architecture – Thought Factory

The Basho walk: starting

June 23, 2024

In late 2023 Suzanne and I spent 3-4 weeks in Japan during their autumn. Autumn is an inbetween time: summer is over and winter near. We had time in Tokyo, Morioka and Osaka as well as doing 2 walks: a Basho walk from Sendai to Yamadera and the Kumano Kodo pilgrim walk from Yuasa to Shingu. The Bashō walking tour,which started in Sendai, took place after we’d spent 5 days in Shinjuku, Tokyo and 3 days in Morioka.

The Bashō walking tour followed part of Matsuo Bashō’s third major journey to the north of Honshu. He sold his house in Fukagawa, Edo (now Tokyo) before he started travelling in 1689 with Kawai Sora, his travel companion for the most part, who also wrote a diary. Bashō and Sora travelled on foot about ten miles a day for about 5 months. The journey was approximately 720 miles and there were some 40 stations and stops on the journey through northern and central Honshu. Bashō returned to Edo in the winter of 1681 to a new house that was built for him. His travel sketch of that journey, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is a blend of prose and haiku.

Bashō and Sora entered the Tōhoku region of northern Honshu after walking 200 miles and they entered the city of Sendai in May 1689. This was Station 18. They stayed for several days before going to the scenic pine covered Matsushima islands via the town of Shiogama. Whilst in Sendai they were taken on a sightseeing tour of the area by a wood block artist and owner of a bookstore whom Basho identifies as Kaemon.Whereas Basho saw fields of bush clover, hills covered in blooming white rhododendrons, and dark pine woods I saw a large industrial city, the biggest in the Tōhoku region.

It was an overnight stay in Sendai as we arrived in the late afternoon and left the following morning for Matsushima. As my time for any exploratory urban photography was in the late afternoon before the tour briefing and dinner and early in the morning before breakfast I was limited to walking around the area near the hotel.

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.

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?

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