Friends,
It’s nearly spring and the blossoms have been lovely. Because I have a dog who loves rolling in the leaves and sniffing any and every earthy smell I try to walk him through the Imperial Palace at least a few days a week. The palace grounds themselves take up only a very small amount of real estate and most of the space is open to the public. Walking paths cut through wide lawns pass under varieties of tree life, including plenty of cherry and maple species so that early spring and autumn seasons are remarkably colorful environments. The peach and plum blossoms that came in February held up well in our temperate, soft winter, and some of the sakura trees are already approaching full bloom. Because of the unusual circumstances precipitated by the pandemic, this (hopefully) will be the last chance to enjoy the city’s spring bloom peacefully. I’m cherishing the tranquility, while at the same time hoping the world will be safe enough so that in a year’s time, this intimacy with the blossoms will feel something like a quiet interlude that I am occasionally strangely nostalgic for.
The big news for us personally is my son’s graduation from kindergarten. We were quite lucky to find the right school for him, as he loved the teachers and many of the students, and was always happy to stay late in case we were busy with work. The staff was very good at encouraging him at play and drawing, and he was often coming home with craftwork cleverly composed of sundry things. The school was in a quiet corner of Gion, close to the city’s eastern hills. A grassy square dominates the school’s territory, and all of the wood-paneled classrooms face out to the lawn. There’s a beautiful canal lined with willow trees that runs from the main street to the school. I will miss these bicycle rides together, as well as visiting the shopping arcade nearby where Tennbo buys candy items for ¥10 (about ten cents!) and plays 1970s-era board games with the aging proprietor. On the way home, we often stop at a poultry butcher, Tennbo being a connoisseur of their chicken croquette, the proprietors always happy to see us.
I know he will have fond memories of the school and that eventually he will feel sentimental passing through the neighborhood. The school is run by Chio-in, one of Kyoto’s largest temple complexes. A few Sundays ago he put on his school uniform and we visited the temple. He proudly led the way, guiding us to the different buildings. From the east end of the complex, there’s a stairway into the hills and we walked under the trees, photographing him in his school uniform.
Next month, Tennbo will start primary school at Ittoen. It’s outside Kyoto, a fifteen minutes subway ride east, in the neighboring town of Yamashina. He’ll take the metro with some older kids we know who also live in the city and attend the school. The classes are small— his room will have ten students, as opposed to the local elementary school ten minutes walk with its 35 students in one classroom. As someone who seems to enjoy his teacher’s attentions, this will be good for him. Because of the school’s Buddhist origins, all the children do zazen, fifteen minutes’ morning meditation. They also learn to do acts of charity and community service. We like the school’s philosophy and that it puts an emphasis on character on par with education. It’s a big change for him and I hope he finds joy and friendship in this new environment.
AMOEBA: The publisher, Neutral Colors, beyond publishing books, also puts out a magazine, and because of some last-minute edits, its staff has been swamped with getting the magazine out. Consequently, publication of Amoeba has been postponed until sometime in April or early May. As I mentioned in the previous newsletter, the book will have a small handmade print inset into the back cover. This meant on my end producing at least 300 small prints, which seemed daunting at first. And I spent a half-day tinkering with the enlarger and experimenting with paper. The dimensions were about 10.6 x 6.8cm, and I had to really improve my skills at tearing paper into small pieces. I’ve been printing for years, but had never really been good at severing paper into clean, serrated quarters. Because of necessity, I finally managed to up my skill level.
Some of the prints had some light leaks, darkening the prints, which I sent to the publisher as well, since the magic of darkroom printing is the individuality of the print itself, especially because no dodge/burn is exactly the same. I decided to make 312 photographs just in case there were any problems, but when I’d finished and was double-check counting the prints, I noticed that the first fifty images I printed were a bit too red and insufficiently exposed. This was because on the second day of printing I decided the prints looked better if I made them a little bit darker. It was clear to me that I had to dispose the first fifty and print another fifty with the more attractive exposure. It was another few hours’ work, but by this juncture I had established a rhythm fast enough that the effort was no trouble at all. The publisher, Katoh-san, and his staff will crop each image and place them on the back cover.
They sent me a very rough handmade dummy with images printed out from the computer, and the book looks great. It has a nice feel in your hands. They did an excellent job in complementing the long essay with the photographs. I’m going up to Tokyo next month for the printing to make sure the colors turn out fine, and the book will be bound shortly thereafter. I’ve noted everyone who has contacted me for a signed copy, and if anyone else is interested, please be in touch and I’ll reserve an edition to sign and send out. If you’d like to know more about the book, I wrote about it in greater detail in my previous newsletter here.
