Thought Factory

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.

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.

architecture, Tokyo, urban

in Tokyo

November 12, 2023

We recently spent several days in Tokyo before we started the Basho Tohoku Tour followed by walking the Kumano Kodo’s Nakahechi route on the Kii-Peninsula in Honshu. I spent some time during those five days walking around the bar district in Shinkjuku, which is where our hotel in Tokyo was located; as well as traveling around the different wards of Tokyo on the very crowded but extremely effective JR Yamanote loop line. Tokyo is an ever-changing, decentralized postmodern city of patchwork neighbourhoods with a long history of being a photographed city, often explored in terms of the tense relationship between tradition and modernity. The photos after 1945 were usually published in the form of photobooks. Two examples are Toshio Yamane’s color photographs of the waterfront of Tokyo Bay, taken on 4×5 film during the 1980s entitled Front (1991) and Shinichirō Kobayashi’s photographs of the construction works of Tokyo Bay taken throughout the 1980s in Tokyo Bay Side (1991)

As a visitor I could only photo the urban surface of this ever changing city –ie., the streets, people and architecture–which is what Nguan, the Singapore photographer, did with his Shibuya project (2010) of the peoples scramble at the intersection—the in front of Shibuya station, sometimes known as the Hachikō diagonal crossing. My idea was to be a flaneur for several days either by getting lost in Shinjuku or using the Situationist drifting strategy. The former was easy to do as Shinjuku Station is a large subway and railway hub is a labyrinth consisting of over 40 exits, two major department stores and many of the other conveniences and advertising associated with Tokyo subway stations

Whilst on the train I endeavoured to make photos of the city though the window when I was able to. The Big Echo photo below was made whilst we were on our way to the Shinagawa station to visit photography exhibitions at the Tokyo Art Photography (TOP) Museum. The standout exhibition was that of Homma Takashi entitled Revolution 9, which used rooms as if they were pinhole cameras — the blurb says “using the city to shoot the city”.

I was unable to make many urban photos through the train windows whilst in Tokyo as both the monorail from Haneda airport and the trains on the Yamanote loop line were extremely crowded and it was usually standing room only. There was little space by the window amidst a continual flow of people walking on and off the trains at the various stations on the loop line.

critical writing, large format, trees

Photography and the anti-pastoral: part 1

September 21, 2023

A key issue in contemporary photography is how can photography address climate change, given the convincing account by climate science with respect to the geological epoch of the Anthropocene. We now live in a world where non-human entries are more vast and powerful than we are: our reality is caught up in them, and they could well dislodge us from our commanding position over nature. This points towards a dark ecology that assumes an awareness of our ecological dependency, coupled with our realisation of how we have been re-shaping and damaging the planet’s ecological systems. If we are to really think the interconnectedness of all forms of life and all things, then hesitation, uncertainty, irony, and thoughtfulness need to be put back into ecological thinking.

If photography is to be relevant to this present, then what could an eco-orientated photography say? What kind of story could it visually narrate? Could such a photography create a cultural space within which very different kinds of knowledge and practice meet?
Though there is no blueprint, such a photography would need to be different to, and critical of, the photographic visions of settler colonial landscapes of John Watt Beattie and Nicholas Caire as these were premised on the emptiness, pristine wilderness and pastoral utopias . It would also need to critically assess the aesthetic concepts established during the Romantic era, which framed the golden age of landscape painting and the visual arts in the nineteenth century.

These aesthetic concepts divided the natural world into the 3 categories of the pastoral, the picturesque, and the sublime. If the first two historically represented nature as a comforting source of physical and spiritual sustenance, the sublime referred to the thrill and danger of confronting untamed nature and its overwhelming forces, such as thunderstorms, alps, deep chasms, wild rivers and stormy seas.

Whilst both the pastoral and picturesque reference human kind’s ability to control the natural world, pastoral landscapes historically celebrated the dominion of humankind over nature. If the roots of the pastoral lie in a form of poetry that celebrates the pleasures and songs of the herdsmen, then this steadily expanded to a visual representation of rural nature that exhibits the ideas and sentiments of those to whom the country affords pleasures and employment. The scenes, which are usually peaceful, historically depicted ripe harvests, lovely gardens, manicured lawns with broad vistas and fattened livestock, were in contrast to the views of the court or the city. John Constable’s landscape paintings of the English countryside are a classic example.

In colonial Australia the settlers developed and tried to tame nature so that the land yielded the necessities the colonialists needed to live, as well as beauty and safety. If Joseph Lycett established the pastoral landscape tradition in Australia, then Arthur Streeton’s ‘The purple noon’s transparent might’ is an iconic example of the representation of the Australian pastoral landscape. In this tradition of the Australian idealisation of settler landscapes — Australia as a Promised Land — Europeans are seen to be in harmony with a fertile land; a land which has been ordered and produced by them, and in which they are able to experience leisure and pleasure. The Heidelberg School’s celebration of colour and light is a popular example of this tradition.

critical writing, digital image

unthinking photographic culture

June 30, 2023

In this post on the Leica Poetics blog I referred to Wim Wenders view about the shifting ground of the photographic medium (as the single, static image). So what has happened to photography with networked computing? Wenders held that photography is dead and that we need to find a new term for the digital photography in our contemporary visual culture. Digital images in this culture are images that are co-constituted with software; are networked; are driven by algorithmic analysis of the vast banks of images collated by social media platforms that are profit-driven; whilst seeing is now platform or screen seeing. Now we hav generative AI, which produces text and images in abundance, and soon, music and video, too. As James Vincent of The Verge says the dynamics of AI is producing cheap content (AI junk) based on others’ work through scraping their content.

We are a long way from the photography and ways of seeing of the Bowden Archives and Industrial Modernity project of the late twentieth century that finished in the 1990s. The images produced by this analogue photography has been replaced by the automated processes of algorithms, data flow, big data and social networking. So we need to unthink photography; or more specifically unthink the ontology and culture of the analogue photography in the Bowden Archives, Mallee Routes or my large format photography, now that the historical period of the mechanical analogue has passed.

This representational kind of photography in the age of the computational mode of image production is redundant, whilst still exerting an influence as an after-life. It is an obsolete medium, one which refuses to die, that has become a historical medium of heritage.

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