Issue #5: The Sniper Paused So He Could Wipe His Brow
A new photo book, a show in Santa Barbara, and learning how to be a better father.
Friends,
I’m very pleased to announce that my book The Sniper Paused So He Could Wipe His Brow will be published in Paris by The (M) Editions in early summer. This is wonderful news, as I have been working on this project for nearly 15 years and The (M) makes some of the most beautiful books in the industry. I’m extraordinarily fortunate and excited to describe how this photo book came to be.
The story begins in late summer, 2006. I was in Iceland, my first trip there, helping my partner, Ariko, for a magazine shoot. Before production, we rented a car and drove around the west side of the island, ostensibly to location-scout, but we needed the adventure and the solitude, a welcome break from our lives in Tokyo. I turned 31 on the road and one my presents from Ariko was a Holga camera. I shot a half dozen rolls on our trip, some of them pretty good, but I put the camera away when I returned to Japan. At the time I was in a brief digital phase—if I were taking any pictures at all— as I was mostly spending my free time revising both of my novels.
About a year later in the autumn of 2007 Lomography released its first reiteration of the Diana f series, a low-fi toy camera once produced in 1960s Hong Kong. I loved the look of the camera and must have been one among the earliest users. Around this period I was spending a lot of time in India, taking multiple trips there for research for one of my novels. Some of the photographs I brought back on that first trip really excited me, which encouraged me to take the Diana’s potential seriously. This was a period in my life that involved a great deal of travel, for myself and for travel magazine assignments, and I spent many months abroad in the U.S., India, and Southeast Asia, with long trips to Turkey, North Africa and Central America as well. Along with my Nikon f3, the Diana was often with me. With its light leaks and its soft-focus blurs, the camera’s mechanics are somewhat imperfect, but because of these very flaws the results can also surprise you with some wow aesthetics.
While I was taking photographs with the Diana, I was writing haiku to go along with them to see if I might be able to incorporate my writing and picture-taking together. Most of the poems were haiku in form only, observing the five/seven/five syllabic rules, but not in content since they were not seasonal observations. They were closer in spirit to senryū, which riff on human nature. I considered the best ones more like micro-stories, because in spite of their strict brevity they still contained something of a narrative or revelation.
While traveling all these years it was extremely rare that I ever saw anyone else using a Diana (or Holgas for that matter). Folks traveling abroad tend to take a number of photographs for obvious reasons, but the Diana, albeit a $50 plastic camera, is quite expensive to use regularly as a roll of Portra 400 is upwards of $10US, and if you’re shooting square-frame images with the Diana (as I was), that only leaves you twelve shots a roll. And there have been times when I returned home from very rural and harsh places in India with a bagful of film, only to be shocked that the camera malfunctioned and nearly everything looked blurry. And then there were some extraordinary light leaks because after some use the film would not rewind properly and the finished rolls were inevitably streaked with light flashes. It happened enough times that around 2013 I began focusing more with the Nikon and 35mm as my medium for apprehending my experiences.
However, it was around that time also began to color-print in the darkroom. And I discovered there was more I could do with a spoiled negative in the darkroom than I could ever do with a scanner and Photoshop. The first prints I made looked pretty good, if not better than the scans, but I was still learning my skillset. I had a lot more 35mm cross-processed negatives (which was its own challenge and steep learning curve to master), some of which became my first photo book, Sunlanders. But I kept printing and my second book, Middle Life Notes, was all Diana photographs, many of which I had overlooked in the past. I have a pretty substantial archive of toy camera negatives—three filed-boxes worth— and I knew that I would have to really delve into these pictures on my light board if I wanted to make the best possible book.
In autumn, 2018, I took a bookmaking class in Tokyo run by Yumi Goto and led by Teun van der Heijden and his wife, Sandra. The class was a revelation and I learned a great deal about bookmaking and the narrative potential of photo books, especially how the components of telling a story are not only pictures, but ephemera, like maps, love letters, old faded photographs, newspaper clippings, grocery receipts, and so much else— anything really, that can help tell your story. Gorgeous photographs will always be important, but for a photo book to really effective, it must have emotional resonance so that the reader feels life is just that fraction more complete for having experienced this sort of full-immersion photographic story.
In just ten days I was able to produce a dummy book. If I remember correctly, everyone in the class in fact was able to assemble something, which is extraordinary when you consider many of us had just a mess of pictures with no direction forward. I had a bit of guidance and a lot of inspiration, and was pleased with the way my dummy turned out. Last year, shortly before the pandemic began, I received the good news that my gallery IBASHO and The (M) Editions would collaborate with me on the publication of the book.
