film, light, water

light

March 15, 2024

The image below is a continuation of the little experiment that I’d started  a couple of years ago to photograph light itself. At this stage I am not sure whether the experiment will evolve into a series.

This is early morning light over the sea at Encounter Bay looking to the right of  Wright Island across to the Coorong. It  is from the winter of 2022, and it  was  made whilst I  was  walking along Jetty Rd from  Rosetta Head in Victor Harbor on a poodlewalk with Kayla.  The image  was made with Franke & Heidecke’s archaic and retro  Rolleiflex TLR camera.

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architecture, people, Tokyo

coded/uncoded Japanese photography

February 25, 2024

Whilst staying in Tokyo I started doing some research about postwar Japanese photography and what has been called the lost decades after the collapse of the 1980s bubble economy. Since photography doesn’t happen in a vacuum I was trying to gain a sense of the world I’d stepped into as a tourist and a photographer. Very little is known about the history of postwar Japanese photography in Australia. I was there prior to the release of OpenAI’s video generator Sora that can create realistic footage up to a minute long that adheres to a user’s instructions on both subject matter and style. It is latest in the AI technologies that summarize and processes human generated information (AIs such as Midjourney and Dall-E are already replacing Shutterstock-type photography).

It was obvious that historically speaking photography in Japan was more or less photography in Tokyo. Historically, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (it became the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum after 2016) played a central role in establishing photography, not only as a genre of modern and contemporary art in Japan, but also as a subject of academic study. Its initial canon of photography constructed after its establishment in the 1990s was centred around the postwar photography of the two generations of Japanese-occupation, male photographers.

It was Kaneko Ryūichi, a curator and photo historian at the Photographic Art Museum, who recognized that the photobooks made in the 1960s and ‘70s represented the golden age of Japanese photobooks. These photobooks  suggest that Japanese postwar photography was less a by-product of Western culture and more a direct response to the political and social constraints that dominated postwar Japan in the shadow of the atomic-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American occupation and Japan’s emergence from the ashes of war into a prosperous nation with a booming consumer economy  in the 1960s and 1970s.  

Whilst in Japan various conversations with people indicated that the Japan I was walking in as a tourist was the post-bubble Japan with its significant overhang of the lost decade of the 1990s on the present. The 1990s was a period of transformation and change towards a more market oriented economy with its embrace of the logic of neo-liberalism, the emergence of the precariat, greater inequality, increasing poverty of the working poor, the applications of market principles to to society, and the loss of traditional forms of social connectedness.

The overhang was 3 decades of post bubble period of the 1990s-2000s was a period of economic stagnation with its sense of hopelessness and loss of confidence in the future. The impact this had for photography was that there was a turn away from international art exhibitions to an emphasis on DIY practices, smaller scale, local communities. It was like a turn back to the postwar past.

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contemporary art,, landscape, trees

Ian Lobb + contemporary landscape photography

January 28, 2024

Ian Lobb’s black and white landscapes in his Black Range (State Park, Victoria) series opens up the possibility for a contemporary landscape photography in Australia in the early 21st century after the demise of modernism and the decay of postmodernism. Lobb worked on the Black Range series throughout the 1986-1996 market bubble decade. These intimate photographs of the Victorian bush within the image economy of a globalized world were interpreted by Helen Ennis, the then Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Art, as metaphors for psychological and spiritual states. The aesthetic background of the styles, mediums and concerns in Australia in this period is succinctly outlined by Terry Smith in this interview.

My contrasting interpretation of Lobb’s smallscale and localized Black Range landscape series is that it is part of the displacement of the modernist emphasis on photography being part of the grand narrative of the avant-garde breaking new ground in terms of art historical style. It also part of the displacement of the critical postmodernist emphasis on pastiche, parody, appropriation and a free floating simulacral world of signs disconnected from real physical objects. Several diverse strands of contemporary art emerged in the clearing opened up this displacement, and the smallscale and localized artmaking exemplified by Lobb’s modest Black Range photos, was identified by Terry Smith in his What is Contemporary Art? as one of the 3 main currents of contemporary art in the early decades of the 21st century.

My interpretation holds that the significance of Lobb’s contemporary Black Range landscapes is that this series highlights place (topos); place in the sense of Lobb being in a local place that he understood and knew very well from his frequent visits. Place is that within which we are at homeor within which we dwell, and to dwell is to be located in a harmonious relationship with one’s surrounding environment. Lobb’s intimate landscapes shows both that he was at home in the Black Range bushland and that his photography was a form of placemaking. They open up a pathway for others to begin to walk along.

In contrast to many of Melbourne’s art photographers, who relate to Ian Lobb as the master fine printer with his worthy emphasis on the beautifully crafted print, I connected to his smallscale and modest landscape photos of the local Black bush. My interpretation of this body of work as opening up a pathway for a contemporary landscape photography is that it suggests that such a photography is of the present, but one that newly mobilizes the past tradition of landscape photography. A photography that is of the present but is not out of date, doesn’t have a backward looking orientation, nor is it nostalgic.

