March 11 to June 12, 2016
333 E 47th Street (between 1st and 2nd avenues)
New York, 212 832 1155

In his seminal treatise on photography, Camera Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes presents two qualities he believes are found in photographs: the studium (the photo’s general, cultural context) and the punctum (the picture’s pointed, personally significant moment). Barthes defines a photograph’s punctum as “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” The latter quality provokes the viewer, presenting “a tiny shock, a satori, the passage of a void […] close to the Haiku.” Indifference to the image is therein disturbed. Like the photograph, the haiku presents the moment directly, as wholly present, brief and marking. Barthes often describes this phenomenon as a seism — an earthquake.

It is easy to locate such rushing poignancy in The Japan Society’s latest exhibition, “In the Wake: Japanese Photographer Respond to 3/11.” Marking the fifth anniversary of the catastrophic Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, the exhibition’s 17 photographers are handlers of so much puncta. Their extended interactions with the photograph, by hand or hard drive, find fresh and dynamic potential for Barthes’s punctum beyond the personal; as images by seism and of seism, many of these photographs are both puncturing and physically punctured. In choosing work that is not purely documentary or of studium, this exhibition presents 3/11 in a context larger than a single day.

For many of these artists, such a monumental natural and nuclear disaster can only be quantified or documented; they try to capture, as Barthes tried to understand, “what cannot be transformed but only repeated.” Takashi Arai documents sites of atomic disaster by daguerreotype, a sensitive medium of silver plate burned by the subject’s reflection. His blown-out daguerreotypes from Hiroshima, Fukushima and Nagasaki are equated, across time and place, in his series “Exposed in a Hundred Suns.” As details are over-exposed and flushed from photographs of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial or a family of Fukushima survivors, viewers are bruised by the blue-black event horizon beyond which history’s details are not visible. Arai’s A Maquette for a Multiple Monument for Wristwatch Dug Up from Uenomachi (2014) is a literal reversal of time as he horizontally flips an iconic World War II image: a wristwatch, found in Nagasaki, which was stopped at 11:02 on August 9, 1945 by the second atomic bomb, “Fat Man.” This simple and punctal detail, not immediately noticed, collapses the time and distances between these disasters, speaking to how progress can often seem futile.

The most stunning representation of this catharsis in counting is realized in the Lost and Found Project. Organized by Munemasa Takahashi and other residents of Tohoku (the northern region which bore the brunt of the disaster’s devastation, and for which it is named), the Project has been collecting and cleaning thousands of photographs remaining in the tsunami’s wake. Under the banner of “Memory Salvage,” they have recovered, cleaned and digitized over 750,000 photos (returning an incredible 400,000 to their owners). Water-damaged and sun-bleached, the photographs’ erasure of faces, hands and landscapes are unsettlingly beautiful: here is memory undone, the photograph un-developed. Indeed, the punctum is carried in the actual bruising of these images, evidence of the physical damage against the subjects’ homes, their visages and too often their person.

Nobuyoshi Araki’s work is similarly marking and marked by both time (being date-stamped) and experience (in the mutilation of the negatives). In Untitled (2011), Araki has scratched and gouged at a bright little cloud in the sunny sky of March 11th. Nearby, the scratches, vertical daggers — like black rain — puncture urbanite umbrellas. As in the bleached wounds of Takahashi’s images or Arai’s stopped watch, the implementation of a date-stamp is that forceful punctum that marks time and marks the viewer. The date-stamp is found in most of Araki’s oeuvre and yet it has never been so jarring. Like a time loop, the moment wounds the artist and the artist wounds the moment — however futilely. Here is punctal, and punctual, revenge.

