Tomoko Yoneda: Part III
III. Frames of Action
Tomoko Yoneda discusses art in Japan after March 11.
Chrysanthemum (2011). All images: © Tomoko Yoneda, courtesy ShugoArts, Tokyo.
ART iT: In your career to date you've shot at various locations and in different regions, and in the resulting works you present a more or less objective narrative that allows for the possibility of viewers to develop their own individual interpretations. On the other hand there are also aspects of your personal identity that you cannot escape. You started off working in Europe, and have gradually shifted to working in Asia. Does this affect how you respond to the themes you want to explore> Have you thought much about how to deal with such issues?
TY: I think that's something I still have yet to overcome. It's difficult, yet unavoidable, so it's something that I'm always thinking about. I was talking with another artist recently about how visual artists, being neither professional sociologists nor politicians, must do whatever we can as artists. Being in the world, living wherever I live, no matter what I say or how I dress it up, it is impossible to escape society. So now, being in Japan, when I photograph here I must also account for the inescapable presence of Japan's past and history, and how I process and express that is indeed my greatest challenge.
ART iT: This time, in the process of photographing in Japan have you felt any change in your mentality, whether from a purely physical stimulus or from a sense within yourself that now is the time to address Japan?
TY: I feel that perhaps now is the time for people in Japan to look critically at the situation around them. Before, everyone spoke of the complacency of peace, but that can no longer be the case after March 11. I have come to understand now that the stories that need to be told must be told, and formerly naïve artists must think carefully about their individual positions and what they want to say, taking responsibility for the works they make. I myself have always tried to be self-aware in my practice, but now I believe I must be even more rigorous in my approach. And even in terms of how my work is received, I feel that maybe there is more potential for people to appreciate what I am doing.
ART iT: In that sense when you're dealing with Japan it's easy to imagine you lose some of the objectivity that you apply to other locations. How do you deal with that? Compared, for example, with shooting in Eastern Europe, do you find yourself to be more judgmental or critical with regard to Japan?
TY: It's impossible for me to be objective with Japan, or at least my thoughts spill out before they are fully formed. At the same time I don't want Japanese to be seen only as nationalists; in my new works I am reconsidering what it means to be Japanese. Following the Meiji Restoration Japan turned toward authoritarianism, and even if this could be strategically justified by the desire to stand shoulder to shoulder with the West, I have no intent of whitewashing what happened. I believe that the distortions of that period are connected to what happened in Fukushima. Disregarding the fact that we were the first country in the world to suffer a nuclear strike, the entrapment of the people who in the 1950s were seduced and manipulated by the idea of applying nuclear energy for peaceful purposes extends into the present.
I hope to make works that can address major aspects of Japan including such issues. For example, I have made some new photographs of chrysanthemum flowers, which as a symbol of the imperial family appear on the cover of Japanese passports, even though one would assume that the national symbol should be the Hinomaru "rising sun" of the national flag. The flower in that sense symbolizes the ambivalence of the Japanese people. I'm not photographing the flower as a symbol of the imperial family. I'm photographing it as a portrait of Japanese people today.
Top: Heian Shrine I, Kyoto (Sorge & Ozaki) (2008), gelatin silver print, 9.5 x 9.5 cm. Bottom: River - View of earthquake regeneration housing project from a river flowing through a former location of evacuees' temporary accommodation (2004), C-type print, 76 x 96 cm.
ART iT: Do you think the works you have shot in Japan will receive different responses from those you have done so far?
TY: Right now I have no expectations. I'm sure there will be unexpected responses. For example, the issues with Yasukuni Shrine are something we as Japanese people are unable to avoid. Even in Europe it's a topic that comes up every year in the media, and something I have been constantly thinking about. It's not necessarily that I want my works to have some political significance, but they could be considered a statement of my hopes for bringing about an age of peace. Beyond whatever political associations the image itself will elicit, I hope that through it people can also visualize the relations between image and memory.
The point of origin for this thinking is perhaps my parents' experiences of World War II, which form a powerful axis for thinking about the past and present. Osamu Tezuka's manga series Adolf (1983-85) was set in Kobe [events in the story, about a Japanese-German man and Ashkenazi Jewish man both named Adolf, and their connection to Hitler himself, begin in 1936], and the line, "Akashi is burning," evokes the stories my father told me of that time.
ART iT: Speaking of which, how do you now view the work "A Decade After," with photographs of areas struck by the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake?
TY: I am from the area, born in Akashi. As the bigger city, Kobe was always the place my friends and I went to for hanging out. Wanting to preserve that memory for myself, I shot photographs of areas we used to frequent, in black-and-white. This was about three months or so after the earthquake; I was abroad but had returned home because I was worried about my parents. Without ever publishing the photos, I put them away. Then in 2003 when I had my solo exhibition at Shiseido Gallery, I met a curator from the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History who was planning an exhibition revisiting the earthquake 10 years later. This curator was interested in me as an artist from the Kansai region who lives abroad and might be able to photograph the area from a more objective viewpoint than locally based artists, and so asked me to make photographs of the current situation, to be paired with the older photographs I had made.
At the time, as with my other works to date, I wanted to capture those things that are invisible or not immediately apparent - to make visible those invisible distortions. For example, in the middle of some area built like a housing exhibit with new homes all constructed to the same specifications, you might find a vacant lot, and feel some peculiar sensation. Then, asking around, you would learn that the lot was owned by a family that died in the earthquake, and is still caught up in estate settlement.
The photograph River - View of Earthquake Regeneration Housing Project from a river flowing through a former location of evacuees' temporary accommodation, Japan (2004) was shot overlooking a river that once had temporary housing lined up along its banks, beyond which in the distance now rise earthquake regeneration housing projects built by the city of Kobe. It's not visible, but what I wanted to photograph was the fact that even a decade later, there were still people with psychological scars from the earthquake. At the time I was aware that, as though left to rot, the people who lived in temporary shelters had been placed in a considerably remote area, and experienced a high rate of suicide. But then when I was shooting my photo the young boy entered the frame. Seeing him, I felt that even with all these serious issues, just as the boy had grown, so too could there be room for a small hope, or at least a beacon toward the future, and that was when I released the shutter.
ART iT: Have you revisited "A Decade After" since March 11? Certainly there are overlaps between the Hanshin and Tohoku earthquakes. On the other hand, since you seem to prefer viewing things from a distance, do you need more time to allow some distance from which to consider March 11?
TY: Yes, there are overlaps. But with March 11, there is the Fukushima nuclear crisis, so I also think of "Scene" in addition to "A Decade After." However, in making my new works, I think it's fine not to have so much distance from Fukushima, because the problems there are a continuation of those that began in the Meiji era.
Heat I (1996), gelatin silver print, 47.5 x 37.5 cm.
ART iT: Finally, many of your works have documentary elements, but would you consider mixing fiction into them?
TY: "Topographical Analogy" was a kind of fiction for me. But once I understood the specificity of places, or the unique power that places have, I decided fiction was no longer necessary and got rid of it from my practice. That was the beginning of the objective approach that I continue even now. Earlier you asked about how I fit all my research into one image, and it was difficult for me to explain, but there is a part that is not constructed. There are different circumstances each time that make everything open to chance, but being able to identify that point you want to capture is about knowledge gained from experience.
Return to Index
Tomoko Yoneda: The Multiple Lives of Images
Tomoko Yoneda discusses art in Japan after March 11.
Chrysanthemum (2011). All images: © Tomoko Yoneda, courtesy ShugoArts, Tokyo.
ART iT: In your career to date you've shot at various locations and in different regions, and in the resulting works you present a more or less objective narrative that allows for the possibility of viewers to develop their own individual interpretations. On the other hand there are also aspects of your personal identity that you cannot escape. You started off working in Europe, and have gradually shifted to working in Asia. Does this affect how you respond to the themes you want to explore> Have you thought much about how to deal with such issues?
TY: I think that's something I still have yet to overcome. It's difficult, yet unavoidable, so it's something that I'm always thinking about. I was talking with another artist recently about how visual artists, being neither professional sociologists nor politicians, must do whatever we can as artists. Being in the world, living wherever I live, no matter what I say or how I dress it up, it is impossible to escape society. So now, being in Japan, when I photograph here I must also account for the inescapable presence of Japan's past and history, and how I process and express that is indeed my greatest challenge.
ART iT: This time, in the process of photographing in Japan have you felt any change in your mentality, whether from a purely physical stimulus or from a sense within yourself that now is the time to address Japan?
TY: I feel that perhaps now is the time for people in Japan to look critically at the situation around them. Before, everyone spoke of the complacency of peace, but that can no longer be the case after March 11. I have come to understand now that the stories that need to be told must be told, and formerly naïve artists must think carefully about their individual positions and what they want to say, taking responsibility for the works they make. I myself have always tried to be self-aware in my practice, but now I believe I must be even more rigorous in my approach. And even in terms of how my work is received, I feel that maybe there is more potential for people to appreciate what I am doing.
ART iT: In that sense when you're dealing with Japan it's easy to imagine you lose some of the objectivity that you apply to other locations. How do you deal with that? Compared, for example, with shooting in Eastern Europe, do you find yourself to be more judgmental or critical with regard to Japan?
TY: It's impossible for me to be objective with Japan, or at least my thoughts spill out before they are fully formed. At the same time I don't want Japanese to be seen only as nationalists; in my new works I am reconsidering what it means to be Japanese. Following the Meiji Restoration Japan turned toward authoritarianism, and even if this could be strategically justified by the desire to stand shoulder to shoulder with the West, I have no intent of whitewashing what happened. I believe that the distortions of that period are connected to what happened in Fukushima. Disregarding the fact that we were the first country in the world to suffer a nuclear strike, the entrapment of the people who in the 1950s were seduced and manipulated by the idea of applying nuclear energy for peaceful purposes extends into the present.