Lobb’s Black Range series gave me the confidence to go beyond my tentative landscape photos of the local Waitpinga bush on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia by continuing to walk along his pathway and continue with my initial photographs through becoming attached to this place by being at home in the bush. I came to understand that the history of both the Black Range and the Waitpinga bush as a place or topos meant that they are both bounded and open, both singular and plural. I realized that the question of place they raise is also a question of time or history, which can be understood as a history of these specific places coming into being and undergoing change.

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Tokyo, urban, walking

The tourist (in Tokyo) as flâneur

December 11, 2023

The assumption underpinning the photography of my two previous posts —namely, In Tokyo and In Japan’s Railway Stations — was my mode of being as an international tourist in a post-3.11 Japan. This is a Japan that had been shaken up by the Great East Japan earthquake and the tsunami that caused the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident that was not supposed to happen. Nuclear technology was assumed to be perfectly safe and infallible. The triple regional disasters resulted in 16-20,000 deaths along the Pacific coast of the Tōhoku region of fishing ports, farms, communities and towns. Picturing the Invisible is an exhibition, which brings together artists working with photography and film in the affected territories, to examine the lingering legacies of  3.11.

The Japanese redevelopment strategy post WW2 war segregated energy production in the rural areas from consumption and development in the metropolitan areas. Nuclear risk was concentrated in aging and poor regions such as Tōhoku, and metropolises such as Tokyo were protected from a distance. The role of the Tōhoku region was to be  the supplier of energy, labor force, industrial resources and food for the benefit of metropolises. It was by design that Fukushima bore the burden of the nuclear calamity whilst life in Tokyo for the most part  continued as if nothing had happened.  Today, the state has been trying to seal off Fukushima’s contaminated and unruly  body while the local residents try to protect their community at the cost of their lives.

Being a tourist in Japan for us did not include dark tourism ie., visiting a radiated Fukushima and the depopulated surrounding areas with their ageing communities. Our only contact was briefly stopping at the railway station in Fukushima when we were on the Shinkansen. My understanding of the figure of the tourist in a postmodern city such as Tokyo is that it has an essential relationship to that of the flâneur in early European modernity (Paris).

The relationship is one of drifting through the city — Tokyo, Morioka, Sendai and Osaka — haphazardly strolling, taking in and photographing the appearance of the city through a chance gaze. I was drawn to things and people that I encountered by chance. The difference is that the figure of the tourist is emblematic of the consumption-based society of late capitalism with its intensive commodification of the tourist spaces.

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people, Tokyo, urban

in Japan’s train stations

November 21, 2023

As mentioned in the previous post we traveled by train whilst in Japan. Consequently, we spent time in train stations whilst in Tokyo and traveling to Morioka and Osaka from Tokyo. The train stations provided me with limited opportunities to make some photos within a loose reference to, and understanding of, the tradition of Japanese street photography.

This photo below was made whilst we were on the circular JRYamanote Line from Shinjuku to Tokyo Station. We were on our way to catch the Tohoku Shinkansen to the city of Morioka in the Iwate Prefecture located in the Tōhoku region of northern Japan. 

I say a loose understanding since the Japanese tradition of classic postwar street photography (sunappu shotto) is usually characterized as a snapshot made with a handheld 35mm camera; black and white film; an ethos of candid spontaneous images; a style favouring rough, blurred, and out of focus images; high contrast tonality; a naive persona of the photographer as a hunter on the streets and photographic truth as evidence of reality. The subject matter of are-bure-bok (grainy, blurry, and out-of-focus) has its roots in the mass devastation of war in the form of a shattered, dislocated, military occupied country, which was initially pictured by Ken Domon and Tadahiko Hayashi, was often of Shinjuku’s dark alleyways (eg., Golden Gai) the bar areas of large cities, urban streets and railway stations and US military bases.

The work of the two main post-war groups — VIVO and Provoke — was surveyed and exhibited by John Szarkowski at Museum of Modern Art’s New Japanese Photography exhibition in New York in 1974.  It concentrated on the men photographers in the 1960s. Though some photographers such as Ishiuchi Miyako’s 1977 Yokosuka Story, Tatsuo Suzuki, Takashi Hamaguchi and Kitai Kazuo continued to work within this classic black and white tradition, the orthodox understanding of street photography was questioned in the 1990s including its general disregard the images of women photographers as girl photos. With female street photographers (such as, Kawauchi Rinko, Mikko Hara and Ume Kayo), the tradition broadened, became more reflexive and critical of its classical assumptions about realism, objectivity, experience, gender and subjectivity.

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