As time is a flexible material for these artists, it is important to note Lieko Shiga’s work, as much of it was created previous to the disaster at hand. In 2008, Shiga moved to Kitahama — a serene and isolated town in the Miyagi prefecture of Tohoku. In Japan, Miyagi is famous for its mysterious and timeless spirit, making the destruction of its scenic coast especially devastating. Shiga has an oneiric aesthetic; she often manipulates photographs digitally or in cross-processing (using the wrong chemicals to develop film in unique and unexpected ways) to glaze them with new narrative. Framing her floating subjects with blown-out nightscapes, she presents something like nuclear fallout, post-apocalyptic ceremony, or perhaps prophecy. For instance, Mother’s Gentle Hands (2009) shows an elderly woman, eyes closed, resting just off-center against a glittering and cosmic wall, her arms seemingly doubled into two pairs of clasped hands. Like much of Shiga’s work, it takes a great deal of looking to decipher the discomfort of this arrangement. And just as Barthes was taken with the clasped hands in a Mapplethorpe photograph, this image “holds me, but I cannot say why.” Shiga loves multiplicity in metaphor and timelines, so the viewer may see a mutated resident of the evacuation zone as easily as Shinto’s wrathful four-armed deity of fire, Sanbō Kōjin. The hands are perhaps not the punctum, but they do restrain the viewer, doubly so by their abstrusity to hold us inside that world of horror and wonder, the artificial stars blinking behind. (Perhaps it is in the stars.)

Shimpei Takeda’s “Traces” also resemble scattered cosmic galaxies; in actuality, these are the photographs produced by the radioactive particles contaminating Fukushima’s soil. Trace #7, taken in 2012 from Fukushima’s Nihonmatsu Castle, is the most aggressively galactic. Other Traces, sampled from the soil around hospitals or shrines, are less crowded — safer — and yet uneasy. This leaves the viewer with a disturbing desire to see more of these “hot spots” in a temporary confusion of pollution mistaken for cosmic dust. To see the stars in the soil captures that feeling many humans have towards the cosmos: hopeful, yet hypoxic. Time is lost in such a space — it becomes theoretical, measured in half-lives. Staring at these images one wonders at the government’s method of handling such insurmountable contamination, as expansive as these universes, with little more than spades and trash bags.

Barthes was a philosopher who loved Japan. His Empire of Signs (1970) celebrates the beauty and intelligence of the island nation, and he often weighed the simplicity and spark of the haiku against his burden of Western philosophy and semiotics, traditions that labored the past into the future. His study of the haiku colored his understanding of photography as the moment’s twin but not its copy; the actual moment, temporally and physically, is ineffable. So too, he writes, the “the notation of a haiku […] undevelopable […] might (we must) speak of an intense immobility, linked to a detail (to a detonator), an explosion makes a little star on the pane of the text or of the photograph: neither the Haiku nor the Photograph makes us ‘dream.’” As with the haiku or the photographic punctum, so with tragedy: we can only know of the experience, not experience it; even still, it pierces us.

The post Intense Immobility: “In the Wake” at Japan Society appeared first on artcritical.

Through January 2, 2005

A striking black and white photograph of a cloud over the sea is entitled “Untitled [Hateruma-jima, Okinawa], from the series The Pencil of the Sun,” 1971, by Shomei Tomatsu (b. 1930). The isolated cloud, distinct against an empty sky, casts its backlit reflection over a calm sea; the horizon tips down to the right. Everything is fine and at the same time, not fine at all.

Five decades of Shomei Tomatsu’s photography, comprising some 250 works in both color and black and white, are on view at Japan Society in a retrospective entitled Skin of the Nation. The exhibition was organized jointly by Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography at SFMOMA, and Leo Rubenfein, a photographer and writer, in association with Japan Society. The exhibition venues include SFMOMA, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and Japan Society here in New York. To be sure, Tomatsu has long been famous in Japan, and US exhibitions at MOMA in 1965 and 1974 have given him visibility in this country. He had significant exhibitions in Europe during the 1980s and 1990s as well. Skin of the Nation represents considerable effort on the part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to bring Tomatsu’s life work into focus now for audiences on the east and west coasts of the US. The catalog for the exhibition (published by SFMOMA in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2004) is the first English language book to examine Tomatsu’s work in depth.

Japan Society’s galleries provide a serene environment in which to contemplate the range and complexity of Tomatsu’s photographs. He creates named series that are similar to photo essays, but an unusual feature of his practice is that he sometimes reprints negatives that are decades old, and even recycles images from existing series, to mix into a new series. Skin of the Nation has these characteristics of recontextualizing the old with the new. Section by section, it follows the main outlines of his entire career.

Tomatsu was just 15 when the A Bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, the presence of the American military took root alongside civilian life. Modernization meant Americanization. This subject obsessed Tomatsu, and he made series after series that explored it from various angles. The people who survived the Bomb, himself among them, still had to live there, and photographic images became an important touchpoint for the collective psychic survival.