I hope to make works that can address major aspects of Japan including such issues. For example, I have made some new photographs of chrysanthemum flowers, which as a symbol of the imperial family appear on the cover of Japanese passports, even though one would assume that the national symbol should be the Hinomaru "rising sun" of the national flag. The flower in that sense symbolizes the ambivalence of the Japanese people. I'm not photographing the flower as a symbol of the imperial family. I'm photographing it as a portrait of Japanese people today.
Top: Heian Shrine I, Kyoto (Sorge & Ozaki) (2008), gelatin silver print, 9.5 x 9.5 cm. Bottom: River - View of earthquake regeneration housing project from a river flowing through a former location of evacuees' temporary accommodation (2004), C-type print, 76 x 96 cm.
ART iT: Do you think the works you have shot in Japan will receive different responses from those you have done so far?
TY: Right now I have no expectations. I'm sure there will be unexpected responses. For example, the issues with Yasukuni Shrine are something we as Japanese people are unable to avoid. Even in Europe it's a topic that comes up every year in the media, and something I have been constantly thinking about. It's not necessarily that I want my works to have some political significance, but they could be considered a statement of my hopes for bringing about an age of peace. Beyond whatever political associations the image itself will elicit, I hope that through it people can also visualize the relations between image and memory.
The point of origin for this thinking is perhaps my parents' experiences of World War II, which form a powerful axis for thinking about the past and present. Osamu Tezuka's manga series Adolf (1983-85) was set in Kobe [events in the story, about a Japanese-German man and Ashkenazi Jewish man both named Adolf, and their connection to Hitler himself, begin in 1936], and the line, "Akashi is burning," evokes the stories my father told me of that time.
ART iT: Speaking of which, how do you now view the work "A Decade After," with photographs of areas struck by the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake?
TY: I am from the area, born in Akashi. As the bigger city, Kobe was always the place my friends and I went to for hanging out. Wanting to preserve that memory for myself, I shot photographs of areas we used to frequent, in black-and-white. This was about three months or so after the earthquake; I was abroad but had returned home because I was worried about my parents. Without ever publishing the photos, I put them away. Then in 2003 when I had my solo exhibition at Shiseido Gallery, I met a curator from the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History who was planning an exhibition revisiting the earthquake 10 years later. This curator was interested in me as an artist from the Kansai region who lives abroad and might be able to photograph the area from a more objective viewpoint than locally based artists, and so asked me to make photographs of the current situation, to be paired with the older photographs I had made.
At the time, as with my other works to date, I wanted to capture those things that are invisible or not immediately apparent - to make visible those invisible distortions. For example, in the middle of some area built like a housing exhibit with new homes all constructed to the same specifications, you might find a vacant lot, and feel some peculiar sensation. Then, asking around, you would learn that the lot was owned by a family that died in the earthquake, and is still caught up in estate settlement.
The photograph River - View of Earthquake Regeneration Housing Project from a river flowing through a former location of evacuees' temporary accommodation, Japan (2004) was shot overlooking a river that once had temporary housing lined up along its banks, beyond which in the distance now rise earthquake regeneration housing projects built by the city of Kobe. It's not visible, but what I wanted to photograph was the fact that even a decade later, there were still people with psychological scars from the earthquake. At the time I was aware that, as though left to rot, the people who lived in temporary shelters had been placed in a considerably remote area, and experienced a high rate of suicide. But then when I was shooting my photo the young boy entered the frame. Seeing him, I felt that even with all these serious issues, just as the boy had grown, so too could there be room for a small hope, or at least a beacon toward the future, and that was when I released the shutter.
ART iT: Have you revisited "A Decade After" since March 11? Certainly there are overlaps between the Hanshin and Tohoku earthquakes. On the other hand, since you seem to prefer viewing things from a distance, do you need more time to allow some distance from which to consider March 11?
TY: Yes, there are overlaps. But with March 11, there is the Fukushima nuclear crisis, so I also think of "Scene" in addition to "A Decade After." However, in making my new works, I think it's fine not to have so much distance from Fukushima, because the problems there are a continuation of those that began in the Meiji era.
Heat I (1996), gelatin silver print, 47.5 x 37.5 cm.
ART iT: Finally, many of your works have documentary elements, but would you consider mixing fiction into them?
TY: "Topographical Analogy" was a kind of fiction for me. But once I understood the specificity of places, or the unique power that places have, I decided fiction was no longer necessary and got rid of it from my practice. That was the beginning of the objective approach that I continue even now. Earlier you asked about how I fit all my research into one image, and it was difficult for me to explain, but there is a part that is not constructed. There are different circumstances each time that make everything open to chance, but being able to identify that point you want to capture is about knowledge gained from experience.
Return to Index
Tomoko Yoneda: The Multiple Lives of Images
Tomoko Yoneda: Part II
II. Frames of Consciousness
Tomoko Yoneda on the photography of paradigm shifts.
Lovers, Dunaujvaros (formerly Stalin City), Hungary (2004), C-type print, 66 x 84 cm. All images: © Tomoko Yoneda, courtesy ShugoArts, Tokyo.
ART iT: We were just discussing how you draw from diverse research and visual references in producing even a single image, while at the same time exploiting the relations between text and image to transform a single image into multiple images. Did this kind of methodology develop intuitively, or from a consideration of photo theory?
TY: It was an intuitive process, not something that I arrived at through theory. Maybe it results from having been conscious about my identity as a Japanese person living abroad. In Japan, you might have little awareness of the Japanese mentality and one's own social context and background. However, once you go abroad you necessarily enter an environment where you cannot help but be aware of your identity, and through that experience you also become aware of many other different backgrounds, mentalities and historical perspectives. I think that has influenced my works.
ART iT: Obviously there are physical limitations if you're living overseas, but was it a conscientious decision on your part not to deal with Japan in your early works?
TY: It was partly so. I studied in the US before going to England. There is already a difference between the visibility of history in the US and in Europe, which I was extremely conscious of in my work after moving to Europe. I arrived there in 1989, right as the Berlin Wall was coming down and the Soviet Union was collapsing. Prior to that the world had been entrenched in the Cold War - everything was in a continuous stalemate. To then witness it all collapsing felt like witnessing a paradigm shift. Being in Europe at that moment changed the way I see things. I understood that things we had believed in because they were there right in front of us would not necessarily last forever, and indeed had the potential to collapse or become something else entirely. I probably wouldn't have realized this had I been in Japan at the time. However, I think Japan is experiencing a similar paradigm shift after March 11, 2011, and it feels fateful that I am now back here under such circumstances.
Top: TAKARAZUKA THEATER, TOKYO (Clausen & Vutokevich) (2008), gelatin silver print, 9.5 x 9.5 cm. Bottom: Wedding - View of the wedding party on the river that divides North Korea and China, Dandong, China (2007), C-type print, 76 x 96 cm.
ART iT: The paradigm shift certainly seems to be a mechanism that you conceptually reenact through your works. In terms of the concrete process of making the photographs, though, what considerations go into the formats that you use for each project, from size to color to effect? For example with the series about the Sorge spy ring, "The Parallel Lives of Others" (2008), it seems you chose to use a pinhole camera.
TY: For "Parallel Lives" I wasn't using a pinhole camera, I was using a Kodak Brownie. I imagined that when a spy meets another spy for the first time, there must be a mutual distrust or sense of confusion among them. Even though there is documentation of the actual words they exchanged, and the places where they met, there's always some ambiguity as to whether those events actually took place or not, or what actually happened. As spies, even if they had families and everyday lives, they probably could not share their experiences with those families. So I wanted to show through the photographs how everything is fuzzy with regard to spies. I was going for a phantasmal effect, something slightly out of focus. In fact, there are actual photographs that the spies took of each other, and almost all of these photos are blurry. So I chose the format and approach that I thought best reflected the understanding I arrived at after synthesizing all my research, including the photos I had seen and the documents on the spies I had studied at libraries and archives.
But "Parallel Lives" was a unique case. Generally I like to take crisp, large-format photographs. The first time I used medium format was when I went to Hungary and Estonia for my project "After the Thaw" (2000-04). Many times on location during that project, people would enter the frame or there were things moving across the landscapes. For example, there is the photograph, Lovers, Dunaujvaros (formerly Stalin City), Hungary (2004), with the two lovers in the pool. Having done research on the background of the city, I wanted to make a photo of the pool with its Socialist Realist design motifs, but then the lovers entered the frame. Thinking about movement, it was at that moment that I switched from large format to medium, and then took the shot. Since that time I have always worked with large and medium formats in tandem. Another example is the shoot that resulted in Wedding - View of the wedding party on the river that divides North Korea and China, Dandong, China (2007). I initially wanted to photograph the bridge at Dandong, which had been bombed by the Americans during the Korean War and collapsed into the river. The bridge had been built by the Japanese so they could cross back and forth from Korea into Manchukuo and China. In this case, too, where I had planned to shoot using a large format camera, the wedding boat suddenly entered the frame and I hastily switched to a medium-format camera. When I was shooting, beyond thinking about relations between Japan and North Korea, I also thought that if China could act as a go-between, then there might be some improvement to the current fierce standoff, so the wedding party was symbolic in that sense, but also simply because I found the idea of the potential trajectory of the wedding itself to be interesting.
ART iT: The post-war architecture in Eastern Europe reflects a unique design heritage that is attractive to contemporary sensibilities. Is there any difference photographing in a location with such highly-charged aesthetics, as opposed to, say, the border between China and North Korea or the rather nondescript "banzai cliff" in Saipan?
TY: I was a child when Expo '70 was held in Osaka, and feel there must be some kind of connection between the utopian vision that was expressed there and the architecture of Eastern Europe. My personal opinion is that architecture and design that are visibly inspired by ideology can be stronger than anything else.
When photographing architecture, I begin by assessing elements like form and color. I fundamentally have a preference for precise, formalistic photographs, and have no patience for photos that are distorted - "Parallel Lives" being the anomaly, in that I was playing around with an unusual approach.
I would say this is the influence of having studied photography at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where one of my teachers had studied with the New Bauhaus school at Illinois Institute of Technology. And of course in Chicago there are many buildings by Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius - I was particularly attracted to those designed by Mies. Although if someone were to draw parallels between my work and that of so-called Chicago School photographers like Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, I would disagree.