Tales of the Print: In the first newsletter last December, I announced a print sale of five 8 x10 darkroom prints shot with a Toy Camera, including this photograph, “Citizens & Contours.” It was shot in Tottori, the small narrow stretch of sand dunes in the rural hinterlands. Those of you familiar with my books probably recognize the landscape from the cover image of Sunlanders, as well as the photograph in Middle Life Notes that folds out near the beginning of the book. I was extremely fortunate to take these photographs in just an hour’s visit to the dunes. So this brief story is about fortune, because so much about photography is being lucky.
Tottori was the last stop during a four-day trip to western Honshu in January, 2014. I had spent time in Matsue, Adachi Bijitsukan, and Izumo Taisha, among a few other little-known towns. I was planning on taking a bus to the dunes, but arriving at the train station I happened to discover a small stand where the city was sponsoring three-hour sightseeing taxis to foreigners for only ¥1000. Because of this opportunity, I was able to visit the sand dunes much faster than had I taken the bus. Afterwards, the driver took me to Tottori Castle and I was able to wander the ruins of that hilltop fortress as the sun set and the winter wind howled, feeling confident that I had something all right in my rolls. I’d no idea that what I had would become the cover of my first photo book.
I long to return to Tottori, not only to photograph, but to just wander the dunes with my family and offer gratitude for what the place has given me. And if you are interested in cinema, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman of the Dunes, is one of the strangest, most beautiful films I’ve seen in Japan. Based on the novel by Kōbō Abe, it’s about an entomologist who becomes something of a concubine to a widow living at the bottom of a sand pit. The cinematographer, Hiroshi Segawa, utilizes Tottori’s geography to create this feeling of beautiful yet menacing claustrophobia. The film is worth an afternoon of your attention.
I have sold five prints of “Citizens & Contours.” It is an edition of ten, so if you would like one please be in touch. It is discounted from my normal print prices to 200 Euros. The size is 8 x 10 inches, and this is the only edition that will ever be available. I found I was able to affordably ship the prints overseas with regular mail so long as the prints were protected with a hard cover case. Thanks again to everyone who has bought one.
A Best Loved Book: When I’m printing in my studio and feel an urge to randomly pull a photo book from my shelves, I often find myself returning to Hanayo’s Magma (published by akaaka in 2008). It’s quite a simple book, and despite perusing it dozens, if not hundreds of times, I’ve never really discerned a narrative in it. It’s one of those books that’s defined by a distinct atmosphere of color, which is just fine.
Hanayo is a former geisha and TV personality who moved to Berlin in the 1990s (she’s since moved back to Japan). She has a daughter, Tenko, around five to eight years old at the time the images were made, playing with friends, doing ballet, and experiencing the artistic universe that her mother inhabited. The photographs are a mix of bucolic scenes of free spirit nudes on hillsides and bathers at seaside locales, as well as Old World architecture in dusk, often with solar flares tagging windows and bushes like spiritual stamps. In a sense, the book feels like a paean to childhood, where a girl discovers her awareness of the world in lakes, beaches, and the shelter of shaded trees.
Hanayo shoots with an Olympus Pen D, a half-frame film camera, which means the negatives are very small (but you get twice as many images per roll). Printed large, the images have a very gritty, unconventional color scheme (some of the colors are really eye popping, and I wonder if some of it is a result of expired film or perhaps darkroom experimentation). The print quality is beautiful and there is a sense of mystery to the characters in the book. Who are these people? Is one of them the father? Shouldn’t I get out of the darkroom myself and take my kid to the seaside?! It calls forth in the reader a nostalgia for summer excursions in nature, hot days, time meaningless or just standing still. Beyond the beautiful colors and atmosphere, that’s probably why I like the book so much: because it reminds me of the joys of being alive, and witnessing my son discovering the world and the role of his self in it.
LATELY READING: Because I was born in the middle 1970s I figured I ought to read Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, since I am of that generation and it seems relevant to know the literary provenance of one’s era. But I couldn’t get very far into it before giving up. Like his other novels I’ve read, for all the witty nomenclatures Coupland invents, I found the book mostly overwritten and distracted, and the three main characters’ diffident sarcasm unsympathetic. That said, there were a few nice passages in the book, especially this one: “Either our lives become stories or there is no way to get through them.” Amen to that.
I’m a big fan of rereading books, and in the spirit of that sentiment, I reread Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which I last encountered in my early twenties. It has an interesting structure in that the “novel” consists of seven stories, connected not through characters, but via the thematic exploration of the power of totalitarianism to control memory and dictate the narrative of historical processes.
