News From Home
Two new reviews of Sniper Paused, a second printing of House of Tennbo, and why I love Greatest of All Time lists
Friends,
I hope this finds you warm, healthy, happy, and engaged with life. Things are fine here, with the weather finally feeling winterish. The light is clear, soft, and pretty. Because the days have been so fine, the maple and gingko leaves lingered on the branches a long while. Autumn is my favorite season, probably because I’m a sentimentalist. Something about the end of things or transitions, the way elements in our life— good and bad— never stay the same. I’m just most keenly aware of these feelings when out walking in nature, windswept leaves crunched underfoot.
We put up the tree and hanged it with heirloom ornaments— “heirloom” in the sense that these are the same objects that decorated the holiday spruce trees of my childhood four decades past. The ornaments are not necessarily yuletide, but contain familiar allusions: Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz figurines and Americana dolls of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the Washingtons. In a world with so much changing, I like this sense of continuity, and hope my son keeps the ornaments for his future family. Tennbo has kicked off a new tradition, removing the cotton stuffing from pillows and decorating the tree and other places in the living room with ersatz snow. He’s also “filming” a Christmas movie with available household kitsch, which hopefully we’ll edit together into something cohesive this coming school break.
For the past five Christmas seasons (as well as Hannukah and birthdays too), I’ve been giving Tennbo my old toys. Somehow (like the Christmas ornaments) they survived all these years, in our family’s possession despite my mother’s big move when she left Los Angeles for Fredericksburg, Virginia, and her passing four years ago. The toys had been bagged in various closets for approximately thirtyfive years, completely untouched. These were Hot Wheels cars, a lot of Transformers, and a coterie of Star Wars figures. When the pandemic began and life came to a standstill, we played with those toys together every day, building sets and dioramas, his imagination breathing new life into these old things. A good many of them broke, arms legs, fragile plastic pieces— I’m guessing they had collector value, but it seemed more valuable for us to have that sense of continuity. I’m not a keen fan of Star Wars or Transformers today, but they had once been a great love of mine, and so I was happy that Tennbo in the prime of his toy-playing years should handle the same figures that had once catalyzed my play-acting.
Sometime this year, around summer I think, he lost most of his interest in toys. Rather, he loves reading Doraemon and playing Minecraft (though I’m strict with his playing time). I’ve lately been buying him hardcover reprints of old Marvel comics, including The New Mutants, X-Men, Dr. Strange, and others. His favorite is the Fantastic Four, especially the John Byrne scripted-and-penciled issues of the early 1980s. I’ve lately taught him how to read, but these comics are a bit difficult and so they comprise most of our reading time. I am glad he likes them. I know there is good artwork being made today, but one of the great delights in parenthood is reliving your childhood vicariously, sometimes literally, with the toys, books, films, and music that shine so bright from a long-past-but-never-totally-gone point in your life. I love that through these comics I am connecting not only with my son but the child I had once been.
Two New Reviews of The Sniper Paused: One of my favorite write-ups of The Sniper Paused So He Could Wipe His Brow was recently published in C4 Journal. I love it when someone gets the meaning and purpose of my work and then articulates that interpretation with extraordinary eloquence. Eugenie writes :
“Sean Lotman photographs memories – not specific memories or events from his past, but memories in a more general sense: events, moments and scenes that may not be immediately recognisable to the reader, but that feel as though they should be. His photographs don’t seem to belong to any particular time or place, but to a kind of shared archive of times and places – as such, they have the slightly disorienting quality of a recollection that rushes up, unexpectedly, into consciousness.”
And there’s a glowing review of The Sniper Paused in The Independent Photographer. I’m flattered that Josh Bright wrote:
“It is, without a doubt, one of the most creative and intriguing photo books of recent times. It stands both as a testament to Lotman’s unique artistry, and to the inimitable potential of visual storytelling.”
Copies remain available at IBASHO and The M Editions.
House of Tennbo second printing: The first run of House of Tennbo, the zine I created with my son, combining his Instax photographs and mine, sold out in about a week’s time. The good news is Trey, the publisher at Tour Dogs, has just released a second edition of fifty copies. I’m very glad how well-received the zine has been. If you are keen you can get a copy from the publisher here.
Tennbo’s sketchbooks from 2022: In addition to putting out his first zine with me, Tennbo finished six drawing books this year. There are another three unfinished sketchbooks, one of which is a manga story about the end of the world, the other illustrated scenes inspired from the kaiju disaster movies made in the 1960s and 1970s by Toho Studios, like Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, and others. There are approximately 600 drawings, of all kinds of bizarre beasts, weird humans, and he-can’t-explain-it phenomena. It’s incredible to pick up any of the books and go through them. I can’t draw at all, so to see his aptitude at just seven years old fills me with awestruck fatherly pride.
When the pandemic first hit in the spring of 2020, it was difficult persuading him to sketch. He couldn’t compose, say, an elephant realistically, so he would become frustrated and quit. When we started doing aliens and monsters together and his imagination given free rein, his inhibitions collapsed and he began having fun. There have been times over the past three years where he takes the initiative and starts drawing on his own, but most of the time the drawings are produced with quid pro quo arrangements: twenty minutes of Minecraft or Doraemon-watching is worth a “detailed” drawing. At this point, I know when he’s dialing it in and remind him he can do better. But even though he would love to get back to his movie or his game, he usually takes pride in his work and I respect him for that.