Left: Former house of General Wang Shu-ming, the Chief of Staff under Chiang Kai-Shek, Cidong Street, III (2010), C-type print, 83 x 65 cm. Right: Former house of General Wang Shu-ming, the Chief of Staff under Chiang Kai-Shek, Cidong Street, V (2010), C-type print, 83 x 65 cm.
ART iT: So when you look at works other than your own, and particularly when you look at photographs, do you tend to respond to them visually, or more through context?
TY: I prefer photographs with context. There are of course photographs I like based on their technical elements, but really when I'm looking at works I like to think about context. For example, I like Bill Brandt's photographs, which touch upon social issues. Although I don't like Lee Miller so much, I do like the photographs she took while on assignment covering the battlefields of Europe during World War II. And in terms of combining context and formalism, I think Margaret Bourke-White's photographs are truly excellent.
Part III ⎮Return to Index
Tomoko Yoneda: The Multiple Lives of Images
Tomoko Yoneda on the photography of paradigm shifts.
Lovers, Dunaujvaros (formerly Stalin City), Hungary (2004), C-type print, 66 x 84 cm. All images: © Tomoko Yoneda, courtesy ShugoArts, Tokyo.
ART iT: We were just discussing how you draw from diverse research and visual references in producing even a single image, while at the same time exploiting the relations between text and image to transform a single image into multiple images. Did this kind of methodology develop intuitively, or from a consideration of photo theory?
TY: It was an intuitive process, not something that I arrived at through theory. Maybe it results from having been conscious about my identity as a Japanese person living abroad. In Japan, you might have little awareness of the Japanese mentality and one's own social context and background. However, once you go abroad you necessarily enter an environment where you cannot help but be aware of your identity, and through that experience you also become aware of many other different backgrounds, mentalities and historical perspectives. I think that has influenced my works.
ART iT: Obviously there are physical limitations if you're living overseas, but was it a conscientious decision on your part not to deal with Japan in your early works?
TY: It was partly so. I studied in the US before going to England. There is already a difference between the visibility of history in the US and in Europe, which I was extremely conscious of in my work after moving to Europe. I arrived there in 1989, right as the Berlin Wall was coming down and the Soviet Union was collapsing. Prior to that the world had been entrenched in the Cold War - everything was in a continuous stalemate. To then witness it all collapsing felt like witnessing a paradigm shift. Being in Europe at that moment changed the way I see things. I understood that things we had believed in because they were there right in front of us would not necessarily last forever, and indeed had the potential to collapse or become something else entirely. I probably wouldn't have realized this had I been in Japan at the time. However, I think Japan is experiencing a similar paradigm shift after March 11, 2011, and it feels fateful that I am now back here under such circumstances.
Top: TAKARAZUKA THEATER, TOKYO (Clausen & Vutokevich) (2008), gelatin silver print, 9.5 x 9.5 cm. Bottom: Wedding - View of the wedding party on the river that divides North Korea and China, Dandong, China (2007), C-type print, 76 x 96 cm.
ART iT: The paradigm shift certainly seems to be a mechanism that you conceptually reenact through your works. In terms of the concrete process of making the photographs, though, what considerations go into the formats that you use for each project, from size to color to effect? For example with the series about the Sorge spy ring, "The Parallel Lives of Others" (2008), it seems you chose to use a pinhole camera.
TY: For "Parallel Lives" I wasn't using a pinhole camera, I was using a Kodak Brownie. I imagined that when a spy meets another spy for the first time, there must be a mutual distrust or sense of confusion among them. Even though there is documentation of the actual words they exchanged, and the places where they met, there's always some ambiguity as to whether those events actually took place or not, or what actually happened. As spies, even if they had families and everyday lives, they probably could not share their experiences with those families. So I wanted to show through the photographs how everything is fuzzy with regard to spies. I was going for a phantasmal effect, something slightly out of focus. In fact, there are actual photographs that the spies took of each other, and almost all of these photos are blurry. So I chose the format and approach that I thought best reflected the understanding I arrived at after synthesizing all my research, including the photos I had seen and the documents on the spies I had studied at libraries and archives.
But "Parallel Lives" was a unique case. Generally I like to take crisp, large-format photographs. The first time I used medium format was when I went to Hungary and Estonia for my project "After the Thaw" (2000-04). Many times on location during that project, people would enter the frame or there were things moving across the landscapes. For example, there is the photograph, Lovers, Dunaujvaros (formerly Stalin City), Hungary (2004), with the two lovers in the pool. Having done research on the background of the city, I wanted to make a photo of the pool with its Socialist Realist design motifs, but then the lovers entered the frame. Thinking about movement, it was at that moment that I switched from large format to medium, and then took the shot. Since that time I have always worked with large and medium formats in tandem. Another example is the shoot that resulted in Wedding - View of the wedding party on the river that divides North Korea and China, Dandong, China (2007). I initially wanted to photograph the bridge at Dandong, which had been bombed by the Americans during the Korean War and collapsed into the river. The bridge had been built by the Japanese so they could cross back and forth from Korea into Manchukuo and China. In this case, too, where I had planned to shoot using a large format camera, the wedding boat suddenly entered the frame and I hastily switched to a medium-format camera. When I was shooting, beyond thinking about relations between Japan and North Korea, I also thought that if China could act as a go-between, then there might be some improvement to the current fierce standoff, so the wedding party was symbolic in that sense, but also simply because I found the idea of the potential trajectory of the wedding itself to be interesting.
ART iT: The post-war architecture in Eastern Europe reflects a unique design heritage that is attractive to contemporary sensibilities. Is there any difference photographing in a location with such highly-charged aesthetics, as opposed to, say, the border between China and North Korea or the rather nondescript "banzai cliff" in Saipan?
TY: I was a child when Expo '70 was held in Osaka, and feel there must be some kind of connection between the utopian vision that was expressed there and the architecture of Eastern Europe. My personal opinion is that architecture and design that are visibly inspired by ideology can be stronger than anything else.
When photographing architecture, I begin by assessing elements like form and color. I fundamentally have a preference for precise, formalistic photographs, and have no patience for photos that are distorted - "Parallel Lives" being the anomaly, in that I was playing around with an unusual approach.
I would say this is the influence of having studied photography at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where one of my teachers had studied with the New Bauhaus school at Illinois Institute of Technology. And of course in Chicago there are many buildings by Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius - I was particularly attracted to those designed by Mies. Although if someone were to draw parallels between my work and that of so-called Chicago School photographers like Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, I would disagree.
Left: Former house of General Wang Shu-ming, the Chief of Staff under Chiang Kai-Shek, Cidong Street, III (2010), C-type print, 83 x 65 cm. Right: Former house of General Wang Shu-ming, the Chief of Staff under Chiang Kai-Shek, Cidong Street, V (2010), C-type print, 83 x 65 cm.
ART iT: So when you look at works other than your own, and particularly when you look at photographs, do you tend to respond to them visually, or more through context?
TY: I prefer photographs with context. There are of course photographs I like based on their technical elements, but really when I'm looking at works I like to think about context. For example, I like Bill Brandt's photographs, which touch upon social issues. Although I don't like Lee Miller so much, I do like the photographs she took while on assignment covering the battlefields of Europe during World War II. And in terms of combining context and formalism, I think Margaret Bourke-White's photographs are truly excellent.
Part III ⎮Return to Index
Tomoko Yoneda: The Multiple Lives of Images
Dayanita Singh: Part II
II. Antonino's Bundle
Dayanita Singh on photo editing, form and dissemination.
From the series "Dream Villa" (2010). All images: © and courtesy Dayanita Singh.
ART iT: We were just discussing photography in terms of breakdown, and how your images change significance depending on who is viewing them or who you are addressing. One thing that I noticed with your color photography is that it resists the idea of the photo as an absolute index, in that your photos "index too much." For example, in House of Love (2011) there's a nightscape of the city, with all the lights in the apartments, and the viewer is confronted with all the individual lives represented by each light. There's no single focus, particularly because of your rejection of the photo-journalistic caption. And through your use of daylight film at night, even with the simple image of a tree, the colors are so heightened and outlines so blurred that it is no longer only an image of a tree. Yet this sense of indexing too much is something that already seems to be nascent in early works like Myself Mona Ahmed (2001), with its portrayal of how the titular Mona's agency and place in the world, already tenuous because she is a eunuch, are thrown out of balance when her daughter Ayesha is taken away from her. Mona has multiple identities throughout the course of the book.
DS: Mona was really about what it means to be alone. It's unfortunate that the book always gets pegged as "gender" and "eunuch" and all that. In that sense the book has been a failure, because it's a story about alienation at its height. First you join the eunuch community and you're alienated, and then you're thrown out from there, so you're outcast among the outcasts. I had hoped the conversation around it would be about loneliness, but that never happened. I guess the curiosity factor always takes over.
Curiosity is a key word in how I now edit my photos, because I don't want to make pictures to satisfy anyone's curiosity. I'm not going to tell you about what a certain situation is like. That's why the night is my medium, because it removes all context. And then I'm using daylight film, so that even the night is not quite as you see it. I want to disorient you, and if you're getting too comfortable in the sequence of the book, I want to turn you over a bit.
Both: Spread from Myself Mona Ahmed (Scalo, 2001), hardcover, 176 pages, 20.3 x 17.8 cm.
ART iT: How does that sensibility relate to the form that your books take?
DS: Well, I think Mona needs a new form. Beautiful as the book is, it just becomes this gender story, and that would have been so easy to do and so marketable: everyone's dying to hear the true hijra story - I hate that word, I can't even believe I just said it. It's the same thing with prostitutes. You could spend your lifetime photographing prostitutes because it's the sexiest story ever.
So the Mona story just failed really. I'm experimenting with the idea of a new version for projection, something I already tried out with the Dream Villa Slideshow (2010) at Venice and in the exhibition "Where Three Dreams Cross" at Fotomuseum Winterthur before that. I'm interested in projections because now that I have to scan my images to make the prints, what's the point of making prints?
