Friends,
It’s been a while. Summer has hit us pretty strong here in Kyoto. It’s hot and humid, the rainy season persistent. Haven’t seen the sun in approximately a week and dog walks are rushed through drizzles between downpours. We’re fewer than two weeks away from an Olympics that nobody really wants. Here in Japan we’re entering a fourth State of Emergency, “emergencies” that have been toothless and meaningless. Balancing good news with bad, the personal and the general, scales tipped one way, then another, trying for a balanced outlook that measures apprehension against anticipation.
In a world of such uncertainties, it is good to step back from global developments and focus on the personal. I wasn’t able to compose monthly missives for May and June because of being caught up in life. Life for the past two months (perhaps six months?twelve months?) has been lived in my color darkroom. As I mentioned before, I became caught up in reprinting all the photographs for my new book, The Sniper Paused So He Could Wipe His Brow, because I believed I could articulate my sentiments in color that much better. Once I had everything ready I had to send the prints to Barcelona so that these originals might be used as “proofs” to double-check the colors against the book’s pages as they were being printed. Normally, I would have traveled to the printing site to confirm firsthand the qualities of the color and depth of light are what I wanted, but alas, COVID, a two-week quarantine, and the all-in-all complexity of international travel logistics precluded my being there. But my publisher, Marie, and designer, Laure-Anne, attended and they had my prints to corroborate shades of magenta and hues of yellow, Skyping with me regularly as each section of the book was printed.
Rather than the publisher FedExing the prints back to me I had them sent to IBASHO, my gallery in Antwerp, and set about making prints for my show in Santa Barbara, California. Astrologically, I’m double-Virgo, born in late August under the Virgin’s Sign and my moon rising sign is Virgo, which suggests I should be pretty good at record-keeping. Since I began darkroom printing, I’ve been keeping meticulous notes on nearly every print I’ve ever produced, with specific instructions on color settings, f-stops, and burning and dodging. These notes aren’t always helpful: a few years ago we changed lightbulbs in the enlarger, which for some reason threw off all the color settings I’d recorded. But because I’d printed everything recently for the book, it was a pretty straightforward operation. The tricky element is that gallery prints need to be absolutely perfect, not a speck of dust evident. Printing for a book, this is not so much a necessity, since small blemishes can be PhotoShopped easily enough. But not with gallery prints. So lots of eagle-eyeing negatives, air-gun blowing tiny motes, saying silent prayers in the dark, as light-sensitive glossy paper was exposed, hoping the fifth time’s the charm.
The show in Santa Barbara will be at Gray Space in Downtown. It’s a rather large space, needing to fill two walls of twenty feet, another measuring twenty-five, so the curator, Elliot Avi Gitler, and myself, decided on thirty-one prints (a birthday number, lucky, fortuitous perhaps). The curator has the prints up here, where you’ll also find a video made by friend, Jimmy Pham, when he visited me in February, 2018 and talked me into making a short documentary about my process. If you’re in Santa Barbara this summer the other shows being curated look great too.
At this point it does not bode well for me attending the opening. Roundtrip flights are nearly $2200US, about triple the normal fare to Los Angeles. The conundrum is I’m quite limited by flight selection, needing to return via Kansai International so that I can quarantine at home for two weeks rather than in a tiny hotel room in Shinjuku (once you clear customs in Japan you’re not allowed to use public transportation, including domestic flights, and the fourteen days’ isolation is strictly enforced even for the fully vaccinated). There remains the slim chance that Japan produces vaccine passports before I depart, which would make the journey viable. It’s not just the opening I’d like to attend, but it would be lovely to see friends and family in Santa Barbara, where I spent my college years. Never for a moment in the middle/late 1990s did I imagine I would return in twenty-plus years for a solo show with my color darkroom prints and a book launch with pictures made from all over the world. Back then, horizons were much smaller: a night on the town, money in my pocket, a book to read under the sun. Salad days, a time that we think will last forever but doesn’t and then we spend many more years looking back at that faraway time nostalgically. Still, I’m happy to be where I’m at, especially as it’s beyond what I’d ever imagined for myself as twenty-year-old pup.
Book News: I’m very pleased to report that The Sniper Paused So He Could Wipe His Brow has been very well received at the Maison E’toile at the Arles Photography Fair. Once again, if not for COVID and travel restrictions I would have loved to have gone to Arles this year for the book’s official launch. I was actually in Arles four summers ago showing the project’s prints to gallerists, so to have the book launched there feels like something of a small victory. I imagine the festival is subdued this year but a pleasure nonetheless. So many books and exhibitions and people in town.
I’ve still not seen or held the book myself, but hopefully will within the month. It seems there are some issues with some of the books’ binding, so it might be a while before we can get orders out. And my other book, Amoeba, is being slowly printed in Tokyo as it takes a considerable time for Risograph printing ink to dry. Moreover, as all the books are being hand-bound, the labor-intensive quality of production has entailed some delays. I’m hoping that by August, all will be resolved and I can devote the next newsletter to both new books.
