urban – 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.

Adelaide, archives, urban

Reconnecting

August 27, 2022

Over the last month I have been upgrading my hardware for my film photography at great expense. The old (cheesegrater) Mac Pro (circa 2009) died and its system, which included an Epson V700, has been replaced with a Mac Studio, Eizo monitor, Epson V850 Pro flatbed scanner and VueScan software in addition to the Silverfast SE 8.8 software that came packaged with the Epson scanner.

Whilst engaged in upgrading I stumbled across some lost 5×7 negatives of Adelaide’s CBD that had been tucked in the sleeve of an office style leather folder. The negatives had been made whilst I was still living in the CBD and using the old Cambo 5×7 S3 monorail. I have no memory of why they were in such an odd place.

I experienced great difficulty in scanning 5x7colour negatives with the old Mac Pro system that I made whilst walking the CBD with a 5×7 monorail. If I didn’t use Newton glass when scanning the digital files had huge Newton rings that were extremely difficult to remove in Lightroom. If I did use Newton glass the files had a strong greenish caste that prevented me from restoring or recovering the colour realism. I more or less gave up, or in desperation I tried to save things by converting the colour to black and white. The box of 50 Kodak Portra 160 ASA sheet film lasted me several years as I more or less stopped walking the CBD with a 5×7 monorail.

Today, after I’d finished finishing scanning some 5×4 colour negatives (using the SilverFast SE software) for an online exhibition hosted by View Camera Australia I decided to scan a couple of the lost/found 5×7 colour negatives of modernist architecture in Adelaide using VueScan. To my surprise and delight I obtained a workable scan of Wakefield House– something that I’d not been able to achieve previously. Sure some of the new scans are desaturated whilst others have colour tinges, but that awful green caste that I could not previously remove did not appear. That’s a rare win. Maybe I can pick up walking the CBD with a 5×7 monorail?

black + white, critical writing, Melbourne, photography, topographics, urban

Interview: Stuart Murdoch

May 7, 2021

I have decided to do the odd interview with photographers whose work I find interesting and who are interested in engaging in a conversation about their work. ‘Interviews’ will only be an occasional feature of the Thoughtfactory blog. This, the first in the series, is with Stuart Murdoch.

Stuart is a Melbourne based photographer. He has adopted a topographic mode of working, continues to run a couple of photography blogs (one on photography and one on Sunshine); is a member of the Melbourne Photobook Collective; and an administrator of the Australian and New Zealand Topographics group on Flickr. He and I have occasionally collaborated around a rethinking documentary photography project.

Gary Sauer-Thompson (GS-T)

Thanks for offering to do the interview on your industrial Melbourne photos Stuart. The interview will be posted on the Thoughtfactory blog and it maybe cross posted to the blog of View Camera Australia. My observation of what is happening in photo-land is that most photographers in Australia traditionally talk about a particular print, or about their technique, or their equipment, despite, or in spite of, the art world being conceptually orientated since conceptual art in the 1960s. This traditional photo land approach strikes me as an unhelpful way to make sense of your industrial photos of Melbourne series, which has been ongoing for a decade or more. A more fruitful approach is to shift the emphasis to understanding your series of photos as a project.

Can you describe what this project is (ie., the idea behind the project), what you are trying to do with making this project and how has it evolved over time. If it has evolved over time, how has this changed the way you have have approached photographing industrial Melbourne. Can you describe what photographic and or literary or cultural influences have informed your photography, and how have these shaped the way that have understood both the project and they way you approached the photography.

Stuart Murdoch (SM) Thanks for the invitation Gary, and what a great set of questions to kick off with.

Initially I never set out to photograph the industrial in Melbourne. Like many students starting out I aspired to making work that was considered valuable and usually pictorially conservative subject matter. At University I discovered Robert Adams, and The New Topographic Exhibition in 1977 1. I never looked back and continue working in this way to this day. I have seen enough of each of the photographer’s work, leading up to and after the exhibition, to gain an understanding and appreciation of ideas being put forward by William Jenkins².

Stuart Murdoch, Port Melbourne, looking west, 1990

Robert Adams especially has for me been particularly inspiring. I have quite a few of his monographs and other books. His early essays, helped clarify in my own mind something I’d seen around me, since my early days of photography in the late 1980’s, but was unable to articulate, until, as he suggests in one of his essays, I found a map and compass and sent out to find my own way. Adams’ ideas about hope are central to how I approach my photography.

The idea that the urban was worthy of photographing was revelatory. But I wanted more than a dispassionate view that Jenkins espoused to frame the approach to the New Topographics. The question I asked myself was it; or is it ever, possible to photograph one’s own place with “dispassionate neutrality”? ³ I would argue that it is not. Though the New Topographic Photographers like Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz and Joe Deal, may have approached or attempted to approach their work from a neutral and distant style, my own work is more ardent.

This place — Melbourne — is my home.

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