Or I wonder if Mona's story needs to be text only. Why does it need to have these photographs? Maybe it could be only six photographs. If someone were to spend time with Mona, I think they would find her story is far more important than the pictures. Just last week in Delhi, I gave a grant of a hundred rolls of film and processing to a young photographer in Mona's name. Mona's not well, she couldn't attend the ceremony, but she sent a beautiful message over the phone for the photographer, which I read to the audience: "Everything will pass, our childhood goes, my youth has gone, but in my photographs I live forever, may Allah guide you through this photo life. Myself, Mona Ahmed." She's very wise, and I think perhaps the photographs do a disservice to that wisdom. When she talks about English love and Hindustani love, that's a whole chapter to be written. She has the wisdom, but I wasn't able to ask her to explore that direction further. Somehow I feel the Mona story has not yet reached its true format.
Sent a Letter (Steidl, 2008), 7 volumes, softcover, housed in a handmade cloth box, 126 pages, 9 x 15 cm each.
ART iT: If the books have this provisional aspect of seeking out their true formats, is there much calculation involved when you are actually shooting and composing images?
DS: No, that calculation is very dangerous. The shooting part I feel has to be very intuitive, although it's also informed by conversations with the outside voices, and the books you're reading, and the music you're listening to. Go Away Closer (2007) was made from reediting all past work, but I recognized the emotion I felt while doing that, and built upon it in new works. Now with House of Love it's this nighttime disorientation mode. It's not that I'm looking for anything specific; everything just falls into place.
This also happens with the addressee. Sent a Letter (2008) is a great example of how the books change depending on for whom they are made. If I want to make a book for someone from my experience of Tokyo, it would be completely different than if I just set out to photograph Tokyo. At that point I'm not thinking about the words we associate with photography, not at all.
For me making the photo is maybe 10 percent of my work, or even less. It's the form that it's going to get that is where most of the time is spent. The timeline begins with making the photographs, then there's a big gap before the weeding out, and then the editing starts, and you put the photos in different clusters, and then there's the sequencing, and then there's the pacing, for which music is really crucial in how it turns out. Then the form starts: Will it be a projection? Will it be a book? Will it be printed on napkins, so you get a box and take out image after image, wipe your hands with it and throw it away?
Top: Installation view of Sent a Letter on display at Satramdas Dhalamal Jewellers, Park Street, Calcutta (2008- ). Bottom: Installation view of the exhibition "Ladies of Calcutta," Bose Pacia Gallery, Calcutta, 2008.
ART iT: You mention the addressee, and this idea with the napkins of a disposable photobook. I'm fascinated by this aspect of your practice, not just with something like Sent a Letter, but also with the exhibition of portraits held at Bose Pacia gallery in Calcutta in 2008, "Ladies of Calcutta," where all the people who sat for the portraits took them home from the gallery.
DS: I always give prints to the people I photograph. I made those portraits in 1996-98, and I gave prints to the sitters at that time. We would decide on the final print together, and in those days I didn't think about value, so there are people who have something like 20 work prints of my photographs, from which they chose the final. But I guess because they were shy, they never put the prints up in their homes. Then with the exhibition I framed the new prints in very thick frames and presented them to the sitters unpacked: everything was done so that they had to put it on a nail. It was framed, so they couldn't put it under a mattress, and it was unpacked, so they couldn't leave it in the packing, and now the prints are hanging in 66 homes in Calcutta.
At the same time in January 2008 I also put Sent a Letter on display in the window of a jewelry store in Calcutta, on Park Street. It's still there. It's like having an exhibition for three years in the Shiseido show window. Even if only one percent of the passersby see the work, it adds up to more numbers than any museum.
I love that aspect of photography - the dissemination of it - and that has to do with having been a photojournalist, because you know how many people see your images and think about them. The keys for me are dissemination and giving. I love my books and I feel they are a gift, even when you buy them. I feel in making the book I've given you a gift, so I want you to buy it, but I think people don't give enough importance to that, so now I am designing my own book cart, like a dim sum trolley, with three levels. The top level will have Sent a Letter, the middle House of Love, and below that the big Dayanita Singh (2010) book, just because of the essays in it by Sunil Khilnani and Aveek Sen. I'm having a cart made in Goa out of stainless steel, and one made in Delhi out of wood, and I'm making one here in Tokyo, because I think I'll get the best wheels here. And I can take these carts around to different events and openings. I always think of the books themselves as my work.
Both: Spread from Privacy (Steidl, 2004), clothbound hardcover, dust jacket, 128 pages, 90 tritone plates, 20 x 24 cm.
ART iT: But the dissemination of gifts can also be ambivalent, as with the book Privacy (2004). These are portraits of people who in some cases seem quite interested in projecting their social status to the camera. It's tempting to view the work as both a celebration of material traditions and a critique of bourgeois pretension, but impossible to decide for either, because there is a contradiction between the intimacy of the access and the exposure of the resulting image.
DS: Absolutely. After that I started "Empty Spaces." I'm very cautious now working with people.
Privacy was part of a process. It was at the time the only way to get away from photojournalism. I thought that at least I could photograph families and if nothing else they could hang the pictures in their homes. It was not intended for publication, because nobody was interested in the work, except the families. Then somehow Robert Frank heard about it and sent me a huge grant. Otherwise it would have been too expensive to shoot, and on top of that give prints to the people.
If I had to be critical of my work, I would say it really started to form with Go Away Closer, and everything else was a preparation for that. In a way up to that point I had exposed my student work. From Zakir Hussain (1986) to Myself Mona Ahmed, Privacy and Chairs (2005): something really opened up with Go Away Closer.
Now in House of Love I see similar elements, but it will also become something else, and you can go mad from that. It's like when you're tumbling down a mountain and you don't know where it's all going to crash. Storytelling I guess has been part of my language right from Zakir, but I don't know which way it will go from House of Love, and actually I don't want to know. And the day I know will be the day to stop; then I can start gardening or whatever. I'm not interested in the end product. It's the somersaults. I'm interested in the tumbles and what comes after that. I think it will finally take me out of photography. I'll still be photographing, but somehow having escaped from photography.
Both: Spread from Go Away Closer (Steidl, 2007), softcover, 32 pages, 31 tritone plates, 16 x 20 cm.
ART iT: Of course the title Go Away Closer itself is a contradiction.
DS: That's love. Isn't that what happens between parents and children? I'm sure that as much as they love them, parents must sometimes wish they could get away from their children, and yet couldn't imagine living without them. And as children, we love our parents but can't bear to be with them either.
To me that's photography. You're trying to hold onto something but in the process of trying to hold onto it you're pushing it away. In any case life has already pushed it away, because it's over. That contradiction is key to me. If I had to make a book of my life's work, "Adventures of a Photographer" would finally be called Go Away Closer.
Return to Index
Dayanita Singh: The Always Exceptional Condition of Images
Dayanita Singh on photo editing, form and dissemination.
From the series "Dream Villa" (2010). All images: © and courtesy Dayanita Singh.
ART iT: We were just discussing photography in terms of breakdown, and how your images change significance depending on who is viewing them or who you are addressing. One thing that I noticed with your color photography is that it resists the idea of the photo as an absolute index, in that your photos "index too much." For example, in House of Love (2011) there's a nightscape of the city, with all the lights in the apartments, and the viewer is confronted with all the individual lives represented by each light. There's no single focus, particularly because of your rejection of the photo-journalistic caption. And through your use of daylight film at night, even with the simple image of a tree, the colors are so heightened and outlines so blurred that it is no longer only an image of a tree. Yet this sense of indexing too much is something that already seems to be nascent in early works like Myself Mona Ahmed (2001), with its portrayal of how the titular Mona's agency and place in the world, already tenuous because she is a eunuch, are thrown out of balance when her daughter Ayesha is taken away from her. Mona has multiple identities throughout the course of the book.
DS: Mona was really about what it means to be alone. It's unfortunate that the book always gets pegged as "gender" and "eunuch" and all that. In that sense the book has been a failure, because it's a story about alienation at its height. First you join the eunuch community and you're alienated, and then you're thrown out from there, so you're outcast among the outcasts. I had hoped the conversation around it would be about loneliness, but that never happened. I guess the curiosity factor always takes over.
Curiosity is a key word in how I now edit my photos, because I don't want to make pictures to satisfy anyone's curiosity. I'm not going to tell you about what a certain situation is like. That's why the night is my medium, because it removes all context. And then I'm using daylight film, so that even the night is not quite as you see it. I want to disorient you, and if you're getting too comfortable in the sequence of the book, I want to turn you over a bit.
Both: Spread from Myself Mona Ahmed (Scalo, 2001), hardcover, 176 pages, 20.3 x 17.8 cm.
ART iT: How does that sensibility relate to the form that your books take?
DS: Well, I think Mona needs a new form. Beautiful as the book is, it just becomes this gender story, and that would have been so easy to do and so marketable: everyone's dying to hear the true hijra story - I hate that word, I can't even believe I just said it. It's the same thing with prostitutes. You could spend your lifetime photographing prostitutes because it's the sexiest story ever.
So the Mona story just failed really. I'm experimenting with the idea of a new version for projection, something I already tried out with the Dream Villa Slideshow (2010) at Venice and in the exhibition "Where Three Dreams Cross" at Fotomuseum Winterthur before that. I'm interested in projections because now that I have to scan my images to make the prints, what's the point of making prints?
Or I wonder if Mona's story needs to be text only. Why does it need to have these photographs? Maybe it could be only six photographs. If someone were to spend time with Mona, I think they would find her story is far more important than the pictures. Just last week in Delhi, I gave a grant of a hundred rolls of film and processing to a young photographer in Mona's name. Mona's not well, she couldn't attend the ceremony, but she sent a beautiful message over the phone for the photographer, which I read to the audience: "Everything will pass, our childhood goes, my youth has gone, but in my photographs I live forever, may Allah guide you through this photo life. Myself, Mona Ahmed." She's very wise, and I think perhaps the photographs do a disservice to that wisdom. When she talks about English love and Hindustani love, that's a whole chapter to be written. She has the wisdom, but I wasn't able to ask her to explore that direction further. Somehow I feel the Mona story has not yet reached its true format.