It doesn’t worry me too much that his drawings are bargains made for activities I’m not as excited about. I know there are times I just don’t want to write, take pictures, or print in the darkroom, feeling I have nothing to say at the moment. We have to develop a work ethic, doing a little bit each day so that the body of work grows. I do it myself, often sitting down with a croissant and coffee before writing. Rewards systems can work if the discipline to focus is there.
The kid is even getting commissioned assignments. Ariko was asked to get him to draw, write poems, and take pictures of the family restaurant and soba dishes for a food magazine in the US. And I was asked by a Japanese publisher here to explain to him universal basic income, paid/unpaid work, how value and work are often not fairly matched up, and he will need to illustrate it. I’m not sure how in the world I’m going to get him to compose something from that! Wish us a lot of luck…
You can see more of his drawings from this year here.
Sunlanders on view at the Victoria & Albert: For the past year, Sunlanders has been part of a group show at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, England. The show, “Known and Strange: Photographs from the Collection” has over fifty artists’ prints and photo books represented, including Rinko Kawauchi, Mitch Epstein, Susan Meiselas, and others. “Known and Strange” has been extended until next year, February 5th, a show worth your time if you find yourself in South Kensington.
Leisurely Interests: If you were to draw a Venn Diagram of folks who love cinema and folks who love lists, there would be so much crossover, it would look more like one blurry circle than two overlapping. So it it was rather big news for us list-makers when the British Film Institute recently dropped its List of the 100 Greatest Films of All Time, which only comes out once every ten years. There are many familiar pictures within (Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Tokyo Story, etcetera), but the big news was the new #1 film, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). I was raised on films and have read many books on cinema (once even had a subscription to the BFI magazine Sight and Sound), so I was quite surprised that the greatest film of all time was a movie I had never seen or even heard anyone talking about before.
The big difference between 2012 and 2022 is the rise of the social justice movement, not only in everyday life, but in the arts and entertainment world as well. The 2022 Greatest Films list has a number of new entries that had never registered before, many of them by women, people of color, and underrepresented groups. Greatest of all Time lists are a silly thing at face value— I am sure that if I were to watch Jeanne Dielman, a 1970s portrait of a kept woman in bourgeois society that runs 3 1/2 hours long—I will take umbrage that these critics dare rate this film of worthier merit than Jack Sholder’s The Hidden or Philip Kaufman’s The Wanderers. That’s all right. Agree to disagree. Besides pop music, cinema is probably the most subjective of all the arts.
The point is not to say one film is better than any other, but to provoke a discussion, to contemplate one’s own moviegoing tastes, to make a list of one’s own. And ideally, to make an effort to see these critically-acclaimed films you never heard of. Since that list was published I’ve watched Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl, Djibril Diop Mambety’s Touki Bouki, and Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar. They were all great, particularly Touki Bouki, which is sort of a West African New Wave remix of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde.
Interestingly, the film I probably was most inspired by was Chantal Akerman’s News From Home. Before she made what would be hailed as the greatest film of all time in 2022, Akerman spent her early 20s living in New York City between 1971 and 1973, doing odd jobs, learning English and meeting artists. News From Home was made in 1976: Akerman returned to New York after make Jeanne Dielman and set her camera up in various locations in the city: subway platforms, busy intersections, and newspaper kiosks, sometimes in the day, sometimes at night. In voiceover, intermittently, Akerman reads from her mother’s letters written to her from the early 1970s over these unfolding everyday scenes. The letters are quite banal— maternal concerns whether Akerman is getting enough to eat or has warm clothes in the winter, updates on everyone’s health, family gossip. There are some veiled entreaties that she is sorely missed and it would be in everyone’s interests she return to Belgium sooner than later. All the while, New Yorkers nearly fifty years ago are walking about their business, driving in traffic, reading newspapers in graffiti-rich subway cars, impatiently waiting for trains that never seem to arrive on time.
News From Home is ranked #52nd on the Greatest Films List, ahead of Blade Runner, Casablanca, and Modern Times. No doubt such a ranking is a bit bold, but I’m okay with it, because without such a controversial move I would never have seen it, and frankly I was genuinely moved and inspired. I could relate on several levels. The appeals and longings from Akerman’s mother reminded me of my own mother— she employed a similar language for many years on long-distance phone calls between the US and Japan. And I was born in New York City in the summer of 1975 and lived there until the end of 1976. I have no accessible memories of that era, so it’s fascinating to see unfiltered scenes of mundane life in the city I was born in nearly fifty years ago. It felt like recovered lost recordings of a time and place that had long ceased to exist and that are never ever coming back. I was entranced by these people passing through Akerman’s frame, briefly concerned with their fates, wondering what might have become of them.
By the end, I was very glad to have watched the greatest people-watching film of all time. Sure, the list is small, but it makes life that little bit more wonderful.