I’m beginning this letter the day after the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction. We missed it, the great cosmological event slipping my mind. Instead, at the moment our three planets were aligned I was reading Alice in Wonderland to my son while waiting for the bath. While glancing up occasionally to explain Lewis Carroll’s wordplay, I did notice the evening sky had a marvelous hue and the silhouette of the urban horizon appeared particularly poignant. Ariko and many of her friends more spiritually au courant than myself believe we are entering a new astrological era, Aquarius, an age of lightness and grace. One can only hope the future will be better than the present.
I sit at my table in the afternoon listening to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, watching the light change the shadows on the wall while my Kai Ken, Monk, naps in a pool of sunbeams. I procrastinate, glance at Twitter, consume passages from a book at hand (rereading John Berger’s Ways of Seeing to remind myself to take nothing visualized for granted). One of the benefits of trying to get in the mental space to write is that cleaning is temporarily not a chore but something akin to escapism. So I get up, move around, counters and dining table becoming all the more luminescent. At the end of the year I tend to become obsessively organizational. Desktop screens, food pantries, closet space, musical libraries, photo book shelves, children’s books. Shortly after my son was born when I could no longer keep my home as clean and structured as it was, I created a filing system for my negatives and contact sheets so thorough that I can generally find a negative in about a minute, and the printing instructions in a few minutes. If the living room might be in a constant flux of order and chaos, at least this one small, vital part of my being is well arranged.
One resolution for the coming year is to organize my writing. I spent much of my twenties and thirties writing fiction, including two novels. I began both of them in the early 2000s when still in my twenties and spent the next decade annually rewriting, editing, fine-tuning, until I felt that I could no longer improve upon them. I had reached a dead-end getting them read in New York publishing circles, and all my free time flowed into photography and shortly thereafter, fatherhood. But it’s not just the novels— there are about two dozen short stories in which I’m no longer sure where the most recent edits are located, and I’m slightly disappointed in myself that I had not taken better care of the stories after all the effort and time put in.
I’m hoping that in a post-Trump/post-Covid world, people will realize that they have spent too much of their free time following the news, much of it terrible, and a lot of it ephemeral. I know personally I’m trying to reduce my absorption, especially upon waking. Most of my twenties and thirties I spent the first hour(s) of the morning reading books and am now actively trying to renew that habit. Perhaps with a mellowing in global events, we’ll give ourselves the benefit of returning to reading fiction. Not disengagement, mind you, but a break from torturous, masochistic doom-scrolling. (Full disclosure: this newsletter has a tardy release because during the process of editing, there was an attempted insurrection against my country’s democracy. Man…)
I’ve not yet given up on these stories. I think the only greater patience in writing a novel is the patience required to find the right champion in published form. The closest that one of my novels came to being released was the summer of 2003 when it made the rounds of all the big New York publishers. At the time I was on top of the world, believing my stage moment was at hand. Alas, the book was refused by every house. I still have the rejection slips: Penguin, Warner, Houghton-Mifflin, Harper Collins, and a half dozen others, collectively suggesting a glimpse of dream-come-true shores. I’m glad it was turned down. The book has improved so much after multiple rewrites. It’s good to fail sometimes. Failure gives you time for reflection. It’s never really over until you give up for good.
Ten days later: Like so many, I left Christmas present purchases and wrapping to the last minute, and getting all that done just in time, Tennbo was released from kindergarten for nearly three weeks beginning Christmas Eve. His big gift this year was a Fuji Instax mini 90, a midrange instant camera that he requested because of the double exposure option. I’m rather happy that this trick intrigues him. I often show him my projects so he understands what I’m working on and some of his favorite prints of mine are double-exposed. Right away, I taught him how to program this feature and we headed to the Imperial Palace to try the camera out.
We’re still learning the kinks regarding exposure, what background works well against what portraits, when to flash or not, but the first few days playing with the camera encouraged his engagement. I’d given him an old digital camera last summer, with which he tended to judge his picture-taking talents harshly, erasing his pictures shortly after shooting them. Having printed pictures in his hand immediately, he appreciated the finished, tangible object. It was *his* rather than something trapped behind a screen. Or so I’m assuming/projecting (haha).
There have been a few awkward exchanges. Tennbo has this strange predilection for collecting brochures and advertisements wherever he goes (when we visited Busan, South Korea in summer, 2019, he was picking up business cards all over town— turns out they were marketing drops for usurious loan sharks!). I’ve had to talk him out of photographing somewhat unlovely ads and redirect him towards nature. Slowly learning him to make his own work and not make pictures of something used to make people buy stuff. Mostly, he likes to photograph our dog, Monk, or have me photograph him with the dog. And I cannot lie: I’m enjoying it too, taking pictures of him with the camera. Already, the gifted camera helped me through a creative breakthrough regarding a project I’ve been long contemplating how to resolve.