Paris Photo & the Victoria Albert Photography Center: I received some very good news this week. My gallery in Antwerp, IBASHO, will present my prints at the Grand Palais for Paris Photo. It’s a wonderful development, as Paris Photo remains the most important gathering for galleries and collectors. I visited in November, 2018, and it was an experience. Much of the world’s best photography assembled in an expansive, beautiful Beaux-Arts exhibition hall. The quality and quantity of the prints is overwhelming. You need several days of perusal to properly visit.
At the same time as Paris Photo, the Victoria & Albert Photography Center will include my first photo book, Sunlanders, in a major group show called “Known and Strange: Photographs from the Collection,” which includes fifty prints and twenty books from the 1970s to the present day. V&A Photography Center is one of the world’s great collectors of photo books and prints, so it’s a real honor to have Sunlanders among the twenty photo books available for viewing. All I can hope is the world is in good shape four months from now and we can gather together.
Tales of the Print: While I’ve made contact sheets for all my 35mm negatives, I’ve not done so for most of my medium format sheets. Most of them were shot with a square frame so there are only twelve photos per roll. When I was preparing Sniper, I utilized a light board, eyeballing each negative with a loupe magnifier. Sometimes it’s easy enough to pass over an image if it looks out of focus or “messy.” But printing for my book I attempted a number of images I was unsure about just in case. And this photograph from a grotto in Vang Vieng, Laos, in 2009 was one I was very glad I followed through with.
The picture— the light effect created by liberal dodging of my hands between the enlarger lens and the exposed paper— is of my friend, Rob Judges, who was a best bud in my Tokyo years (we did a lot of DJ parties back in the day and used to stroll Tokyo parks with Rob’s boom box playing T. Rex or the Faces or some reggae jams or something else finger-snappable). I haven’t been able to make a lot of overseas trips with friends, but in August, 2009, Rob rendezvoused with me in Bangkok and we journeyed to Laos, spending about twelve very hot, humid days traveling through Vientiane, Vang Vieng, and Luang Prabang. I don’t remember very much from the trip, just able to recall snippets: we hung out with monks and rented bikes and swam in rivers and drank plenty of Beer Lao and made “Best of” music lists. I dug out my journal from that time but there’s very little written down. That’s usually the case when I’m living in the moment.
I want the photo books I create to have a narrative thread, so I recognized in this photograph of Rob a quality valuable to the story. Perhaps because I spent much of my adult life as a traveler, I’m attracted to stories of journeys undertaken. So when I sequenced the book, I saw the photographs revealing a two-fold movement: darkness to light, void to understanding. This photograph of Rob comes very early in the book as I found it allegorical to Plato’s hero in the cave who must go out into the world to learn the act of being. It’s the sort of journey we all need to make eventually. And if we’re attentive and open-hearted, it’s a trip that never ends, that we lead our entire lives.
A Well-Loved Book: I discovered Roger Steffens’ the family acid, perusing book shelves at London’s Photographer’s Gallery in the summer of 2015. Always very receptive to art, culture, and lifestyle generated in the 1970s, I was immediately drawn to the book’s hippie rockandroll traveler mystique. The book begins with a few photographs of Saigon in the late 1960s, but they’re something of a red herring because almost immediately, you’re far away from that, in a countercultural place with the fashions, the drugs, the festivals, the characters suggestive to that era. Steffens was an amateur photographer who shot a lot of color slide film. He was also something of a Zelig-like figure, for besides being involved in his generational conflict, he seemed to have known everybody and there are photos of antiwar activist Ron Kovic, photographer Tim Page, Richard Boyle (Oliver Stone’s Salvador), Peter Tosh, and a number of other reggae legends (incidentally, I recently viewed the Bob Marley documentary Who Shot the Sheriff where Steffens is one of the prominent historians talking about Marley and Jamaican history in the film— a man of many talents and many lives, Steffens was a reggae DJ for Santa Monica’s KCRW in the 1980s). Steffens wanders landscapes like Stonehenge, Marrakesh, the California Redwoods. Often, there are people tripping out of their heads, but he seems to have had the presence of mind to make a good photograph out of these occasions. While the vibe is straightforwardly identifiable, it’s almost always more archetypal than stereotypical. And there’s an intimacy that makes all the chaos feel interconnected.
What makes the book really delightful besides the evoked atmosphere is Steffers’ success with double-exposures and other experimental techniques. One of my favorite images in the book is this portrait of Ron Kovic, in which Steffers had exposed the slide to an open flame. I’ve done that myself for a few negatives and a bit of caution is warranted.
