Infinite Reread Value
News and reviews of my photo book, The Sniper Paused So He Could Wipe His Brow
Friends,
I hope this finds you well. Hard to believe we’re nearly halfway finished with 2022. It’s remarkable how fast life begins to accelerate at a certain point. For me, this development began after my son was born. Time became a real premium, especially the hours allotted for self-care. It’s become increasingly difficult to find the space for reading novels or watching films. I often need to wait until my son has gone to sleep before I can enjoy this private time. Of course, doing so usually means getting less sleep than I need.
Fortunately, for the past nine+ years I’ve been keeping a daily log of my time spent. In my twenties and thirties I was an avid diarist, but I would write my daily experiences in spurts— lots of processing of my experiences, friendships, and musings for a few days or weeks at a time, and then nothing recorded for weeks or months. Beginning on March 17th, 2013, I started recording the bare facts of the day’s happenings and haven’t missed a day since. The first few years were very minimalist in descriptions, but I’ve expanded the logs from just the days’ doings to include details of what I made for dinner, what I did with my son, books being read, films watched, the kinds of specific writing or printing I’m working on, even topics of conversations I enjoy with friends, but entries mostly free of analysis or deeper pondering so that I don’t feel overwhelmed by the responsibility to record. I can go back to any day or week over the past nine years and review the day’s doings, which kickstart memories and slows the passage of time just a bit.
I don’t really need the journals to make sense of the past two months. Since March, I have not been able to do any color printing because the factory which produces the developer and fixer chemicals for our darkroom printer is located in Hong Kong. Because China’s government was brazen enough to think it could host the Winter Olympics while maintaining a Covid-zero policy, Hong Kong, like other major cities in China, was under strict lockdown . For the entire spring it’s been impossible to procure the chemicals I need, this being my most personal and inconvenient experience with the fragility of global supply chains. Fortunately, folks have been allowed to return to work so I should be back in the darkroom again soon.
Rather than printing (or doing much photographing), I’ve spent the past month working on getting my latest book better known through book reviews. Researching photo magazines and working on emails and pitches isn’t the easiest work, but it’s important. The hardest part of making a photo book might be the last part: selling it, especially if, like me, you’re not a big social media #ShoutFromTheRooftops type. But it’s crucial, not just because of the “tree falls in the forest and no one hears it” aspect, but also because you’ve worked hard with publishers and designers who have invested in the project together with you, so to see it to the end is to ensure nearly all the books you print find a home on someone’s shelf.
The Sniper Paused So He Could Wipe His Brow: I suffered some false starts attempting to market the book. We launched it at Paris Photo just before Omicron hit in November, disrupting postal services in Japan. Also, I worried about writing editors and art directors who might’ve been out sick. When the surge settled down, Russia invaded Ukraine and I felt it improper to reach out with ambitions of promotion when a potentially catastrophic war was beginning. These days you really can’t wait for a slow news cycle; you just have to put yourself out there. And the first reviews of the book are coming in. I really love this article and interview I did with The British Journal of Photography about Sniper (thank you, Marigold Warner!). In the interview section I discuss the book’s Choose-Your-Own Adventure format, the influence of science fiction, color-as-nostalgia, and the lucidity of awakening. And the wonderful Jesse Freeman really captures the spirit of the book with his enthusiastic review on Japan Camera Hunter. (I appreciate his description of the design having “infinite reread value.”) There will be another five or six reviews coming in the next few months, which I’m awfully excited for.
But the biggest news with Sniper is the collective decision between the publishers and myself to lower the sticker price of the book to 40 Euros. Apologies to those who bought the book at the higher price, but the most important goal is selling all the available copies (and once sold out, the book itself becomes a collector’s item). And while I love signing books, I don’t have that many left for sale, and as it’s still really expensive posting books out of Japan, if any of you are keen to see a book with an extraordinary novel design concept and you would like to support independent publishing, I strongly urge you to consider buying a copy directly from The M Editions or IBASHO Gallery.
Self-promotion is not something that comes easily to me— I might have grown up in Los Angeles, but feel I have more of a Midwestern disposition. Anyways I need to keep in mind that it’s not about me as much as it is about an object made by a team. I hope you read these reviews and take the ride that the book offers.