I had left all of my prints in Antwerp, and though I considered requesting them be sent here so that I could have them scanned, I had already begun deep-diving my Diana archives, finding dozens of overlooked negatives that when printed, looked very nice. So I decided I would reprint nearly everything to see if I could make the work punchier, as I was a better, more experimental printer now, with a clearer understanding of the frontiers of the printmaking process (further ahead in the Tales of the Print section is an example of a print I improved upon).
The new design for the book is finished, and I could not be happier how the photographs will be presented and the innovative way the book can be uniquely read whenever picked up and contemplated (because I feel a lot of what we do with photo books is contemplate). We are figuring out paper selection, covers, and what images to include as darkroom prints for the limited edition release. Things are moving very fast— we hope to print in early June and have the book ready for competition in Arles in early July. I should have more news regarding the book in about a month for the next newsletter.
SOLO SHOW: Some more really good news: I have a solo show at Gray Space in Downtown Santa Barbara, tentatively scheduled for August. It’s being organized by a good friend, Avi Gitler, who used to run a gallery in Harlem and has been art collecting since he started traveling twenty years ago. I met Avi in Pushkar, India, in 2008 at the falafel stand in the middle of the town’s bazaar. We talked a lot about traveling and climbed one of the local hills together. Through the years we stayed in touch and became friends when I visited him in New York and he visited me in Kyoto. Avi represents a number of young artists from all over the world, but is perhaps best known for the Audubon Mural Project, in which artists paint bird species endangered by climate change on various buildings and storefronts in the Washington Heights and Harlem neighborhoods (where Audubon lived and is buried). I have a great memory from a few years ago of Avi driving me through Northern Manhattan showing me some of the murals.
The plan is to showcase prints from the new book. I’m really hoping that I can be in Santa Barbara for the show, but for now I am following global developments. I don’t want to travel in August if the Olympics happen as it will be a dangerous time for flying, and I’m not sure I can travel abroad for two weeks and then quarantine for two weeks in a hotel, per Japanese law as it now stands. A lot can happen in three months, and I’m hoping the world might be in a better place in high summer than it is now.
AMOEBA: Publication of Amoeba— my personal story about my relationship to my wife, Ariko—was pushed back a few months due to the publisher becoming pre-occupied with his magazine release. All the prints are scanned and the design is done, but we have not yet printed and assembled it. As I mentioned, the publisher, Katoh, and his team intend to hand-stitch the books themselves, and a small handmade color darkroom print will be inset into the back cover. I know they’re working hard on this and that the book will be ready in a month or two.
Magazine Story: A few newsletters back, I mentioned an article I wrote about the process of instilling in my son an enthusiasm for storytelling and reading, and how this led to our Alien Stories project. I talked about how he would draw aliens in action and then narrate the stories to me, which I would type out on my 1938 Remington typewriter. I also described trying to teach him to read utilizing Scrabble letters on my family’s vintage 1976 Scrabble turntable edition. Unfortunately, nearly a year later I still have a ways to go teaching him how to read— he’s still learning to process how the sounds add up together to words. Sometimes he surprises me with his capacities, sometimes it just doesn’t click. Two steps forward, one step back. (That said, he can read and write the Japanese hiragana alphabet pretty well now, as the phonetics are much more straightforward than they are in English.) Anyhow, the topic of the new issue of Neutral Colors is education, and my essay (translated into Japanese) is in the magazine. Katoh, the publisher (who also put out Middle Life Notes and is releasing Amoeba), and his design team did a beauty of a job and the magazine is one of the few in Japan that has both verve and authenticity (In the same issue, Ariko has a long story about her own educational journey, how she left Japan’s rigid systems for the U.S., living as an exchange student and studying photography in New York City).
It’s a terrific magazine and it’s nice that I can visit almost any major bookstore in Japan and show Tennbo his work has been published among the many millions of words and photographs. Something I’ve spent the last few years working on with my son is building self-confidence. I can understand his insecurities because when I was a kid I suffered plenty of my own self-doubts. I wasn’t naturally very good at anything, so it’s been a lifetime of trial-and-error and setbacks and small victories before finding confidence in my own voice. I’d like to mentor my son as much as I can so he can find his stride faster than it took me..
