing one because of the sense of loss conveyed, is of the family home by itself, no one left to wave back.
The book has done extraordinarily well, last year winning the Prix Nadar. It’s a remarkably simple concept and the pictures are not especially incredible, but the emotions it speaks to in all of us means the book resonates powerfully. It’s like I mentioned earlier how the particular can stand for the universal: Even if we never leave our hometowns, eventually people leave us, and the sad part is if we’re lucky our parents pass on before we do. Part of living is saying goodbye, sometimes for a season, sometimes forever. It’s never easy and somehow we have to go on living.
I must have flown out to see my mother more than twenty times in those eighteen years she was living in Virginia. My grandfather picked me up from the airport in Dulles the first eight years. When he passed away in 2008, my Uncle Tom started picking me up. In the beginning my mother would brave the traffic to meet me at Tom’s house in Falls Church, Virginia. But I discovered it was easier for everyone if I took the train. Thus, at the very end of my visits my mother and I usually said goodbye at the Amtrak Station in Downtown Fredericksburg. This was bittersweet for both of us, my mother’s hourglass sand all used up, contemplating the long passage of time until my next visit, me excited about returning to my lived life, but wondering sadly if this might be the last time I saw my mother alive. The pain of long goodbyes could be unbearable and we often parted at the parking lot. She would wave back at me from her car while the elevator doors closed between us. From the platform moments later I could see her Honda station wagon driving down Caroline Street returning to the family home. There are no pictures of these farewells, but that doesn’t really matter. I don’t believe I’ll ever forget my confused emotions moving on without her, nor her sweet sad smile, and that will have to be good enough for me.