Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 36

A Restatement: The Art of ‘Ground Zero’ (Part 13)
Nukes and Niigata – Addendum III


The five children of Hidenaga, fourth generation of the Yoshihara Photographic Studio (1936), from “SPIRAL LIFE – 140 Years of the Yoshihara Family” (2011). Photo courtesy Yukihiro Yoshihara.
For the same exhibition, Yukihiro of the sixth generation selected 50 from among the photographic plates found in the cellar of the Yoshihara home in 2004. Prints were made from the plates by Kazumi Ikezoe and exhibited at the Yoshihara Photographic Studio, that is, the place in which in the photographs were originally taken.

This past May 31, ahead of the World Photograph Day that was to be commemorated the following day, the 63rd World Photograph Day Memorial Lecture was held at the Shufu Kaikan in Yotsuya, Tokyo. The event was organized by the Photographic Society of Japan/Kanto Photo Studio Association. I had frequently attended art photography exhibitions, but this was the first time I had been to an event of this kind. The audience gathered at the venue in the basement of the Shufu Kaikan seemed to be in an older age bracket and did not come across as attached in any way to the world of contemporary art.

I had a reason for being here however, having received an invitation from the artist Yukihiro Yoshihara, with whom, at the Water and Land – Niigata Art Festival held last year, I had been reunited for the first time in a long time. The lecture consisted of two parts, Part 1 being “140 Years of the Yoshihara Family.” Yukihiro Yoshihara is a member of the sixth generation of the family and current proprietor of the Yoshihara Photographic Studio, which has an impressively long history in Niigata. The lecture was an attempt to unravel an historical journey from the Meiji era to the present day through Yukihiro’s own commentary and a set of images.


The former Yoshihara Photographic Studio in 1905. Genrin of the second generation, having inherited the photo studio, at the time called Shashindo, from Shusai of the first generation, changed its name to Yoshihara Shashindo at its present location. The photo studio business was going well during the time of Chohei of the third generation, but the building burnt to the ground in a large fire that occurred in Shibata in 1935.


The Yoshihara Photographic Studio rebuilt by Hidenaga of the fourth generation (front row, third from the right) in the year following the fire of 1935. The photo was taken in 1950 by Toshio (father of Yukihiro) who was 26 years of age at the time.


Yukihiro Yoshihara of the sixth generation (second from the right) and staff in front of the same Photographic Studio in 2011.
All three photos courtesy of Yukihiro Yoshihara.

What I’d like us to keep in mind here is that the organizer is not a photographer, nor a photographic association. The organizer is a photo studio association. That’s right, every single one of the people who had gathered for the lecture on this day were either currently running or used to run a photo studio in various parts of Kanto. Now the fact that they are all in a higher age bracket makes sense. With the advent of digital cameras, the capability of mobile phones to take photos and then Twitter and Instagram, photographs (and also photographic studios) have very rapidly become estranged even from the prints that are created from those photos. There are more than a few photo studios that have been forced out of business because they are no longer viable, as well as photo studios that had no choice but to close their doors because a successor to the business could not be found.

When I was a young child, however, my family would get together in the holiday season and without fail pay a visit to the local photo studio where we would have a commemorative family portrait taken. We were all in a cheerful mood and it was a kind of “event” for us. Chichibu, where I was born and raised, is a small town situated in a basin among the mountains. Nevertheless, three of the businesses in the area were photo studios. It was also a big deal that the photographer Buko Shimizu was there. It may be because I am left with such a memory of it. The family gathered together on the occasion of my parents’ golden wedding anniversary last year, and although a private affair, I asked the artist Hiroyuki Matsukage to take a commemorative photo of the occasion. I’ll never forget the way their faces lit up, as if the sun had come out, when I showed the completed family portrait to my members of my family.

However, I believe that a new kind of light, in a different form from this sort of “extravagant” photography is now being shone on the photo studio because of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan. As was reported frequently in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, for the victims whose land and houses were taken away from them, the only evidence that they were born and raised in that place and led their everyday lives there existed in photographs. Many of the survivors could be seen over and over again picking through the rubble and finding photos, which they wiped clean and stored carefully away. There were likely many photos of people who had not survived. So, the photo studio is not merely a service industry. It is an irreplaceable object that lies dormant on the land, a facility for storing memories themselves. Now that we all understand that Japan is a chain of large islands susceptible to natural disasters not often seen in other parts of the world, the photo studio takes on a greater significance.

All photos below are from the Photo-Shibata project (commentary provided by the Executive Committee). The photos have been displayed each autumn since 2011. The idea is for people to enjoy photographs of the way Shibata used to look in the past as they stroll through the town.


1935 – The cherry blossoms of Kajikawa. Photo courtesy of Okashi Tsukasa Kikutani.
The cherry blossoms of Kajikawa, once touted as “the world’s best cherry blossoms on a 40-kilometer embankment.” A photo of a golden age, a cherry blossom embankment of yesteryear that was lost in a flood that started in 1966 and continued into 1967. This photo was taken by someone from a Tokyo advertising agency while in Shibata. The daughters of the Kikutani family who provided us with this photo were asked to sit in the boat and have their picture taken. Kikutani was founded in 1613 and has a proud history of 400 years.