It’s a marvelous thing to witness his imagination in bloom. When the pandemic began, one of our collaborations was something called our “Puking Rainbow” book, which, just as it sounds, features a variety of humans, animals, aliens, and weird formless entities vomiting colors. I had to draw a few now and then to get him going, but he could be remarkable at times, finishing one drawing and then drawing something completely different right after. He doesn’t like pencils, but prefers the pen I use for my note-taking, which has a rich, dark ink. When he makes mistakes he just improvises on that error, and the mistake is incorporated into the drawing. At the moment I’m contemplating what might be the theme of our next book of drawings.
Tales of the Print: I thought it best to include one of my favorite photographs from The Sniper Paused So He Could Wipe His Brow, this one an image I shot in Lake Eğirdir, Central Turkey, in October, 2008, where I spent one long day cycling its shores. The region is famous for its apple orchards, and I often paused along my route to photograph locals, who were very kind and generous, handing me apples freshly plucked from their trees. Many would not take no for an answer, and by the end of the day I’d obliged their hospitality eating something like ten apples, and at one point was carrying another two dozen in my backpack, which made the going a bit arduous on the bike. I eventually found a tractor with a wagonload and surreptitiously emptied my apples there, lightening my weight.
Despite all the apples I ate, I was famished when I returned to the coastal village for supper. I was craving a fried fish and while walking out to a boardwalk overlooking the water, I espied this boat just leaving the shore. A beautiful woman was strumming her guitar and the folks on their watercraft waved at me to join them. I was very tempted, but my inclination to eat was strong so I just smiled and waved goodbye to them after taking this photograph. That evening the fish was delicious, but I often wonder about the adventure that might have been had I skipped down to join them.
When I first printed this image about four or five years ago, it had a much more normal look to it, with a more conventional sky and the boat and its party less highlighted. So when I reprinted this in the darkroom— among many other prints for the book— I attempted to make the image more dramatic now that I had a lot more confidence in my dodge-and-burn techniques. That I was able to really improve upon this photograph inspired me to reprint nearly all the photographs for the project, experimenting to see if I could make them better, which to me meant more colorful, intense, or ethereal. Of course, I had to be prudent, as there had to be quieter images that would better buttress the more dramatic ones, but the difference in quality between the prints four years ago and today made the effort truly worthwhile. Already somewhat surreal because they are shot with a Toy Camera plastic lens, many of them took on a more cinematic dreamlike element. I’m really not interested in reality—invented worlds with wild color schemes is where I want to go as an artist.
A Well-Loved Book: Last month the people of Japan acknowledged the ten-years anniversary of the triple-disaster of the Great Tohoku Quake-Tsunami-Meltdown. It’s really hard to believe it’s been ten years and many victims are still living with the consequences, mostly because of national, civic, and corporate incompetence. Overlooked because of the Covid news-stream was the announcement that TEPCO, the company responsible for the Fukushima meltdown, would begin releasing irradiated water into the sea, to the ire of its Pacific neighbors and environmentalists (the government even created a radiation mascot to Disneyfy the controversy in a failed public relations gambit). Moreover, thousands of families continue to live in “temporary” housing units many years after the tsunami swept their homes away.
There are more than a few tragic books about the disaster (especially Mayumi Suzuki’s The Restoration Will— Suzuki lost both of her parents and her home the day of the tsunami), and one book I’ve long admired is Alejandro Chaskielberg’s Otsuchi. The title of the book comes from the small coastal town, Otushi, that suffered some of the worst destruction of the tsunami. Chaskielberg has a remarkable signature aesthetic made famous in his first book, La Creciente: long-exposure night portraits of villagers in the Paraná River Delta in his native Argentina. For Otsuchi, he utilized the same method, but with families from Otsuchi photographed at their ruined homes or businesses, almost like floating spirits over the rubble.
The reason for the ghostly pallor is that Chaskielberg colorized the images with a color similar to found photographs recovered from the shore, the chemical component of the photographs beautifully compromised by long exposure in the Pacific’s saline waters. The book, in fact, is evenly divided between Chaskielberg’s portraits of the survivors and recovered images. The entire book has a sad, haunting, yet, extraordinarily beautiful feeling.
Otsuchi was published in 2015 by Editorial RM. I believe it is not yet sold out. I picked up my copy a few years back at Tipi’s Books in Brussels, after first discovering Chaskielberg’s work when we were among the artists featured in a photo festival in Spain. I’m looking forward to getting his other books at some point.