We gave him ten boxes of Instant film with the camera (enough for 200 pictures). It’s been ten days and he’s gone through about three boxes already. Fortunately for him he has a birthday coming soon. Can’t recommend enough getting your child (or yourself) one of these instant cameras. There’s such a nostalgic element in their chemical makeup and the pleasure of instantaneous printing really motivates kids to use their eye creatively. That said, I’m still considering getting Tennbo a better digital camera so that he can experiment with composition more liberally than he is able with film cameras. I’ve heard that the Olympus Tough is a good one for children, as it has underwater features and handles being dropped rather well. It helps that we need to walk the dog every day, so I encourage him to bring his camera just in case…
ON SHARING ON SOCIAL MEDIA: I see a lot of folks posting their favorite photographs of the past year. As mentioned in the first newsletter, I did not take many photographs and spent most of the year printing. But even if it had been a prolific year for me I don’t think I would have shared many pictures. I feel it’s better to hold back rather than give too much. I believe an artist should cultivate a sense of mystery, so that when a publication or show happens, there is a real freshness to the work. Even when a book is out, it’s best that at least half the content remains off-line so that people who collect your book will have a more privileged relationship to your work than those who know you from Instagram or elsewhere. Instead of rushing your best work to be seen, you should consider which images most suitably represent your project, so that these photographs will do the leg work in garnering attention. They should be striking, of course, but also emblematic of the project as a whole. These decisions take time so you should never feel rushed to share on social networks.
I also feel that whenever I post an image to the internet (especially on social media) it no longer belongs to me, that a certain intimacy between that photograph and myself has been severed. From then on, it is shared, critiqued, “liked,” ignored, googled, and submerged within the internet ether.
(There is a whole other essay to be written on what should be the point of Instagram for the artist? When I joined the platform in summer, 2015, I began the first two to three years posting mostly only iPhone images, but increasingly, like many others, I’ve had to repurpose my profile as something more akin to a gallery, arranging darkroom prints in sets of three and announcing career milestones, as people really don’t seem to check artists’ websites anymore, folks often only knowing someone’s work online solely through his or her Instagram profile. I’ve relegated iPhone snaps to Stories and have set up an alternative profile strictly devoted to Tennbo. But going forward, I don’t know, as Facebook (which I’ve never joined) has changed its Terms & Conditions, making itself ever more invasive into our privacy. So until an alternative comes along and generates widespread adoption, I continue to view Instagram as a necessary evil in the meantime, an essential medium for myself and people who want to follow my progress as a photographer. But we can talk more about this another day.)
All that said, in the spirit of the moment, and because of the more intimate nature of the newsletter format, I thought I’d post here one of my favorite photographs of my son shot and printed last year. It’s from October, 2020, Halloween, of course. For much of the year, he was talking about going as his favorite Marx Brother, Harpo, and I’d tentatively volunteered to pal around as his Groucho, but Tennbo, a cinéaste in slow bloom, had recently discovered Kyonshi, a Chinese hopping zombie/vampire who was in a horror film franchise popular in Japan in the 1980s. He watched all three Kyonshi B-movie pictures in one week in October and had his mind made up. Among the princesses, fairies, & Star Wars get-ups in the short trick-or-treat outing organized by Ariko, Tennbo’s costume confused the children but worked like an inside joke among the grown-ups, recalling their own bygone experience of this zombie from their past.
In order for me to better task this newsletter I decided it should have two features every time I publish. What I’d like to do is talk about one of my photographs a little bit in depth, tentatively titled, Tales of the Print, as well as spotlight photo books that have really inspired me over the years, for now called A Best Loved Book. So without further ado:
This print, Rainbow Bridge, was recently shown by my gallery, Ibasho, as promotion for Photo London, and will also be published in the literary magazine, Grey Sparrow Press for its anniversary issue. I have a good head for dates when things happen in my life, but it’s not often I can remember an exact day, December 30th, 2010, almost exactly ten years ago. It’s a photograph of my wife, Ariko, on the bridge of a pond at Kyoto's Imperial Palace. I had been away from Japan for six months, traveling in the States, India, Thailand, and Cambodia. I'd been back less than a week when an unusually heavy snowfall had fallen overnight. The air was cold, so much colder than I'd been used to after almost six months of summer-like temperatures. We went for a long walk in the park-- the afternoon contained a tranquil, almost divine light-- Ariko was holding an rainbow-canopied umbrella, a family heirloom passed down to her from her grandmother.