Sent a Letter (Steidl, 2008), 7 volumes, softcover, housed in a handmade cloth box, 126 pages, 9 x 15 cm each.
ART iT: If the books have this provisional aspect of seeking out their true formats, is there much calculation involved when you are actually shooting and composing images?
DS: No, that calculation is very dangerous. The shooting part I feel has to be very intuitive, although it's also informed by conversations with the outside voices, and the books you're reading, and the music you're listening to. Go Away Closer (2007) was made from reediting all past work, but I recognized the emotion I felt while doing that, and built upon it in new works. Now with House of Love it's this nighttime disorientation mode. It's not that I'm looking for anything specific; everything just falls into place.
This also happens with the addressee. Sent a Letter (2008) is a great example of how the books change depending on for whom they are made. If I want to make a book for someone from my experience of Tokyo, it would be completely different than if I just set out to photograph Tokyo. At that point I'm not thinking about the words we associate with photography, not at all.
For me making the photo is maybe 10 percent of my work, or even less. It's the form that it's going to get that is where most of the time is spent. The timeline begins with making the photographs, then there's a big gap before the weeding out, and then the editing starts, and you put the photos in different clusters, and then there's the sequencing, and then there's the pacing, for which music is really crucial in how it turns out. Then the form starts: Will it be a projection? Will it be a book? Will it be printed on napkins, so you get a box and take out image after image, wipe your hands with it and throw it away?
Top: Installation view of Sent a Letter on display at Satramdas Dhalamal Jewellers, Park Street, Calcutta (2008- ). Bottom: Installation view of the exhibition "Ladies of Calcutta," Bose Pacia Gallery, Calcutta, 2008.
ART iT: You mention the addressee, and this idea with the napkins of a disposable photobook. I'm fascinated by this aspect of your practice, not just with something like Sent a Letter, but also with the exhibition of portraits held at Bose Pacia gallery in Calcutta in 2008, "Ladies of Calcutta," where all the people who sat for the portraits took them home from the gallery.
DS: I always give prints to the people I photograph. I made those portraits in 1996-98, and I gave prints to the sitters at that time. We would decide on the final print together, and in those days I didn't think about value, so there are people who have something like 20 work prints of my photographs, from which they chose the final. But I guess because they were shy, they never put the prints up in their homes. Then with the exhibition I framed the new prints in very thick frames and presented them to the sitters unpacked: everything was done so that they had to put it on a nail. It was framed, so they couldn't put it under a mattress, and it was unpacked, so they couldn't leave it in the packing, and now the prints are hanging in 66 homes in Calcutta.
At the same time in January 2008 I also put Sent a Letter on display in the window of a jewelry store in Calcutta, on Park Street. It's still there. It's like having an exhibition for three years in the Shiseido show window. Even if only one percent of the passersby see the work, it adds up to more numbers than any museum.
I love that aspect of photography - the dissemination of it - and that has to do with having been a photojournalist, because you know how many people see your images and think about them. The keys for me are dissemination and giving. I love my books and I feel they are a gift, even when you buy them. I feel in making the book I've given you a gift, so I want you to buy it, but I think people don't give enough importance to that, so now I am designing my own book cart, like a dim sum trolley, with three levels. The top level will have Sent a Letter, the middle House of Love, and below that the big Dayanita Singh (2010) book, just because of the essays in it by Sunil Khilnani and Aveek Sen. I'm having a cart made in Goa out of stainless steel, and one made in Delhi out of wood, and I'm making one here in Tokyo, because I think I'll get the best wheels here. And I can take these carts around to different events and openings. I always think of the books themselves as my work.
Both: Spread from Privacy (Steidl, 2004), clothbound hardcover, dust jacket, 128 pages, 90 tritone plates, 20 x 24 cm.
ART iT: But the dissemination of gifts can also be ambivalent, as with the book Privacy (2004). These are portraits of people who in some cases seem quite interested in projecting their social status to the camera. It's tempting to view the work as both a celebration of material traditions and a critique of bourgeois pretension, but impossible to decide for either, because there is a contradiction between the intimacy of the access and the exposure of the resulting image.
DS: Absolutely. After that I started "Empty Spaces." I'm very cautious now working with people.
Privacy was part of a process. It was at the time the only way to get away from photojournalism. I thought that at least I could photograph families and if nothing else they could hang the pictures in their homes. It was not intended for publication, because nobody was interested in the work, except the families. Then somehow Robert Frank heard about it and sent me a huge grant. Otherwise it would have been too expensive to shoot, and on top of that give prints to the people.
If I had to be critical of my work, I would say it really started to form with Go Away Closer, and everything else was a preparation for that. In a way up to that point I had exposed my student work. From Zakir Hussain (1986) to Myself Mona Ahmed, Privacy and Chairs (2005): something really opened up with Go Away Closer.
Now in House of Love I see similar elements, but it will also become something else, and you can go mad from that. It's like when you're tumbling down a mountain and you don't know where it's all going to crash. Storytelling I guess has been part of my language right from Zakir, but I don't know which way it will go from House of Love, and actually I don't want to know. And the day I know will be the day to stop; then I can start gardening or whatever. I'm not interested in the end product. It's the somersaults. I'm interested in the tumbles and what comes after that. I think it will finally take me out of photography. I'll still be photographing, but somehow having escaped from photography.
Both: Spread from Go Away Closer (Steidl, 2007), softcover, 32 pages, 31 tritone plates, 16 x 20 cm.
ART iT: Of course the title Go Away Closer itself is a contradiction.
DS: That's love. Isn't that what happens between parents and children? I'm sure that as much as they love them, parents must sometimes wish they could get away from their children, and yet couldn't imagine living without them. And as children, we love our parents but can't bear to be with them either.
To me that's photography. You're trying to hold onto something but in the process of trying to hold onto it you're pushing it away. In any case life has already pushed it away, because it's over. That contradiction is key to me. If I had to make a book of my life's work, "Adventures of a Photographer" would finally be called Go Away Closer.
Return to Index
Dayanita Singh: The Always Exceptional Condition of Images
Dayanita Singh: Part I
THE ALWAYS EXCEPTIONAL CONDITION OF IMAGES
By Andrew Maerkle
Cover image: From "House of Love" (2010-11). All images: © and courtesy Dayanita Singh.
Describing herself as a bookmaker who works with photography, Dayanita Singh has a profound understanding of the pliability and reproducibility of images: how they are processed and can be printed or projected onto any surface, and how those surfaces themselves can be folded or unfolded, enlarged, expanded, compressed, carried, mailed or discarded. Constantly thinking about new ways to present her photographs, Singh continuously reinvents those photographs, in the way that language reinvents words. For her, then, all images are singular events that also intrinsically exist in relation to other images, or even in relation to past and future instances of their own apparition. For her, images have the same conditionality and abstraction as spoken words, always disappearing the instant they are materialized, formed and deformed by preceding and succeeding utterances or caesuras, yet, at times when decisively employed and at others simply as determined by chance and context, also capable of fastening in the mind's eye an impression of the grave, exciting physicallity and consequentiality of the world around us.
Singh recently visited Tokyo for a solo exhibition at the Shiseido Gallery, "Adventures of a Photographer," where she presented prints from her latest publication, House of Love (Radius Books & Peabody Museum Press, 2011), alongside a selection of past works arranged into a concise, fictionalized overview of her career, and a display of her photobooks to date. ART iT met with Singh to discuss her approach to photography and how she understands the lives of the images she makes.
Index:
I. As Real as Photography
II. Antonino's Bundle
I. As Real as Photography
Dayanita Singh on how images live with each other.
From "House of Love" (2010-11).
ART iT: Much has been written about your work in terms of literature, but I thought we could begin today with an analogy about images. Ernst Lubitsch's 1932 film Trouble in Paradise opens with a sequence of short, interconnected scenes set in Venice: we see a dark alley from which a man emerges to throw trash onto a trash collecting boat; then women frantically knocking at a door; then behind the door a darkened room in disarray, with a man on the floor who tries to get up and collapses; then an amazing panning shot that goes from the exterior of the room around the building to a veranda on the far side, where we find a man in a tuxedo with a waiter planning a supper for a romantic rendezvous. The waiter asks, "How should we begin?" And the man in the tuxedo replies, "Suppose Casanova turned out to be Romeo having supper with Juliet, who was actually Cleopatra, how would you start?" Now, obviously there is sound and movement and other elements that go beyond photography, but the first time I saw this sequence I was completely disoriented. It felt that each subsequent image was pushing away both the one before and the one after, so that they all resisted cohering into a unified whole.
I experienced a similar effect when looking at both your photobooks and your individual photographs, and thinking further about this kind of dissociation effect, I felt that it is somehow unique to images - that images don't hold together the same way words do. And in your case one could even provocatively describe this dissociation effect in terms of breakdown, of both the forms of the images as well as their identities. How do you understand the lives of the images that you create?
DS: What can I say? You've summed it up perfectly. There are always many conversations going on in my head at all times: right now one of the conversations is of course here with you, but at the same time I can't get the images of Naoya Hatakeyama's "Natural Stories" exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography out of my head, and I can't get the Okura Hotel out of my head, and last night in my dreams I was in about four different countries. Because I woke up about two hours ago, everything is colliding. Were we to have met three hours later, I might have more clarity, but it's exactly at this colliding stage that I want to photograph. This is where I want to locate photography: post-dream, post-last-night, today-not-clear. At least half my life is lived in my dream world, which is a very real dream world. These are very real situations, as real as they can be - as real as photography can be.