LATELY READING: I imagine I might be projecting an aura of inspiring fatherhood, but oftentimes I feel barely competent, if that. No one really knows what kind of parents they will be until you become one— often we fall back on our childhood, thinking we’d like to avoid the mistakes our parents made, but also forgiving our mothers and fathers too, or even reinterpreting their techniques, since even if flawed, we usually turn out to be mostly well-adjusted adults. I have a loving, imaginative, hilarious kid, but he often doesn’t listen to us when we ask him to do something and in these scenarios it can be difficult not to lose patience and become angry, which of course only worsens the situation. It’s a vicious circle that often ends in tears.
In The Atlantic, I came across an interview with Michaeleen Doucleff discussing her new book, Hunt, Gather, Parent, in which she and her young daughter, Rosy, spent time living with indigenous families, specifically Mayan villages in Mexico, Inuit clans in the Arctic Circle, and Hadzabe tribes in Tanzania. What precipitated her research is that her three-year-old girl was a handful of trouble, and the methods gleaned from her parents and contemporary self-help parenting books were failing her. In the West, we obsess over our child’s achievements, dispensing endless praise so his fragile, developing ego might flourish, while at the same time running our households like an authoritarian dictatorship. However, our Western-cosmopolitan approach to parenting is a quite recent development and an actual break from the parenting methods that humans had adapted for thousands or tens of thousands of years. Doucleff visited these more traditional societies in the hopes of learning techniques that have survived the sociological and technological upheavals that changed parenting in the West.
I’m only halfway finished with the book, but many of her insights learned from native cultures have made my relationship with Tennbo less confrontational. I won’t get too much into it, but one of the common threads in each of these cultures is that they don’t punish or reward, and thus don’t bother with corresponding threats. Rather than tell their kids what to do (or negotiate with them) parents try to incorporate kids into their daily lives, whether it be work spaces or quiet time, so that children learn to live in adult atmospheres rather than kid-centric worlds. Of course, it’s not enough that they sit and do nothing (this is a good time for drawing or reading). If they are given simple tasks, they can feel they are contributing to the home, which is something instinctual to their nature (archaeologists have taught us that the evolutionary gene for humans that has helped us survive and prosper is cooperation). The same logic goes into home-cleaning as well— instead of forcing Tennbo to clean up his toys, I ask him to help me to organize his things as a team player, and he’s been much quicker to spring into action. And most importantly, Doucleff learned from these cultures the uselessness of anger, how it just catalyzes hot-blooded emotions in the other and that when the tantrums occur, the best way through them is just to walk away and be calm. We model our behavior, so that when we lose our cool, our kids wrongly learn this as acceptable. I can be quick-tempered, but have been trying out a novel beatific attitude for Tennbo’s outbursts and have found that when I walk away and stay quiet, calm, and cool, my son’s anger just dissipates. A confrontation is over before it’s even begun!
I’ve been working hard in the darkroom and have been falling asleep around 9pm most nights, so haven’t had much time for reading or cinema. We took a break from the Adam West TV Batman series to watch The Simpsons, Season 8. Tennbo is only six, so I wasn’t sure he would like the show, as there are so many pop culture references he’s still too young to understand but he turned out to really love it. Maybe a part of it is empathy, as he witnesses me regularly laughing hysterically, but Homer Simpson really is a genius in clown comedy. I’d ordered that particular season specifically because I remembered seeing the spicy jalapeño episode, in which Homer eats Chief Wiggims’ prize pepper and hallucinates like he’s on mushrooms and in this bended reality meets his vision guide, a talking coyote voiced by Johnny Cash. Homer climbs a Mayan pyramid and learns from Cash’s coyote that he must find his soulmate.
When "El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer)" was first aired in January, 1997, I was living in Santa Barbara, California, nearly finished with university, and occasionally very stoned, as I remember being on the night Homer’s adventure of the mind aired. If you told me that evening I wouldn’t see the episode again for nearly another 25 years and it would be in Kyoto, Japan, with my six-year-old son, and that on my honeymoon I would climb Mayan pyramids with my Japanese bride, and that I’d be publishing a book in Tokyo about how I met my soulmate, as well as that one of the photos I’d taken on that trip to Guatemala might be included in both a solo exhibition of my color darkroom prints in downtown Santa Barbara as well as part of another photo book I was publishing in Paris, I would have said, “Hah! That’s the weed talking!” Yet here we are.
Thank you as always for reading.