The rainbow-hued umbrella was broken within a few years of the photograph. And on this beautiful bridge, which overlooks a small turtle pond and classic teahouse, are now ugly blue cones beseeching passersby in Japanese and English not to feed the animals. Cones admonishing against this and that as well as hourly public announcements in five languages reiterating these very basic rules litter the park, the work of zealous bureaucrats who obviously have no sense of atmosphere or aesthetics. I miss the old Palace Gardens, where there was intuited trust between the government and its people, all this signage and noise unnecessary.
This photograph was made with a Diana f+, which was my main camera for about three to four years. I shot hundreds of rolls on the Diana, many of them unprinted, which is something I’d like to get to later this winter, time permitting. I’ve long found this painterly aspect drawn by this flawed plastic lens and uneven light capture quite beautiful. All the photographs from Middle Life Notes were shot with a Diana, and a book I will publish late this year will be all Diana prints as well. At some point I’d like to get back into shooting with this camera again. Honestly, I’d like to just get back to shooting, period. Winter during a pandemic is not a very inspiring time to be outside and it has not been easy to photograph with a dog pulling on the leash when I compose.
A Best Loved Book: The first book I’d like to share is Leo Rubinfien’s A Map of the East published by Godine in 1992. I’d never heard of Rubinfien until a few years ago when I did a talk show with my Japanese publisher, Naonori Katoh, and he had brought the book to the event because he said my first book, Sunlanders, reminded him of Rubinfien’s. I could understand the connection, as we share national backgrounds, a vivid color palette, writerly instincts, and a helpless, romantic nostalgia for the impermanence of landscapes and life patterns lost in the slowly rising tides of Western consumerism and mass market capitalism.
Rubenfien spent several years of his childhood in Japan in the early 1960s, which left an indelible impression. Returning to the East for the first time in 1979, he had been “sickened” by how much the country had changed. A Map of the East contains more than 100 photographs shot over a period of ten years— mostly in the 1980s— in around ten countries, primarily Japan, China, and Thailand, to a lesser extent, the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma, and Vietnam and Hong Kong. Asia in the 1980s was a period of intense economic growth: the first postwar backpackers were hitting Southeast Asia, China had begun modernizing its industry and a massive decades-long construction binge, and Japan was in the final stretch of its economic miracle. This was not Rubenfien’s idyllic childhood memory, but a continent in fast-paced transition.
How much perspective matters! I was a child growing up in Los Angeles at the time of Rubenfien’s peregrinations, so to my eyes, wow, how marvelously retro it all looked back then! What an amazing feeling it must have been to wander this region at the earliest point of contemporary tourism, before discount airlines, the Internet, and everyone photographing everything for Instagram! I’ve been traveling for about twenty years— so before everyone had an iPhone in their pocket— and I too have my lamentations about lost places, including architecture (ubiquitous corporate signage and modern buildings replacing traditional ones with substandard materials and unimaginative design), dress (again corporate ubiquity of the biggest fashion conglomerates), and way of life, in which, so many of us live our lives on-screen rather than on the street. Like Rubenfien, I’m not getting that world back. It’s gone.
Because Rubenfien titled his book A Map of the East, it needed direction and he organized the photo book as a journey from the city (modernity) to the countryside (tradition). Consequently, the earlier photographs are more Tokyo and Hong Kong, the later images Burma and Indonesia especially. As Donald Richie writes in the book’s afterword:
“Leo Rubenfien’s map does not intend to show how Asia looks— how the place merely looked…The photographs do not illustrate a world we already know, but bring into being a poetic one which did not exist before, the photographer’s experience of Asia.”
I cannot improve upon Richie’s eloquence, only to note that he is exactly right, that Rubenfien’s Asia is essentially his, just as any book attempting cross-cultural conception will be uniquely personal. There is no reality, only subjectivity, and that every person who sees to make a work of art out of his experiences in the journey will be honoring not universal facts, but personal truths. I felt such a deep connection to Rubenfien’s book—that I was part of a lineage we shared— that sleuthed his New York address and wrote him a a friendly letter introducing myself and offering to send him a copy of Sunlanders, but alas, the letter was returned to me stamped “undeliverable.” It now sits in a drawer somewhere, unread.
PRINT SALES: Just want to say thank you to those who bought prints that I put up for sale in the #artistsupportpledge. If anyone reading this missed this announcement, should you scroll down the previous newsletter to the bottom, you can find the five that are for sale. One of them, Empyreal Efflorescence, is nearly sold out. Just a reminder that this is an edition of ten and when they’re done, they’re finished. You’ve got a collector’s item.
