Critical Fieldwork 34

‘B-grade horror’ reputation – documentation and mediacy

The criticisms in my previous two columns dealing with Lieko Shiga’s exhibition “Rasen Kaigan,” or what have been dubbed the “Lieko Shiga = B-grade horror” theory, were penned to provide some balance to the almost delirious “rave reviews” from people with no appreciation of photography. But in her official blog, the director of the exhibition of work by Higashikawa Prize winners, Aki Kusumoto, reignites discussion of “Rasen Kaigan,” in the course of which she breaks the almost total silence and addresses my criticisms. Before continuing, I invite readers to cast an eye over her exhibition review (in Japanese), which takes the golden mean by maintaining an equal distance from myself and those with no appreciation of photography.


Aki Kusumoto, “Leiko Shiga: Rasen Kaigan”

According to Kusumoto, the possibility of Shiga’s photography should be seen not in the eye-catching effects but in the “details” that come to light as the imagination is stirred. This possibility, she goes on to say, is the rich mutual relationship between documentation and mediacy, something that harks back to an argument once put forward by Takuma Nakahira. Why is it, then, that the nonessential effects are overwhelmingly in the foreground? Might it be that Kusumoto is projecting onto Shiga’s photography her own thoughts regarding documentation and mediacy? Such questions arise because there is something strained about looking to the “details” for a defense of Shiga.

Considering that such elements are not limited to B-grade horror, but have been employed widely in spirit photographs since the early 19th century, when photography was invented, one could also say that Shiga’s photographs have something in common with the primitive images from the dawn of photography. […] As Walter Benjamin notes, within the supernatural, all the forms that produce life (division, reproduction, etc) are already present as existing forms. It is not particularly strange that Shiga’s photographs, which seek to deputize her own corporeality through photography, make frequent use of such forms. (1)

Recognizing that something supernatural lies at the heart of photography and actually capturing ghosts and spirits on film are two separate things. Benjamin had in mind 19th-century daguerreotype portrait and landscape photographs as well as the photographs of Eugene Atget, not spirit photographs that depict in various ways ectoplasm and spiritualism and suchlike. Surely one cannot substitute spirit photography for “primitive images from the dawn of photography.” My argument was that B-grade horror and its popularity rely on the expression of the invisible supernatural qualities of photography as is in the form of visible effects, and that the “frequent use of such forms” in Lieko Shiga’s photographs is an example of this.

In the following passage, Kusumoto goes on to claim that if one looks carefully at Lieko Shiga’s photographs, which at first sight look like B-grade horror, one can discern the presence of “details that can be read from the photographs,” and that this gives her work “a handmade feeling.”

Many of Shiga’s photographs are tinged with this cheap handmade feeling. However, rather than adding to the B-grade horror flavor, this cheapness communicates to the viewer that the works are an accumulation of handwork and effort resulting from the input of time and labor and relying on grassroots-like human endeavor. This is something that is also discernible from the people who appear in Shiga’s photographs, in the sense that one can imagine, from the way that the elderly people – who are extremely unlikely to be used to being photographed – act so strangely, just how much honest talking must have gone on between Shiga and her subjects. As well, these details constitute elements that clearly distinguish Shiga’s photography from the kind of popular work whose sole purpose is to promote entertainment-like consumption.

There is a handmade feeling in the details of Shiga’s photographs, and here one can read the temporality of “joint work” – to this I have no objection. This is a natural outcome of having “created work with the utmost effort.” However, while “grassroots,” “collaboration,” “joint work” and other flowery words are often heard in conjunction with reviews of the exhibition in question, it is unreasonable to apply these to Shiga’s photographs. However applicable they may be to episodes surrounding the creation of the work (soliciting the understanding and cooperation of the subjects as a part of one’s work is a matter of course for any photographer), grassroots spontaneity and the egalitarianism of joint work do not exist in Shiga’s photographs in terms of results that reach us, the general viewers. The right to decide the final appearance of the images and the way the work is displayed rests entirely with the artist, because in reality there are no credits attached to the work mentioning the collaborators or subjects. The local residents may indeed have been cooperative and spontaneously offered suggestions, but it is Shiga who has both the right and responsibility to choose whether or not to accept that cooperation and those suggestions. As long as the rights relationship is not equal and there are no joint signatures, such work cannot be called “collaboration.” The subjects are not “acting” strangely, but “being made to act” strangely, and when amateurs are being used it is natural for the director to engage in a good deal of “honest talking.” If such honest collaboration with the subjects were really so important, surely the kinds of effects that would hide this would not have been used. It is on this basis that I continue to maintain that Shiga’s photography is B-grade horror “tinged with a handmade feeling.”

The original focus of Kusumoto’s blog, which also ventured to include within its scope the “Rasen Kaigan” exhibition, was in fact the issue of documentation and mediacy.

Particularly in the case of the work created in collaboration with the residents of Kitakama where she had her studio, the images to which effects were added based on the filter of Shiga’s own absolute consciousness and the images arising from the acting of the subjects exist in a state of rivalry, giving this work the ability to act as a medium through which fresh images are created in the minds of the viewers.