Lately Reading and Watching: Honestly, I have struggled with reading over the past month, starting and failing to finish Issac Babel’s Collected Stories and Frank Norris’ The Octopus. However, I’ve just started reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s new novel, The Morning Star, and I really love it. Somehow Knausgaard always pulls me in. He articulates many of my feelings and observations about the world so well.
One of the reasons it’s been difficult to read is because I’ve become recently hooked on the Criterion Collection (with a huge thanks to my friend Lance Henderstein for encouraging that). Netflix has been good for the occasionally interesting television show, but its film curation certainly does not have cinephiles in mind. On the other hand, Criterion is absolute gold— there are dozens if not hundreds of films I’ve been meaning to see or rewatch, movies which are too eccentric or eclectic to ever make the cut on more popular streaming platforms. I’m talking classic, cult, foreign, weird, wild, nutty pictures. In just a few weeks I’ve managed to watch Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, Eagle Pennell’s Last Night at the Alamo, Robert Altman’s The Player, Tom Noonan’s What Happened Was, Richard Linklater’s Tape, Wim Wenders’ The American Friend, and Rainer Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. There are a number of Hong Kong Jackie Chan classics and so I was able to introduce to my son the bizarre wonderfulness of this cult genre with Spiritual Kung Fu.
The film I’ve most enjoyed watching was Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad. Somehow Ichikawa has been forgotten by most folks, even those who love films, despite the fact he arguably authored Japan’s two best post-war WWII films, The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain. He was commissioned by the government to make a documentary about Tokyo’s 1964 Olympics, an event spotlighting Japan’s return to global prominence following its absolute decimation from the Second World War. I am by no means well-rounded here, but I believe Ichikawa’s three-hour film is the greatest sports documentary I’ve ever seen. It’s a truly euphoric film, utilizing novel cinematic points-of-view and incredible sound design. The camerawork is unorthodox, zooming into players’ faces or flexed muscles. You feel like you’re practically on the field, disoriented, excited, thrilled. The filming of a women’s volleyball medal match between the U.S.S.R. and Japan is so exciting it feels as if the outcome of the Cold War is at stake. Every grunt, shriek, and moan of agony is beautifully captured. It’s incredibly emotional yet wildly unique. Inevitably, the Japanese Olympic Committee hated it, disavowed the film, and cut their own fluff piece together that was more patriotic and conventional.
The biggest hangup Japanese authorities had with Tokyo Olympiad was that it was more concerned with the lives of the athletes and the novelty of the event for spectators than it was with the actual adding-up of who won what medals. One of the highlights of the film is the marathon— Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila dominated the race, winning the Gold four minutes faster than his closest competitor. Rather than showcasing his commanding lead, much of the segment is devoted to the pain and arduousness of the event, runners struggling with extreme tiredness and dehydration, drinking glass after glass of water, some collapsing in exhaustion. This focus on the incredible challenge of marathon-running highlights the hard-won endurance of Abebe’s gold-winning achievement rather than detracts from it.
One of the true delights of the film is its feeling of innocence. The world just seems like it was so much simpler back then. There’s not a single corporate sponsorship in sight. There were no doping scandals. The audiences coming to the events appear exuberant. The 1964 Olympics represented a remarkable comeback for the Japanese nation, almost like a high-water mark in the nation’s contemporary history. I’m not Japanese and would not yet be born for another eleven years, but I feel extreme nostalgia for this bygone moment myself. We are witnessing a world absolutely lost to us.
I first saw Tokyo Olympiad about fifteen years ago. A few Saturday nights back, I pitched the film to my son (7 years old) and nephew (9), both of whom responded with resounding thumbs-down “uh-uh”s. I requested they give the film five minutes and if they didn’t like it we’d put on something else. They ended up watching for the entire three hours, the kids falling into a spell. I was surprised how engaged they were, hissing at the Soviets, cheering the Americans. It evolved into such a visceral experience that when the 10,000 meters competition came on and American Billy Mills, an Oglala Sioux tribe-member, came out of nowhere to win the race with a mad dash at the very last lap, my nephew was screaming and my son was on his knees praying for his victory. We erupted in massive cheers when, trailing the entire race, Billy Mills found something deep within to push past the other runners into victory. If the fact we could be so euphoric, crying tears of joy over the outcome of an event run nearly sixty years ago isn’t a sign of well-crafted cinema, I can’t really tell you what is. You know good art when you feel it.