Early in his career, Tomatsu helped found an agency called Vivo, a group of young photographers who reached a broad public during the 1950s and 1960s by publishing their 35mm black and white images anonymously in magazines. Vivo’s members also exhibited their work in galleries as individual artists. Thus Tomatsu’s name and work came to be indelibly associated with postwar Japanese photography; for many years his images were created within Japan for a Japanese audience. After his initial engagement with the devastation and military occupation of post WWII Japan, he recorded impressions of counterculture as the country made an incredible recovery in the 1960s. He began to work in color while photographing southern Asian countries in the 1970s, and color has become an important part of his work since then.

The documentary style of Tomatsu’s immediate predecessor, Hiroshi Hamaya, was congruent with that of better known European exponents of the genre such as Cartier Bresson or William Kline. Tomatsu’s most famous successor, Daido Moriyami, is considered by Dr. Sandra Phillips to be the most significant Japanese photographer working today. Relative to these artists, Tomatsu’s singular piquancy regarding the mood of the nation and textures of life after WWII can be more clearly distinguished. He has never been a documentary photographer in the usual sense.

Tomatsu’s development as an artist came at a time when modernist aesthetics had found form and expression in the technology of photography. European avant garde movements reached Japan in the 1920s and 1930s through a combination of western teachers travelling to the east and eastern artists studying at the Bauhaus or in Paris. Tomatsu’s early attraction to Surrealism and Dada was offset by a Japanese teacher who suggested that he focus on the immediacy of his environment. Perhaps a surrealist photographer such as Brassai was behind this teacher’s advice, because Tomatsu pursued photography in a style that is indisputably modernist, often ‘straight’, yet which can put the real into highly stylized or archetypal form. He also draws upon traditional Japanese pictorial conventions and aspects of Kabuki theater that can be arresting in a photograph. “Apres-Guerre Prostitute, Nagoya” from 1958, printed in 2003, is one such image.

With greater subtlety, he juxtaposes the swift layer of real time with ancient tradition in a shot of an American soldier performing for fellow soldiers. Tomatsu, standing below stage level, frames the actor as if he were a Kabuki mime in an Ukiyo-e (“Floating World”) print. Wearing a woman’s wig and a house dress, it is as if this monstrous hybrid of the American military and old Japan had fused into a new, archetypal character on the stage of Japanese history. Tomatsu could visually infer a meaning that would be instantly recognized by Japanese citizens but (almost surely) opaque to the Americans. Today, the idea of cross-dressing in the military, even in a play, creates its own kind of wonder about a past era.

“Now I roam the earth, gliding as lightly as Styrofoam on the surface of the ocean. I have embarked on a nameless sea of chaos that is neither America or Japan.” – 1999

Perceiving himself at a new phase of his career after almost 50 years, Tomatsu’s long obsession with the US occupation of his country has shifted to a more diffuse malaise about the effects of globalism. The mental image of himself adrift on the sea, an enduring symbol of life and eternity in Japanese culture, is undercut by a tinge of irony – the artist as a bit of flotsam. Not just any flotsam, but a bit of American-produced packaging material designed to buffer products in transit.

In hindsight, Tomatsu’s postwar sensibility appears to be prescient of postmodernism. Far from being an objective observer, it was his very membership in Japanese society that gave him such insight into the split-screen ironies of the postwar situation, where two unwilling parties – the surviving population of Japan and the young American military community – were forcibly conjoined. There’s some logic to dating the symbiotic relationship between technology and culture that dominates life today from the day the A-bombs fell on Japan. Photographic technology changed dramatically during WWII, producing the 35mm SLR camera and industries to support a more widespread standardization and distribution of photographic products. It’s significant that Tomatsu’s activity as producer of images began at the crest of this wave. In his creative riposte to historical forces beyond his control, the vicissitudes of earthly life and destiny can be sensed no matter what the subject matter of the images. There is restraint in his satire as well as his sorrow, and cold comfort in Tomatsu’s sense of humor. His use of photography as a technology embedded in the postwar culture that spawned globalism springs from an uncompromising appreciation for human life and dignity.

The post Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation appeared first on artcritical.