As stated above, the relationship between the effects (for example, horror effect: A) and the acting of the subjects (for example, handmade feeling: B) cannot possibly be one of “rivalry” due to A and B being effectively under the control of the artist as well as one of superiority and inferiority in which B is confined to the details of A. One could probably say that “rivalry” and “fresh images” have no connection with Shiga’s photographs at least for the time being, but the “documentary nature” and “mediacy” of photography with which Kusumoto seems fixated are an issue that is both old and new. Let me offer a few quotes of my own to supplement the Takuma Nakahira quote that appears in Kusumoto’s blog. (2)

The photographer presents the relationship between the world and themselves reduced to a square frame. This is presented to themselves, and at the same time it is presented to others. The others to whom it is presented carry out yet more selection and sorting. Such cycles of selection may in fact be what constitutes communication between individuals. I like to think of photography as just such a milieu. More or less, these are the kinds of things I mean when I refer to photographs as “provocative resources for thought.” (3)

[…] However, when we do not limit ourselves to the space of a single photograph, but consider countless photographs mediated by time and place, does not the meaning of the perspective of each individual photograph gradually become diluted? In other words, by doing this, I think it might be possible for that which is mediated by time, which survives eternally and is survived, for it to reveal the structure of the world as a place that encompasses the world and me and other such dualistic correlations. (4)

Nakahira first located photography outside the dichotomy between documentary (a record of reality as it is) and pictorialism (an artist’s self-expression, photography as artwork), and then went on to explore the critical (in both senses of the word) possibilities of photography with respect to the real world. In other words, as well as criticizing the ideology of “reality as it is” that had guided modern photography, as he stated in the rest of the first quote above, he believed that “a photograph must not, therefore, be a finished work, let alone an elaborate work.” As long as it is a photograph, a photograph must assume mediacy, since to assume a transparent, neutral “as is-ness” is none other than to take the position of the judge, or in other words of state power. However, when this mediacy lapses into arbitrary self-expression or artistry, then photography deviates from the true nature of photography (ie, its documentary nature). In this sense, perhaps one could say both that “photography as a milieu” is documentary that is not “as is,” that it is not a finished work by an individual, and that photography is a process whereby the identity of individual photographs continues to change constantly. (5)

But can a collection of so-called democratic photographs premised on communication and dialogue with others really have the ability to provoke thought? Surely the ability of photographs to provoke cannot be separated from the brutality of the disconnection and discontinuity that they produce. Documentaries are documents of the misfortunes, large or small, of others. Someone from outside reports on someone caught up in an exceptional misfortune, an activity that is by definition unilateral, as a result of which a patronizing power relationship in which the subject is treated not as an individual but as just one symbol of misfortune, or in other words as just another photograph by the photographer, arises automatically. This why Walker Evans’ tenant farmer’s wife, W. Eugene Smith’s Minamata disease sufferer, and all the other people who became subjects of famous documentary photographs come to harbor complex feelings bordering on resentment. (6) Given this violence that springs automatically from the true nature of photography, perhaps the concept of “photography as a milieu” that presupposes an equal relationship such as dialogue or provocation is more than a little utopian or idealistic. On the other hand, we actually know of photographs that could be called “provocative resources for thought.” To think about photography and meaning, about photography and words, is none other than to write about documentation and mediacy, about competing forces, and about the images generated by the actual photographs, photographs such as Shomei Tomatsu’s Nagasaki photographs or Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Indian tribe photographs, for example.


Claude Lévi-Strauss – Saudades do Brasil: A Photographic Memoir, Plon, 1994/2005.

  1. Aki Kusumoto, “Lieko Shiga: Rasen Kaigan,” Note 2, http://curatory.exblog.jp/19815650/

  2. Takuma Nakahira, “Dokyumentari eiga no konnichiteki kadai” (Problems in documentary film today) in Naze shokubutsu zukan ka (Why an illustrated botanical dictionary?), Chikuma Gakugei Bunko, 2007, p. 136 (as indicated by Kusumoto).

  3. Takuma Nakahira, “Dojidaiteki de aru to wa nanika” (What does it means to be contemporaneous?) in Mitsuzukeru hate ni hi ga… Hihyo shusei 1965-1977 (Fire at the Limits of my perpetual gazing… Collected criticism 1965-1977), ed. Akihito Yasumi, Osiris, 2007, p. 86.

  4. Takuma Nakahira, “Naze shokubutsu zukan ka” (Why an illustrated botanical dictionary?) in Mitsuzukeru hate ni hi ga… Hihyo shusei 1965-1977 (Fire at the Limits of my perpetual gazing… Collected criticism 1965-1977), ed. Akihito Yasumi, Osiris, 2007, pp. 304-305.

  5. Perhaps it would be wiser not to talk in a roundabout way about photography as a process and so on, and actually make a movie. Such as Clemens von Wedemeyer’s series Against Death (from The Fourth Wall) (2008-2010) [showing through March 24 in “What We See” at the National Museum of Art, Osaka].

  6. See for example, Takeshi Ishikawa, Minamata Note 1971-2012: Me and Eugene Smith and Minamata, Chikura Shobo, 2012, pp. 139-140.

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