Kundera fled his native Czechoslovakia for Paris in the mid-1970s. His métier as an artist is Cold War dissident overwhelmed by the burden of memory, as well as something like that of an outlaw lover. As an émigré in the West, he became a literary darling for his experimental narratives examining the suppression of thought and free expression in his homeland. His writings are also often surreal, intellectual, and intimately sexual.
In Kundera’s stories lovers’ phone lines are tapped and their letters are confiscated by spies, historians disappear never to be heard from again, and photographs that everyone has seen are retouched during Communist Party purges. Characters say things over dinner dates like: “I have come to realize that the problem of power is the same everywhere, in your country and ours, East and West. We must reject the very principle of power and reject it everywhere.” It’s an interesting book to read now with the world’s broken informational ecosystem as it is. Soviet-era Prague is the sort of nightmare scenario we might slip into or perhaps for some, already have, in which nothing is real anymore.
I finished Kundera’s book right before Adam Curtis released his new eight-hour documentary Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World produced by BBC. As difficult it is to sum up Kundera’s novel, Curtis’ documentary is even more so. In this sprawling six-part series, Curtis summarizes the fates of Britain, the US, Russia, and China from the end of the 1950s through today, and the myriad paths these nations took. There’s a lot to process, but essentially the troubles with each of these countries is failure to reckon with the brutalities of their past (for the U.K. empire, for the U.S. slavery), the demise of sixties’ revolutions leading to the rise of individualism (which also happens when the Soviet Union disintegrates and Deng Xiaoping modernizes China’s economy— the belief in collectivism in both countries giving way to emotions of greed and envy inherent in mass consumerism), and the failure of the Internet to liberate society, which instead of bringing humanity closer together has instead worsened our alienation, the proliferation of fake news especially distorting our shared reality.
But rather than focusing on the major figures of the modern era, like US presidents or Soviet premiers, Curtis takes a more intimate look at this history, telling the stories of lesser-known figures like Michael de Freitas, a.k.a. Michael X, a British gangster-turned-revolutionary decrying British racism; Eduard Limonov, a Soviet dissident poet exiled to New York in the 1970s who returns to Russia in the 21st century proclaiming a new nationalist myth; and Kerry Thornley, the American godfather of conspiracy theories, who penned fake letters to Playboy Magazine, planting the idea that the Illuminati was a secret cabal controlling society. There’s also the Sackler family, now infamous for Oxycontin, but who first got rich selling Valium in the 1960s to anxious housewives feeling miserable in the suburbs, and BF Skinner, a behavioral psychologist, who suggested human behavior can be controlled by government and corporation once enough data is collected on their movements.
Curtis jumps around a lot, between societies and generations, but somehow avoids incoherence (though it can be very difficult afterwards to make sense of all the big ideas). But what I like so much about this and his other documentaries is his use of archival footage juxtaposed with popular music. Adam Curtis has really good taste, and he’ll often play Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, the Specials or Skeeter Davis against some socio-economic event, lingering what feels too long on an insignificant moment, amplifying one of his theses, which is that history is made up of accumulated small, yet poignant moments. The rise of individualism and the failure of governments and corporations to provide meaning beyond consumerism is a theme Curtis has explored in other films, utilizing different moments and different characters. I discovered him about 15 years ago when someone recommended The Century of Self, the story of how Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays invents Madison Avenue marketing, and how advertising rewired our brains to focus on what we desire rather than what we need.
It’s almost complex enough to dream of a superhero. For his birthday in January, I bought Tennbo the complete Batman TV series starring Adam West and Burt Ward. I watched it on Nick at Nite as a kid in the 1980s, and I’m enjoying it now for different reasons. I love the show’s camp, especially Burgess Meredith as the Penguin and Frank Gorshin as the Riddler. The sixties’ TV colors are wild, the side public service announcements are amusing, and the dialogue is absurdly comical. The shows’ narratives always have the same arc: they are two parts, the first episodes ending on a cliffhanger, Batman and Robin looking done for so that we must tune in tomorrow “at the same bat time, same bat channel.” They always free themselves, usually through some silly tool in Batman’s utility belt, and eventually apprehend their nemesis. You can count on the happy ending. Watching Adam Curtis’ films about our contemporary society and its very uncertain future reminds me that it’s no wonder since the terrors of 9/11 and the ensuing numbness of forever wars like in Afghanistan, comic book superhero films have been thriving. We live in confusing times, feelings of rage, mistrust, and incomprehension flowing without end on social media. And no Bat Phone to dial up a clean, tidy solution to it all. So we put on the DVDs instead and watch the good guys beat the bad guys to a nice clean finish.
Oh Sean, I love these rides you take us on!! So much better than 280 characters!!