LATELY READING: The other day I started reading Beatrice Abbott’s Selected Writings. I’d never heard of Abbott until a friend had gifted me the book. Abbott was a social realist best known for photographing New York City in the 1930s. Selected Writings is a charming handbook containing two manuals on how to take good pictures (both books were written in the 1940s). Abbott has a rather charming, personal prose style. I’m about 35 pages in and there’s not much that I had not either read or intuited on my own before, but it’s nice to refresh yourself of some basic ideas regarding photography. Early into the book she has rather relevant advice for shooting the landscapes closest to you, somewhat applicable during our current pandemic:
“In the end, you will find greater happiness in photography if you study familiar scenes and activities around you, the things you know best. Subjects you know inside out from daily personal association gives photographs greater originality and authority than casual, hasty snapshots of subjects, the ‘feel’ of which you cannot convey from lack of knowledge. There is no need to imitate the photographs of other photographers; let your own intimate knowledge of homely, living themes speak for itself.”
It really is quite easy to take for granted our everyday environment. So easy to overlook the typical, mundane beauty around us, whether it be just the way the light falls on certain street corners at different times of day or the maneuvers of our loved ones. Stuck in Kyoto for months on end, the only time I’m really getting out is walking the dog. Exploring different neighborhood routes I’m finding architectural still life scenes more intriguing than I once did. These are quieter photographs than I’ve made in the past, but satisfying to shoot. I’ve no idea if they will fit in a larger project someday, but it feels fine to work with what is at hand.
Abbott talks candidly about the difficulty of shooting the busy streets of New York with a tripod camera and the conundrum involved in photographing one of her most famous images, “New York Stock Exchange:”
“I had to do considerable preparation to coordinate all the elements I wanted— crowds in the street, good lighting, American flag. It developed that the flag is flown only on holidays. But holidays are like Sundays: there are no people in the financial district, and human activity had become an essential motif in my hoped-for picture. Then began a correspondence with the president of the Stock Exchange, to persuade him to issue orders that the flag should be down on a given bright morning at a certain hour. Light changes far more rapidly than you imagine, and in this case by the time the flag had been raised the light effect which had struck the building only for twenty minutes was gone! The whole job had to be done over another day. Finally I ‘got’ New York Stock Exchange… Certainly, no ‘accident’ produced this photograph.
She calls her kind of photography “straight” or “point of view,” one of those artists in the Walker Evans school that came of age in the Depression-era 1930s, intending to show the world as it is, without frills or flourishes. It’s rather contrary to my style of working, one of composing and arranging not as things are but in the service of nostalgia, dreams and surrealism. But to my mind it’s all the same in the end, utilizing unique personal aesthetics in order to arrive at a higher truth that makes life worth living.
Along with Abbott (and The Unabridged Edgar Allan Poe) I’m reading Jose Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. If it sounds like I’m going through a religious phase you have not read Saramago. An atheist and a communist who also happens to be one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century, Gospel reimagines the life of Jesus as a fallible person of self-interest and God as a manipulative autocrat. It’s probably blasphemous to the converted, but for a secularist like me Saramago is merely humanizing all the characters in the New Testament. Instead of haloed, sanctified legends we have characters painted in human brushstrokes. They’re fragile, frivolous, and flawed. If you’ve heard of Saramago at all, it’s probably because Hollywood adapted his novel, Blindness. Another book relevant to our time, it’s sort of a dystopian pandemic story, in that slowly, and then exponentially, nearly everyone loses their sense of sight. The very few who can still see exploit the weakness of the masses to secure a new and violent hierarchy. Saramago explores the full range of human nature, its best and absolute worst, in an unnamed city. The book is terrifying.
For the first time in four years I made a list of books read over the past year. Another list I’m putting together is a list of underrated films that you probably heard of but have never seen. I’m not sure if it should be 75 or 100 titles, as some of the films I feel obliged to rewatch to see if they hold up (and it’s just really hard to find the time). I recently read somewhere that research studies reveal your strongest emotional connections to music happen when you’re 14 years old. For me, my early 20s was a revelatory period in cinema, in which I really fell deeply in love with auteur works from the 60s and 70s, particularly those of Ingmar Bergman and Hal Ashby. I despised showmen like Steven Spielberg. Now, older, watching Jaws, E.T., and Close Encounters of the Third Kind with my son, I rather enjoy his movies (though I continue to feel Spielberg should chill more on using film scores for manipulating our emotions). On the other hand, regarding literature, some writers have not aged well with me. I really *got* Hemingway as a young man, but now find nearly everything he ever wrote unbearably pompous. It’s pretty rare, that work of art that resonates with you throughout your life. Sometimes I’m a bit envious of people who have always loved the first Star Wars franchise, which of course, in my twenties, I abhorred. Older now, more forgiving, I can enjoy it like I did as a kid in the movie theater nearly forty years ago.
Thank you for reading. Wishing you a Happy New Year and a safe journey onwards.