I guess there is a breakdown in feeling very limited by photography as I was trained to think of it, and in identity, because the last few years have seen such an explosion of national identity directed at the demands of the art market or the international art world. Now I'm in Tokyo, and maybe this afternoon I will decide I want to stay here for six months, or for six years. That's how I made my life. I wanted to be free and open, and in that sense I think the breakdown already started when I was 18 and decided to go to Zakir Hussain's hotel room to photograph him, without worrying about what other people might say and the social restrictions that it's not ok for a young girl to go to a musician's hotel room. Somehow you do what you have to do because you have to do it. You can't stop it.
Photography the way I knew it is no longer enough for that breakdown. The breakdown requires literature, it requires cinema, it requires travel, it requires this time of chaos when things are colliding. With House of Love and "Adventures of a Photographer," the fictional aspect has really freed me, and that fictionalizing is only possible because of that breakdown - although at the same time I'm obsessed with "File Room" (2011- ), the series that was on view in the latest Venice Biennale. There are other dimensions to photography that require the breakdown of photography for new forms - or at least different explorations - to start. And digital will help that a lot.
Spread from Zakir Hussain (Himalayan Books, 1986), hardcover, 80 pages, 21.5 x 24.5 cm.
ART iT: Is digital photography something you are actively exploring?
DS: No, I'm not interested in it myself. But now photography is finally accessible to everyone, or at least anyone with a mobile phone. There's no longer the idea that you could only take a photo of some event because you happened to have a camera with you, or because someone with a camera happened to be there: everyone has a camera, and you don't know who will be where with a camera when things happen. That puts a lot of pressure on photography because now making images is like making words: big deal. And even if you can write a sentence, what's the big deal? And even if you can write a short story, is there any new thought in that story, or are you telling me the same story that I've heard for 100 years?
ART iT: Perhaps we could say photography is going through the same process that writing underwent some 200 or 300 years ago in most industrialized nations with the advance toward universal literacy. Once everyone can write, it's no longer about creating a classic. Now more so even than in antiquity, the classic comes to us, in the way that, for example, Muhammad was chosen to be God's interlocutor: you could never set out to become a prophet.
DS: Exactly. There are no formulas, although there are certain exercises you can follow. The first exercise in writing I imagine would be something along the lines of Rilke's admonition not to write love poems. At least if you know what not to do, then other possibilities will present themselves. But you have no say in how it will be seen or whether it becomes a classic.
For me, House of Love is totally experimental, but I just had to do it. The "File Room" series is the same. The photos have been shown in Venice, it's a complete show, I don't need to do more, but I can't stop it, I have to do it. That's one thing I've learned, to trust that compulsion.
Both: From "File Room" (2011- ).
ART iT: As a series, "File Room" (2011- ) seems quite distinct in subject matter and focus compared to your other projects. Where does it come from?
DS: I'd been making "File Room" for a period of over 10 years without realizing it. Then in January 2011 the scholar Sunil Khilnani came to look at my work. I wanted to make something special to show him, so I went through my archive and found that there was a lot of work that had something to do with things like paper, paper factories, offices, libraries, bookshops and printers, and I made 200 little prints for him.
He pulled out 24 of those images and said, "'File Room,' this is what it's called."
I said, "What's a 'File Room'?"
He said, "Never mind, we just made it up."
Then I looked at those images, and it dawned on me that for 10 years I'd been taking almost the same identical photo without paying any attention to it. Since then I've been working like a dog writing everyone I know to request access to places that I want to shoot, and I carry everywhere a big box of about 300 new "File Room" prints, because I can't stop it and I can't travel without it.
That's one part of it. Another part of it is that in the summer after Venice I was in Delhi for two days before rushing to Calcutta, because I had got this amazing permission to go into the Writer's Building. I told my mother, "I'm really sorry I haven't been able to see you, but I'm obsessed with the 'File Room' series and I can't stop it. There's nothing I can do about it, so I'll see you when I come back."
She laughed and said, "You've forgotten, it seems. You've forgotten many things."
Then she reminded me of when my father died and we came back from the cremation. In our home there is a large drawing room, completely covered in mattresses and beautiful textiles, where I would have friends come to stay, eight of us sleeping together there on the floor. After my father's death we had taken out all his files - thousands of them - and stacked them all over this room, where my mother would sleep, and I would bring her breakfast. My mother lived in that room for the first 10 days or two weeks, and she remembers very well waking up among the files and my standing there with the breakfast, looking completely overwhelmed by the loss of the father replaced by these thousands of files.
I don't like the idea of reading my own story into everything, and yet at the same time my obsession with these files is irrational. Somewhere that impression must have stayed with me. It's not a comfortable memory, so it was not obvious, but I guess that's what I was doing. Now when I go into a file room I know whether it's for me or not. Again and again, it's that room filled with so many files that it looks absolutely impenetrable, and yet if you observe, some order emerges and there is someone around who can help you through it.
From "Interior Landscapes" (undated).
ART iT: So in a way even though you are driven by a kind of compulsion, you are also able to keep a distance from your own photos, or at least see them through others' eyes?
DS: Yes. One thing that emerged from this experience is that it became clear to me once again that these two or three outside voices that we have are so valuable. I would be nothing without them. It's not always the same people, but these voices are incredible mirrors. I look to Sunil and the "File Room" comes back, or I look to the writer Aveek Sen and the madness of House of Love comes back.
The work is really a collaboration with these voices in my head, which is why I have this archive of 30 years, and depending on who comes and who I share what with, a different kind of image emerges. It's like my album called "Interior Landscapes," for which Aveek and I put together photographs of the Sundarbans and of this place where crazy people come to be cured. Maybe that was the first realization of how one can make fiction out of documentation, combining two very serious bodies of work into a third thing.
Return to Index
Dayanita Singh: The Always Exceptional Condition of Images
By Andrew Maerkle
Cover image: From "House of Love" (2010-11). All images: © and courtesy Dayanita Singh.
Describing herself as a bookmaker who works with photography, Dayanita Singh has a profound understanding of the pliability and reproducibility of images: how they are processed and can be printed or projected onto any surface, and how those surfaces themselves can be folded or unfolded, enlarged, expanded, compressed, carried, mailed or discarded. Constantly thinking about new ways to present her photographs, Singh continuously reinvents those photographs, in the way that language reinvents words. For her, then, all images are singular events that also intrinsically exist in relation to other images, or even in relation to past and future instances of their own apparition. For her, images have the same conditionality and abstraction as spoken words, always disappearing the instant they are materialized, formed and deformed by preceding and succeeding utterances or caesuras, yet, at times when decisively employed and at others simply as determined by chance and context, also capable of fastening in the mind's eye an impression of the grave, exciting physicallity and consequentiality of the world around us.
Singh recently visited Tokyo for a solo exhibition at the Shiseido Gallery, "Adventures of a Photographer," where she presented prints from her latest publication, House of Love (Radius Books & Peabody Museum Press, 2011), alongside a selection of past works arranged into a concise, fictionalized overview of her career, and a display of her photobooks to date. ART iT met with Singh to discuss her approach to photography and how she understands the lives of the images she makes.
Index:
I. As Real as Photography
II. Antonino's Bundle
I. As Real as Photography
Dayanita Singh on how images live with each other.
From "House of Love" (2010-11).
ART iT: Much has been written about your work in terms of literature, but I thought we could begin today with an analogy about images. Ernst Lubitsch's 1932 film Trouble in Paradise opens with a sequence of short, interconnected scenes set in Venice: we see a dark alley from which a man emerges to throw trash onto a trash collecting boat; then women frantically knocking at a door; then behind the door a darkened room in disarray, with a man on the floor who tries to get up and collapses; then an amazing panning shot that goes from the exterior of the room around the building to a veranda on the far side, where we find a man in a tuxedo with a waiter planning a supper for a romantic rendezvous. The waiter asks, "How should we begin?" And the man in the tuxedo replies, "Suppose Casanova turned out to be Romeo having supper with Juliet, who was actually Cleopatra, how would you start?" Now, obviously there is sound and movement and other elements that go beyond photography, but the first time I saw this sequence I was completely disoriented. It felt that each subsequent image was pushing away both the one before and the one after, so that they all resisted cohering into a unified whole.
I experienced a similar effect when looking at both your photobooks and your individual photographs, and thinking further about this kind of dissociation effect, I felt that it is somehow unique to images - that images don't hold together the same way words do. And in your case one could even provocatively describe this dissociation effect in terms of breakdown, of both the forms of the images as well as their identities. How do you understand the lives of the images that you create?
DS: What can I say? You've summed it up perfectly. There are always many conversations going on in my head at all times: right now one of the conversations is of course here with you, but at the same time I can't get the images of Naoya Hatakeyama's "Natural Stories" exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography out of my head, and I can't get the Okura Hotel out of my head, and last night in my dreams I was in about four different countries. Because I woke up about two hours ago, everything is colliding. Were we to have met three hours later, I might have more clarity, but it's exactly at this colliding stage that I want to photograph. This is where I want to locate photography: post-dream, post-last-night, today-not-clear. At least half my life is lived in my dream world, which is a very real dream world. These are very real situations, as real as they can be - as real as photography can be.
I guess there is a breakdown in feeling very limited by photography as I was trained to think of it, and in identity, because the last few years have seen such an explosion of national identity directed at the demands of the art market or the international art world. Now I'm in Tokyo, and maybe this afternoon I will decide I want to stay here for six months, or for six years. That's how I made my life. I wanted to be free and open, and in that sense I think the breakdown already started when I was 18 and decided to go to Zakir Hussain's hotel room to photograph him, without worrying about what other people might say and the social restrictions that it's not ok for a young girl to go to a musician's hotel room. Somehow you do what you have to do because you have to do it. You can't stop it.
Photography the way I knew it is no longer enough for that breakdown. The breakdown requires literature, it requires cinema, it requires travel, it requires this time of chaos when things are colliding. With House of Love and "Adventures of a Photographer," the fictional aspect has really freed me, and that fictionalizing is only possible because of that breakdown - although at the same time I'm obsessed with "File Room" (2011- ), the series that was on view in the latest Venice Biennale. There are other dimensions to photography that require the breakdown of photography for new forms - or at least different explorations - to start. And digital will help that a lot.
