[Title] Butinage
[Artist] Jean-François Fourtou
[Date] May 19 to July 14, 2015
From its invention in the 19th century, the camera came to be viewed as an implement indispensable for so-called flâneur (a distinctive French term used specifically in reference to persons fond of leisurely strolling the streets of big cities). As they navigated such urban environments, flâneur would use their cameras to capture images of the time spent in that tranquil state of mind, recording details of the cities reflecting their own personal perceptions and other scenes in photographic form. While considerably entranced with the wonders of cameras as new modern-day creation, they also kept their attention focused on the task of documenting the paths covered in their carefree wanderings. In that sense, many of the prominent photographers who made their marks in the 20th century may also be said to have inherited this legacy to excel as masterful flâneur.
The scenes represented here are pitch-black rooms, with the window surfaces blocked to shut out the sunlight. Opening a small hole in that surface causes inverted images of outside scenes to be projected into the rooms. In reality, this phenomenon, the underlying principle of the “camera obscura” noted as the forerunner of today’s cameras, had already been discovered long before the birth of Christ. The earliest written record of the camera obscura method is found in the 5th Century B.C. writings of Chinese philosopher Mozi and his disciples . In that source, descriptions are provided of the ability to flip images upside down through the intersecting of light passed through pinholes*.
The term “camera obscura” is the Latin for “dark chamber.” In the earlier days, people would fashion so-called dark rooms, then proceed to trace shapes of images projected into that unlit space to depict graphically realistic pictures. This enabled fleeting (yet real) images to become visible to the naked eye. Entire rooms mobilized for this purpose steadily made the transition to boxes, which in time were reduced to dimensions able to fit into the palm of the hand. In this way, they gradually drew near to the realm of the modern-day camera.
It was only about 200 years ago, however, that the technique was perfected of using chemical products to effectively cause those images to attach to paper inside such boxes. As discussed within In Praise of Shadows, an essay on Japanese aesthetics by literary giant Junichiro Tanizaki, in traditional Japanese houses, which tended to incorporate considerable shadowy shapes into their depths, views of dimly inverted scenes came to accepted on an everyday basis. With the invention of photography, such “darkness” could be successfully confined within the small box-like space of cameras, while the world immediately surrounding people’s lives became devoid of darkness with the fabrication of windows produced from glass.
Photographer Takashi Homma is fond of transforming selected rooms in buildings lining the streets of today’s big cities into “dark chambers,” then relying entirely on the camera obscura approach to capture inverted images entering from the windows as photographic works. He shot the photographs featured in these window displays by converting one room of a building across the way from Ginza Maison Hermès into a realm of utter darkness, opening a tiny pinhole in the window and exposing the images flowing through that breach to photographic negatives.
These photographs, which reportedly required up to four hours of exposure to realize, essentially condense the flow of time itself. They similarly function to secure air, light, sound and other elements not ordinarily visible to the eye as palpable images. Within the photo using color negatives, unable to withstand the long hours of exposure, the composition of the colors has clearly broken down, materializing a world extending beyond our normal visible perception of reality.
Within the development process, the steadily emerging images become wrapped in a sense of time impossible to express with the word “moment.” In this makeover, they offer us the opportunity to reflect upon the history of photography – or, in a greater context, the history of the very fact and occurrence of vision.
Artist Profile: Takashi Homma
Photographer, born in Tokyo in 1962. From 2011 through 2012, he presented his “New Documentary” exhibition at three art museums in Japan. Homma has published a large number of photographic collections, while among his writings is Photography Course to Make Picture Taking Fun for Good Boys and Girls. Through this August 30, he is showcasing his “Seeing Itself ~ Making the Invisible Perceptible” exhibit at the Dazaifu Tenmangu Shrine.
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Source: Mozi; translated and annotated by Kiyoshi Yabuuchi; published by Heibonsha Toyo Bunko, Inc.