Thought Factory

The figure of the tourist

January 19, 2025

The cultural frame I had of Japan when I visited as a tourist was that of 1990s Japan layered over a vague history of 1960s street photography. In the Australian imagination Tokyo was a place of sophistication and wealth, good taste and cultural authenticity, a postmodern culture, and a reputation for deferential hospitality. A fantasy land of good old fashioned Orientalism.

I was aware that Japan’s economy had never regained the growth of the pre-l980s boom years, and that after the asset bubble burst in the 1980s, there was the three “lost decades”. The images of Japan that spring to mind are of the bustling, neon-splashed streets of Tokyo and Osaka, towering walls of steel and glass, teeming pedestrians on the footpath along with green mountains and cherry blossoms and Zen temples and tea houses. Oh, and the Japan of Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh and Frank Lloyd Wright.

I didn’t know about Japan’s image factory: the post-1995 otaku culture and the gaming subculture of the 1990s. I wasn’t aware of Japan’s embrace of peak tourism with the low yen; an emerging unease amongst Japanese of the over- tourism with their rolling suitcases (36 million in 2024); the demographic collapse, the disappearing, somewhat unsustainable, countryside villages, traditionalism as a culture industry, the izakaya bars, and the multitude of the guest workers looking after the tourists. Japan grows poorer and more existentially uneasy whilst China is the new hegemon.

light, seascape, water

seascapes in dim light

December 10, 2024

My time walking in Japan last year and my subsequent reading of Japanese philosophy, including Junichiro Tanizaki’s ‘In Praise of Shadows’, has influenced my photography; in the sense of the pre-modern Japanese aesthetics is starting to shape, underpin and enframe my photographs of nature. Pre-modern as the bright, neon advertising signs of the Dotonbori canal’s nightscape in Osaka, or Ginza in Tokyo currently celebrate Japanese commercial post-modernity and its overwhelming consumerism.

Well known aesthetic categories include yūgen (the mysterious and the recessive), wabi (the stark and weathered), sabi (the rough and the austere) wabi–sabi (transience and imperfection), shibui (the simple and the humble), mono-no-aware (the pathos of things), Ma (negative space and time) and yohaku (empty space or what is left out). A category that is relevant to the seascapes is the indistinct (In’ei) which David Cooper observes can be found in Bashō, who writes of ‘a distant moon and a line of smoke’ glimpsed as he rides his horse, and of ‘nameless hills … decorated with thin films of morning mist’. This category is starting to shape the form of the seascapes project.

The indistinct (In’ei) refers to the Japanese appreciation of mists, clouds, shadows and related phenomena – smoke, dusk, haze, and soft moonlight, for example — and more generally the occluded, blurred, rough or otherwise indistinct. This stands in contrast to order, clarity, sharpness, brightness, the radiance of the form of things. It is a dimmed down, shadowy world, one of dusk and moonlight, mist and clouds. Rather than the glare of bright daylight it is “muddy light”, “shadowy surface”, the subdued. It is walking through the the dark forest in the approach to the tea hut with its diffused lighting, or the dark path to the Shinto shrine, or the glint of gold lacquer on Buddha in a gloomy interior.

nature, roadside, trees

Roadside #2: unconcelament

October 28, 2024

A few more images from the archives of the minor Roadside project that I mentioned in an earlier post. The pictures in this post are of various patches of roadside vegetation in different parts of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. These various patches have been photographed because their appearance shows some density and life.

The project started after the wave anti-authorial arguments of post-structuralism and the anti-aesthetic arguments of the post-modernism at the October journal had receded. This was a time after art history’s linear narrative of photograph, which had been hegemonic, became exhausted and collapsed; when photography had become a mainstream artistic practice; and photography was no longer regarded as a medium apart from the other arts. The name for this current time is the post-historic or contemporary and it is an era of artistic plurality and open-ended diversity that is freed from externally imposed definitions.

The above photo of Strangeways Road was made during the winter months with this particular section of the road being bounded by the Spring Mount Conservation Park.The latter is a small area of stringybarks on top of a hill surrounded by agricultural land.

This section of the Strangeways Rd through the Spring Mount Conservation Park indicates a roadside that is protected, and so its health is in marked contrast with the poor state of the roadsides within the various agricultural landscapes in Waitpinga. So the patches of roadside vegetation whose appearances show some density and life are few and far between. The patches stand out because on some of back country roads the roadside vegetation is minimal to non-existent.

Anthropocene, film, roadside, South Australia, trees, walking

Roadside

August 15, 2024

I have just re-discovered a fragmentary roadside project that has been going for a while in the background. It emerged whilst walking down the back country roads in my local area of Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula with the standard poodles in the early morning or the late afternoon. I had started to notice the roadside vegetation, its poor condition and its decline and I then started photographing it off and on. It became a collection of individual photographs.

It was only when I was going through the black and white archives on the iMac that I re-discovered this roadside project. The early archival photos for the Roadside project were black and white:

The focus of the project is the two sides of the road — ie., the public area that runs between the fenced, private agricultural land on either side of the road. So there is no trespassing on private property.

Roadside has affinities with, and refers back to, Joyce Evans’ black and white project entitled Edge of the Road that was made in the 1980/1990s and was exhibited at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne in 2013. Joyce Evans’ project was concerned about the edge of the road and with the lack of control and the potential of chance using the Widelux F7 35mm panoramic camera’s inherent capabilities to image the minutiae of the world. Evans says that using “the camera’s capacity to see detail, which in the 60th of a second of the firing of the shutter my subconscious may perceive, but may not fully know.” Her concern is with the power of the edge of the image to relate to what was not shown in the image. What is shown by Evans in this threshold space of the edge of the road are booted footprints, barbed wire, gravel roads, dustbins, tyre tracks, hub caps, cigarette butts, spiders home, an intruding foot, and the fecund compost under snow laden ferns.

Adelaide, street

Street photography: a note

July 29, 2024

A note on street photography, which emerges from my experience of photographing on the streets of Tokyo in Japan and looking at Meg Hewitt’s fascinating book Tokyo is Yours. The latter stand out in a photography world dominated by Facebook and Instagram, the primary online sharing platforms for photographers today, with their infinite supply of images that passes before us on our screens to disappears, be quickly forgotten, with more content appearing. Only the last image matters. All else is forgotten.

Street photography has simple roots: take a camera, walk around the city, see stuff, photograph it. People have been doing that since photography began there is written history (an Euro-American one); a canon (eg., Charles Traub, Sylvia Plachy, Daido Moriyama, Lee Friedlander, Henry Wessel, Elliott Erwitt, Joel Meyerowitz etc); and a current ethos of outsiders and misfits with its sense of alienation, isolation, and voyeurism, which it is held is best conveyed from an outsider’s perspective. Though currently undergoing a resurgence in contemporary photography, with its strong online street photo community with its own collective/website (and its In-Public Flickr page and online exhibitions), street photography is seen as outmoded and old fashioned by the art institution.

I am engaged in a long term, low key street photography project with its plain material based on walking Adelaide in South Australia. So my photography is a part of the street photography tradition in Australia:

However, the problem I have with the self-understanding of street photography is the over-reaching or imperial sense of itself. Thus Nick Turpin, who established In-Public, the first international collective of street photographers, observed that street photography doesn’t need defining because “it is, in fact, just photography in it simplest form, so much so that it is all the other forms of photography that need defining to separate them from that basic urge to respond to a scene with a camera that is .… Street Photography. It is the Prime Mover, the evolutionary inheritance of all photography.” It is overreach as street photography has generally been understood in positivist terms as a transparent mirror of life that shows how things are in reality.

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