Spread from Zakir Hussain (Himalayan Books, 1986), hardcover, 80 pages, 21.5 x 24.5 cm.
ART iT: Is digital photography something you are actively exploring?
DS: No, I'm not interested in it myself. But now photography is finally accessible to everyone, or at least anyone with a mobile phone. There's no longer the idea that you could only take a photo of some event because you happened to have a camera with you, or because someone with a camera happened to be there: everyone has a camera, and you don't know who will be where with a camera when things happen. That puts a lot of pressure on photography because now making images is like making words: big deal. And even if you can write a sentence, what's the big deal? And even if you can write a short story, is there any new thought in that story, or are you telling me the same story that I've heard for 100 years?
ART iT: Perhaps we could say photography is going through the same process that writing underwent some 200 or 300 years ago in most industrialized nations with the advance toward universal literacy. Once everyone can write, it's no longer about creating a classic. Now more so even than in antiquity, the classic comes to us, in the way that, for example, Muhammad was chosen to be God's interlocutor: you could never set out to become a prophet.
DS: Exactly. There are no formulas, although there are certain exercises you can follow. The first exercise in writing I imagine would be something along the lines of Rilke's admonition not to write love poems. At least if you know what not to do, then other possibilities will present themselves. But you have no say in how it will be seen or whether it becomes a classic.
For me, House of Love is totally experimental, but I just had to do it. The "File Room" series is the same. The photos have been shown in Venice, it's a complete show, I don't need to do more, but I can't stop it, I have to do it. That's one thing I've learned, to trust that compulsion.
Both: From "File Room" (2011- ).
ART iT: As a series, "File Room" (2011- ) seems quite distinct in subject matter and focus compared to your other projects. Where does it come from?
DS: I'd been making "File Room" for a period of over 10 years without realizing it. Then in January 2011 the scholar Sunil Khilnani came to look at my work. I wanted to make something special to show him, so I went through my archive and found that there was a lot of work that had something to do with things like paper, paper factories, offices, libraries, bookshops and printers, and I made 200 little prints for him.
He pulled out 24 of those images and said, "'File Room,' this is what it's called."
I said, "What's a 'File Room'?"
He said, "Never mind, we just made it up."
Then I looked at those images, and it dawned on me that for 10 years I'd been taking almost the same identical photo without paying any attention to it. Since then I've been working like a dog writing everyone I know to request access to places that I want to shoot, and I carry everywhere a big box of about 300 new "File Room" prints, because I can't stop it and I can't travel without it.
That's one part of it. Another part of it is that in the summer after Venice I was in Delhi for two days before rushing to Calcutta, because I had got this amazing permission to go into the Writer's Building. I told my mother, "I'm really sorry I haven't been able to see you, but I'm obsessed with the 'File Room' series and I can't stop it. There's nothing I can do about it, so I'll see you when I come back."
She laughed and said, "You've forgotten, it seems. You've forgotten many things."
Then she reminded me of when my father died and we came back from the cremation. In our home there is a large drawing room, completely covered in mattresses and beautiful textiles, where I would have friends come to stay, eight of us sleeping together there on the floor. After my father's death we had taken out all his files - thousands of them - and stacked them all over this room, where my mother would sleep, and I would bring her breakfast. My mother lived in that room for the first 10 days or two weeks, and she remembers very well waking up among the files and my standing there with the breakfast, looking completely overwhelmed by the loss of the father replaced by these thousands of files.
I don't like the idea of reading my own story into everything, and yet at the same time my obsession with these files is irrational. Somewhere that impression must have stayed with me. It's not a comfortable memory, so it was not obvious, but I guess that's what I was doing. Now when I go into a file room I know whether it's for me or not. Again and again, it's that room filled with so many files that it looks absolutely impenetrable, and yet if you observe, some order emerges and there is someone around who can help you through it.
From "Interior Landscapes" (undated).
ART iT: So in a way even though you are driven by a kind of compulsion, you are also able to keep a distance from your own photos, or at least see them through others' eyes?
DS: Yes. One thing that emerged from this experience is that it became clear to me once again that these two or three outside voices that we have are so valuable. I would be nothing without them. It's not always the same people, but these voices are incredible mirrors. I look to Sunil and the "File Room" comes back, or I look to the writer Aveek Sen and the madness of House of Love comes back.
The work is really a collaboration with these voices in my head, which is why I have this archive of 30 years, and depending on who comes and who I share what with, a different kind of image emerges. It's like my album called "Interior Landscapes," for which Aveek and I put together photographs of the Sundarbans and of this place where crazy people come to be cured. Maybe that was the first realization of how one can make fiction out of documentation, combining two very serious bodies of work into a third thing.
Return to Index
Dayanita Singh: The Always Exceptional Condition of Images
Tomoko Yoneda: Part I
THE MULTIPLE LIVES OF IMAGES
By Andrew Maerkle and Natsuko Odate
Former house of General Wang Shu-ming, the Chief of Staff under Chiang Kai-Shek, Cidong Street, I (2010), C-type print, 65 x 83 cm. All images: © Tomoko Yoneda, courtesy ShugoArts, Tokyo.
In her photographs Tomoko Yoneda compresses multiple layers of history into a single image. She is best known for her project "Scene," for which she visited former sites of conflict around the world, photographing them in their current, innocuous states while fully cognizant of their past significance, which she relates to viewers through titles that provide a frame for viewing and responding to the resulting images. The effect of this is to heighten every detail in each image, to give every last bench or shrub or building in the image the same importance as the whole, creating a telescopic relationship between the eyes of the people who participated in the referenced events, and the eyes of the photographer and the eyes of the viewers.
Yoneda is currently participating in a residency at Tokyo Wonder Site, where she is working on a new series that addresses the legacy of Japanese modernization from the Meiji era onward. ART iT met with Yoneda to discuss her practice in greater detail, and to learn about how she is responding to the historic events of the past year.
Index
I. Frames of Reference
II. Frames of Consciousness
III. Frames of Action
I. Frames of Reference
Tomoko Yoneda on the moment when history and present meet in an image.
Sniper View - View from Christian sniper position overlooking no man's land, Beirut (2004), C-type print, 76 x 96 cm
ART iT: You are perhaps best known for works, such as Sniper View - View from Christian sniper position overlooking no man's land, Beirut (2004), which possess a kind of dual or split identity through the disjunction between the everyday scenes they present and the context that literally frames their composition. Such works simultaneously rely upon and undermine conventions of how we relate to photography in everyday life. To begin with, could you explain how you understand photography's potentiality for expression?
TY: For me, photography involves a process of going to a location and shooting it. However, before starting production on my works, I always do extensive background research on the location and its history, and only once I've sorted through all that information do I proceed to the photography itself. It's impossible to describe in words, but once I'm actually standing there at the location, there is something that I respond to through my entire body, and I feel the best medium for expressing that sensation is photography. Specifically, it's like something descends before me, or in a single moment what I need to capture unfolds right before my eyes.
At the same time, many of my photographs are emotionally detached, because I try my best to shoot from an objective viewpoint. As such, I think that my works allow different people to each have their own diverse responses and associations. There is no absolute interpretation. Whether a woman or man, or of whatever age and social background, each viewer will have a different way of seeing my work. Because painting is ultimately subjective, I could never produce what I want to express through painting. So considering all the different capabilities of all possible media, I feel that photography is the most appropriate for me.
ART iT: Could you explain more about what kind of role the research plays in your practice, and how you determine the focus of each new series?
TY: I do almost all of my research through books. Of course I also do online research, or I talk with the people who support me on site at the locations I intend to photograph and do interviews with people in the local communities. It all varies from project to project, but certainly I spend a lot of time with books and in libraries. Regarding how I choose the themes to explore, sometimes it's whatever I happen to be interested in at the time. For example, with the "Japanese House" project I happened to be in Taiwan on a residency, so I began researching local history and digging into things that caught my attention.
I also look for photographs and illustrations in old books. For example, my work Beach - Location of the D-Day Normandy landings, Sword Beach, Normandy, France (2002) references Robert Capa's photographs from D-Day, of which due to a processing error only 11 frames remain from four the rolls of film that Capa shot. The location is now a summer vacation spot, where scores of people frolic on the beach and luxury liners pass offshore.
Similarly, when I made Path - Path to the cliff where Japanese committed suicide after the American landings, Saipan (2003), I had in my head the image of Léonard Tsugouharu Foujita's war propaganda painting Saipan-to doho shinsetu o mattousu (Compatriots on Saipan Island Remain Faithful to the End, 1945): a former site of tragedy is now a honeymoon destination. There are also surviving photographs of the Lytton Commission inspecting the site where the Japanese Kwantung Army orchestrated the Manchurian Incident, [which inspired Railway Track - Overlooking the location of where the Japanese Army fabricated a bombing to create a reason to invade Manchuria, Shenyang, China (2007)].
Top: Railway Track - Overlooking the location of where the Japanese Army fabricated a bombing to create a reason to invade Manchuria, Shenyang, China (2007), C-type print, 76 x 96 cm. Bottom: Path - Path to the cliff where Japanese committed suicide after the American landings, Saipan (2003), C-type print, 76 x 96 cm.
ART iT: But how does all your extensive research end up getting compressed into a single photograph, if at all? And can you expand on what you meant about the sensation you experience when you finally reach the location?
TY: When I take the photograph, something really comes over me. I can't explain it well, but somehow once I'm standing at the location, the material from the research, and memories from my youth, and things and events that I retain as images, as well as things that I learned through language, and news that I saw in passing on the television or in the newspaper, and advertisements, and all these other things accumulating inside me suddenly come rushing up to the surface, and then there's a certain point where all of it matches up exactly with the landscape before me.
ART iT: It seems fair to say that the series "Scene" is the body of work for which you are best known, but for example with early projects like "Topographical Analogy," did you follow a similar process in making them?
TY: With "Topographical Analogy," more than looking at history, I was interested in the progress of time in a given location, so it did not require the same research that went into "Scene." I photographed "Topographical Analogy" without knowing the people who lived in the locations I shot, or what their personalities or families were like, so there is an anonymity to the traces they left behind, and a more universal human existence that is recorded in the resulting photographs. This is quite different from the scars left by wars.