The book has a wonderful origin story as well. Steffens shoeboxed his photographs for many years, but his adult children discovered them and dazzled by the adventures he enjoyed, began posting them to Instagram. The account took off and the book has long since sold out (used editions now sell for hundreds of dollars— note to self: always buy the book if in doubt. It’s usually a worthwhile investment). I love the fact that his kids were so charmed by their father’s life that their social media savvy helped cement his legend. Without their adulation, there is no Instagram following, no book, and less inspiration in the world. One can only hope one’s children can afford you the sort of respect and diligence due a well-lived life.
Recently Read: Probably the best thing on the Internet I’ve read in a while was this Harpers essay titled “The Anxiety of Influencers” by Barrett Swanson. It’s a hilarious, scathing, and ultimately sad exploration of the online life we’ve come to inhabit, our egos moored to follower counts and vulnerable to the dictatorship of the algorithm. “Social media influencer,” a career that did not even exist a decade ago, is now the aspiration of 54% of Americans between the ages of thirteen and thirty-eight. The writer spends several weeks at a “Tiktok mansion” (aka “content house”) with a group of preening 21-year-old boys aspiring to be super-influencers in a Beverly Hills mansion called The Clubhouse. The kids have no interest in college or real world skills acquisition. Instead, they loll around their luxurious settings, regurgitating fake news, scripting cheesy dance moves, and obsessing over blue check verifications and follower counts. With enough social media clout they can be paid $50K for a 15-second Tiktok post. They really don’t have anything to say and go to great lengths saying nothing. It’s all about being “real,” but real about what? Whether it’s Tiktok or Instagram, a concept of invented “authenticity” has cultivated our attention. Swanson remarks on these digital natives:
“they’ve never known a self that wasn’t subject to anonymous virtual observation. And so it may well be that whatever we mean by “authentic” here isn’t the standard definition that Rousseau and the Romantics first fathomed—a true effusion of your unvarnished personality—but is “authentic” in the sense that their identities have been made in perfect, unconscious sympathy with whatever their mob of online followers has deemed agreeable and inoffensive.
While everything might seem dandy in these carefully curated, glossy accounts, the kids are not all right. They agonize over the ever-present passing of their ephemeral fame, all the while obsessing over content creation until that end ultimately arrives. They’re kids, barely into adulthood, with very little life experience to draw from, fragile egos tiptoeing on the edge of a nervous breakdown. And they’re hardly outliers. The author, an English professor at University of Wisconsin, Madison, writes that recently 24 out of 26 of his creative writing students wrote of suicidal ideation.
Swanson’s biggest takeaway from his experience is that the influencer economy is a microcosm of the greater one: that we no longer value ourselves according to personal integrity or virtue, but our relevance depends on the platforms we use to cultivate our personas. We’ve branded ourselves because that’s how the 21st century market operates:
“Call it the Yelpification of the academy. Call it the retail logic of higher education. I mention this only to observe that if we sneer and snicker at influencers’ desperate quest to win approval from their viewers, it might be because they serve as parodic exaggerations of the ways in which we are all forced to bevel the edges of our personalities and become inoffensive brands. It is a logic that extends from the retailer’s smile to the professor’s easy A to the politician’s capitulation to the co-worker’s calculated post to the journalist’s virtue-signaling tweet to the influencer’s scripted photo. The angle of our pose might be different, but all of us bow unfailingly at the altar of the algorithm.”
I might be in my middle forties, but the article nevertheless struck a nerve. Obviously I don’t relate to these kids, but I worry about relevance, about being read and seen, about mattering. I feel more concerned with a personal legacy than branding, but are the lines blurring? Am I any better than these kids because I abstain from hashtags? Or because I have the “discipline” to go a month without posting? It shouldn’t make a difference to a person like myself— a grown man with considerable life experience— how many “likes” a photo receives, and that it would be entirely foolhardy to judge the value of a picture through the whims of stutter-step thumbs motioning through the endless stream. But I do think about it sometimes and in my darker moments I wonder if all the work I’m doing is just shouting into the void. I suppose that’s in our humanity, that sinking feeling of irrelevance: honors, achievements, everything fleeting, easily and finally lost. At times like this I feel perspective becomes all the more important to protect our well-being. I’m rereading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and there’s a striking passage illustrating our existence on Earth:
“He made them imagine that the earth— four thousand six hundred million years old— was a forty-six-year-old woman…It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty-five— just eight months ago— when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman’s life.”
Chacko, the uncle describing the Earth Woman to his sister’s twins, informs them “everything we are and ever will be are just a twinkle in her eye.” Rather than shatter me with the uselessness of everything, Roy’s metaphor reminds me that the day-to-day stuff that distracts and potentially destroys is only worth the importance to which we attribute it. The darkness of the void is always there, but we can look away. And it might not mean anything to the moment’s Influencers or the Earth Woman Herself, but the life you’re living matters to you and the people you love and who love you back.
Be well, everyone.