Making sweets. Photo courtesy of Miyazawaya.
Founded in 1897, the sweet shop Miyazawaya has existed for 116 years. This photo shows the morning prep work being carried out by a now deceased member of an earlier generation. This being an era when gas was not available, a wood fire burned from early in the morning to make the sweets. Even after switching to gas, the daily preparation started at the same time as before. In the castle town of Shibata, there is a whole street of sweet shops that were founded more than 100 years ago.


From the window of a train waiting to depart. Photo courtesy of Singapore Shokudo.
This photo shows the now deceased proprietor of the shop from a previous generation (a true sports buff) and his friend. They were setting out on a ski trip, and here we see him hanging out of the train window and having a laugh with his friend. This photo was taken in 1932. The Singapore Shokudo menu offered dishes that the first generation proprietor had tasted when he visited the city. Opened in 1946, its best-known dishes were fried flat noodles and noodles in broth. At the time, there were people living in Shibata also who enjoyed travelling overseas and going on ski trips.


Open-air school during the war. Photo courtesy of Okinaya.
Open-air schooling at the Ijimino National School in 1942. The son of the proprietor of the Japanese sweets shop Okinaya, which has provided us with this photo, was working here as a substitute teacher. During World War II, within Niigata Prefecture, it was Nagaoka that sustained damage from the air raids and Shibata escaped unscathed. This is the reason that many priceless photographs from the Meiji period through WWII survived in the town of Shibata, which had prospered as a garrison for 16 army regiments. Okinaya was founded in 1912 and this year marks its 101st anniversary.

Several years ago, when I met Yukihiro for the first time in Tokyo, he was not a photographer, nor the proprietor of the Yoshihara Photographic Studio. He was a full-fledged “artist.” I of course knew nothing about the fact that his family had a photo studio of such long standing. On the contrary, he undoubtedly found the whole thing distasteful. He left home and studied art in New York under Nam June Paik, then returned home to Japan. For Yukihiro, who was now being hailed as a top media artist, art undoubtedly meant not being shackled to one particular place, and possessing a kind of universality that rejected the idea of being rooted in one particular place. The place where I found myself reunited with him for the first time in several decades was not an art museum, nor an art gallery. Here also, in this place, as I experienced a curious kind of out-of-placeness from the fact that it was “a gathering of proprietors of photographic studios” who had all but been forgotten about in today’s world, I discovered once more that severe sense of disconnection that had occurred after the earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan.

I dare say it is an opportunity to rediscover the photo studio as a place that harbors a much more tangible quality of universality than the abstract principles that art professes to possess. Yukihiro’s lecture exceeded everyone’s expectations. In Part 2, “Born into a photo studio family,” Yukihiro had a three-way conversation with photographer Itaru Hirama (Shiogama) and actor Shiro Sano (Izumo), whose relationship was deepened by the fact that they also had both been born into a photo studio family, about whether their memories of their family’s photo studio has had an effect on their present-day work. Naoya Hatakeyama was also seen at the venue. A native of Rikuzentakata, he lost his mother in the tsunami, and after the tsunami, released his first ever photographs of his hometown. The significance of photographs is again undergoing radical change.

I’ve just used the word “again” because I myself experienced in real time “radical change” around the second half of the 1980s when photos were no longer just photos and began to be regarded as art. When you get down to it, the fact that photographers such as Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki now receive so much international attention and have come to be regarded as “artists” is the result of this radical change in perception in the ’80s. But now, photography is experiencing more change – once again, it is in the process of returning to a new kind of dochaku (being rooted in a particular place), in an updated sense of the word. When I used the world “again,” I was referring to the “newness” that surrounds the photographic studios. It is patently obvious in the photography of members of the younger generation – Rinko Kawauchi, and also Lieko Shiga, who moved to Kitagama and while there experienced the tsunami. If art is based on a universality that is nothing more than abstract, then I have a resistance to bluntly calling their photographs art.

In the summer of this year, after, as I had done last year, participating in the Great Fireworks of Nagaoka that had been reinstated immediately after the war as a memorial event for the victims of the Nagaoka air raids, I set foot in Shibata for the very first time to visit Yukihiro. I got into the front passenger seat of the car he was driving, and as we conversed like we used to converse together in some resplendent space in Tokyo, I experienced some kind of time shift where we were now having this conversation in Shibata in Niigata Prefecture and Yukihiro, who was beside me, his hands on the steering wheel, was both the organizer of Photo-Shibata, a provincial revitalisation project held every year in autumn and the sixth-generation proprietor of the Yoshihara Photographic Studio, which he had never before mentioned to me. However, seeing, as we walked together through Shibata, the historical remnants that exist in various parts of the town being recreated from one photo after another as a vivid “reality,” I was again powerfully affected by the as yet unknown emotions that surround photographs, the fact that I am living in the world of the 21st century and what is more, in the post-2011 earthquake world.

Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 1-6

Copyrighted Image