Maybe what I deal with in "Scene" is what most interests me. Many of my works are photographed at the sites of conflicts and battles. It's like how in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) Hannah Arrendt uses the example of Eichmann - who in court looked so ordinary - to illustrate how all people are capable of insanity. We tend to imagine the insanity of war through scenes of mothers crying over their children on the battlefield, or people being shot down with guns, or body parts flying and other such ghastliness, but by not directly representing that, I wanted to remind people that insanity can arise anywhere. Motivated by a strong pacifist sensibility, I wanted to show through my photographs that conflicts are in fact not so extraordinary as we like to think.
Fragments of AH (2002), C-type print, 18 x 17.6 cm.
ART iT: At the same time your photographs are somehow released from the burden of expression, because they also employ text as a trigger for transforming the identity of the image or enabling the image to take on multiple identities. For example, in the series "Fragments of the Unimaginable," you have an image of what appears to be an ordinary cardboard box, sitting on a nondescript table in front of a poster of a cat, but contained within are what is said to be the remains of Adolf Hitler [Fragments of AH (2002)]. Each work stages a series of encounters nested within each other. There is the encounter of seeing the work for the first time, there is the encounter that you as the photographer experienced shooting on site, which the viewer experiences vicariously through the image, and then there is the encounter of reading the caption and suddenly reliving the preceding encounters. In this way even a single photograph represents multiple sites, and provides a lot of material for thinking about the essence of photography in general. How do you understand the relations between image and text in your works?
TY: I actually thought deeply about the relations between text and image for my master's degree thesis at Royal College of Art in London. At the time I was thinking about how text is an extremely subjective thing, and how a text can influence the reading of an image in a way that is completely different from if the image were presented by itself. I was also interested in the implications of linguistic signification. For example, I was fascinated by Michel Foucault's description of Rene Magritte's The Treachery of Images, and how text and images can share this paradoxical relationship. Among some of my experiments from that time, I made a photo of a woman holding a glass filed with white liquid. My idea was that were I to present that image with the text "This is lead," it would give viewers a completely different impression than if the text read, "This is milk," and a different image would unfold depending on whichever text. For me, captions are an essential part of the work.
Part II ⎮ Return to Index
Tomoko Yoneda: The Multiple Lives of Images
By Andrew Maerkle and Natsuko Odate
Former house of General Wang Shu-ming, the Chief of Staff under Chiang Kai-Shek, Cidong Street, I (2010), C-type print, 65 x 83 cm. All images: © Tomoko Yoneda, courtesy ShugoArts, Tokyo.
In her photographs Tomoko Yoneda compresses multiple layers of history into a single image. She is best known for her project "Scene," for which she visited former sites of conflict around the world, photographing them in their current, innocuous states while fully cognizant of their past significance, which she relates to viewers through titles that provide a frame for viewing and responding to the resulting images. The effect of this is to heighten every detail in each image, to give every last bench or shrub or building in the image the same importance as the whole, creating a telescopic relationship between the eyes of the people who participated in the referenced events, and the eyes of the photographer and the eyes of the viewers.
Yoneda is currently participating in a residency at Tokyo Wonder Site, where she is working on a new series that addresses the legacy of Japanese modernization from the Meiji era onward. ART iT met with Yoneda to discuss her practice in greater detail, and to learn about how she is responding to the historic events of the past year.
Index
I. Frames of Reference
II. Frames of Consciousness
III. Frames of Action
I. Frames of Reference
Tomoko Yoneda on the moment when history and present meet in an image.
Sniper View - View from Christian sniper position overlooking no man's land, Beirut (2004), C-type print, 76 x 96 cm
ART iT: You are perhaps best known for works, such as Sniper View - View from Christian sniper position overlooking no man's land, Beirut (2004), which possess a kind of dual or split identity through the disjunction between the everyday scenes they present and the context that literally frames their composition. Such works simultaneously rely upon and undermine conventions of how we relate to photography in everyday life. To begin with, could you explain how you understand photography's potentiality for expression?
TY: For me, photography involves a process of going to a location and shooting it. However, before starting production on my works, I always do extensive background research on the location and its history, and only once I've sorted through all that information do I proceed to the photography itself. It's impossible to describe in words, but once I'm actually standing there at the location, there is something that I respond to through my entire body, and I feel the best medium for expressing that sensation is photography. Specifically, it's like something descends before me, or in a single moment what I need to capture unfolds right before my eyes.
At the same time, many of my photographs are emotionally detached, because I try my best to shoot from an objective viewpoint. As such, I think that my works allow different people to each have their own diverse responses and associations. There is no absolute interpretation. Whether a woman or man, or of whatever age and social background, each viewer will have a different way of seeing my work. Because painting is ultimately subjective, I could never produce what I want to express through painting. So considering all the different capabilities of all possible media, I feel that photography is the most appropriate for me.
ART iT: Could you explain more about what kind of role the research plays in your practice, and how you determine the focus of each new series?
TY: I do almost all of my research through books. Of course I also do online research, or I talk with the people who support me on site at the locations I intend to photograph and do interviews with people in the local communities. It all varies from project to project, but certainly I spend a lot of time with books and in libraries. Regarding how I choose the themes to explore, sometimes it's whatever I happen to be interested in at the time. For example, with the "Japanese House" project I happened to be in Taiwan on a residency, so I began researching local history and digging into things that caught my attention.
I also look for photographs and illustrations in old books. For example, my work Beach - Location of the D-Day Normandy landings, Sword Beach, Normandy, France (2002) references Robert Capa's photographs from D-Day, of which due to a processing error only 11 frames remain from four the rolls of film that Capa shot. The location is now a summer vacation spot, where scores of people frolic on the beach and luxury liners pass offshore.
Similarly, when I made Path - Path to the cliff where Japanese committed suicide after the American landings, Saipan (2003), I had in my head the image of Léonard Tsugouharu Foujita's war propaganda painting Saipan-to doho shinsetu o mattousu (Compatriots on Saipan Island Remain Faithful to the End, 1945): a former site of tragedy is now a honeymoon destination. There are also surviving photographs of the Lytton Commission inspecting the site where the Japanese Kwantung Army orchestrated the Manchurian Incident, [which inspired Railway Track - Overlooking the location of where the Japanese Army fabricated a bombing to create a reason to invade Manchuria, Shenyang, China (2007)].
Top: Railway Track - Overlooking the location of where the Japanese Army fabricated a bombing to create a reason to invade Manchuria, Shenyang, China (2007), C-type print, 76 x 96 cm. Bottom: Path - Path to the cliff where Japanese committed suicide after the American landings, Saipan (2003), C-type print, 76 x 96 cm.
ART iT: But how does all your extensive research end up getting compressed into a single photograph, if at all? And can you expand on what you meant about the sensation you experience when you finally reach the location?
TY: When I take the photograph, something really comes over me. I can't explain it well, but somehow once I'm standing at the location, the material from the research, and memories from my youth, and things and events that I retain as images, as well as things that I learned through language, and news that I saw in passing on the television or in the newspaper, and advertisements, and all these other things accumulating inside me suddenly come rushing up to the surface, and then there's a certain point where all of it matches up exactly with the landscape before me.
ART iT: It seems fair to say that the series "Scene" is the body of work for which you are best known, but for example with early projects like "Topographical Analogy," did you follow a similar process in making them?
TY: With "Topographical Analogy," more than looking at history, I was interested in the progress of time in a given location, so it did not require the same research that went into "Scene." I photographed "Topographical Analogy" without knowing the people who lived in the locations I shot, or what their personalities or families were like, so there is an anonymity to the traces they left behind, and a more universal human existence that is recorded in the resulting photographs. This is quite different from the scars left by wars.
Maybe what I deal with in "Scene" is what most interests me. Many of my works are photographed at the sites of conflicts and battles. It's like how in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) Hannah Arrendt uses the example of Eichmann - who in court looked so ordinary - to illustrate how all people are capable of insanity. We tend to imagine the insanity of war through scenes of mothers crying over their children on the battlefield, or people being shot down with guns, or body parts flying and other such ghastliness, but by not directly representing that, I wanted to remind people that insanity can arise anywhere. Motivated by a strong pacifist sensibility, I wanted to show through my photographs that conflicts are in fact not so extraordinary as we like to think.
Fragments of AH (2002), C-type print, 18 x 17.6 cm.
ART iT: At the same time your photographs are somehow released from the burden of expression, because they also employ text as a trigger for transforming the identity of the image or enabling the image to take on multiple identities. For example, in the series "Fragments of the Unimaginable," you have an image of what appears to be an ordinary cardboard box, sitting on a nondescript table in front of a poster of a cat, but contained within are what is said to be the remains of Adolf Hitler [Fragments of AH (2002)]. Each work stages a series of encounters nested within each other. There is the encounter of seeing the work for the first time, there is the encounter that you as the photographer experienced shooting on site, which the viewer experiences vicariously through the image, and then there is the encounter of reading the caption and suddenly reliving the preceding encounters. In this way even a single photograph represents multiple sites, and provides a lot of material for thinking about the essence of photography in general. How do you understand the relations between image and text in your works?
TY: I actually thought deeply about the relations between text and image for my master's degree thesis at Royal College of Art in London. At the time I was thinking about how text is an extremely subjective thing, and how a text can influence the reading of an image in a way that is completely different from if the image were presented by itself. I was also interested in the implications of linguistic signification. For example, I was fascinated by Michel Foucault's description of Rene Magritte's The Treachery of Images, and how text and images can share this paradoxical relationship. Among some of my experiments from that time, I made a photo of a woman holding a glass filed with white liquid. My idea was that were I to present that image with the text "This is lead," it would give viewers a completely different impression than if the text read, "This is milk," and a different image would unfold depending on whichever text. For me, captions are an essential part of the work.
Part II ⎮ Return to Index
Tomoko Yoneda: The Multiple Lives of Images
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