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Japanese Photography
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River Series, No. 4
Hatakeyama Naoya (b. 1958) |
Photo Gallery: Musings on Japanese Photography
On May 18, what may be the most impressive collection of Japanese photographs ever assembled will began summer stay at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
The exhibit made its debut in April at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. The curator for the collection, Anne Wilkes Tucker, is the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography there, and a co-author of the accompanying catalogue The History of Japanese Photography. (Yale University Press 2003).
There are 200 photographs by 110 photographers, spanning 150 years. As Tucker explains, in 1851 the powerful and progressive Satsuma clan ordered a samurai named Matsuki Koan and a scholar named Kawamoto Komin to take up the study of photography. The first Japanese-made photograph was of the Satsuma daimyo, or ruler, Shimazu Nariakira. It was taken in 1857.
The early photographs in the exhibition include an image of an 1864 attack by British, French and Dutch warships on a Japanese fort overlooking the strait between Honshu and Kyushu. Another is a portrait of the Meiji Emperor dressed in traditional garb. It is a gelatin-silver photograph placed in a metal frame with doors and stand. This emperor gave his name to the revolutionary epoch which transformed Japan from an isolated feudal state into a powerful modern nation. Of some poignance, I think, are the portraits of proud samurai still wearing their two swords for the camera, unaware of the coming changes in their world.
By the 1920s, Japanese photographers were entirely at home with the Western avant-garde. This decade and the following are represented by such fine works as Tamura Sakae's "White Flower," a beautiful portrait of a young pensive Japanese woman hoding a small, slivery dandelion in her hand. The whiteness of her face and the petals of the dandelion stand out in relief against the woman's sleek black hair, dark eyes and black clothing.
The rise of militarism in the 1930s meant that artists were forced to make heroic photographs praising Japanese expansion. The exhibition takes this into consideration with a group of photographs from the war years. The post-war period in Japanese photography was dominated by neo-realism. Among the striking photographs are Hayashi Tadahiko's "Smoking War Orphans" from the "Days in Dregs" series. It features two small raggedy street urchins sharing the last puffs of a cigarette. Another compelling image is of the doomed novelist Dazai Osamu, taken by Hayashi Tadahiko in 1946. Dazai is sitting on a barstool with his legs on an adjacent stool, a newspaper sticking out of his trousers. The writer's works reflected the wide disillusionment of modern Japanese youth following military defeat.
As the Japanese adopted from the West, they have shown a genius for transforming their borrowings into something authentically Japanese. The contemporary scene for Japanese photography is quite rich and varied. In the last chapter of the accompanying catalogue, Dana Friis-Hansen entitles it, "Internationalization, Individualism, and the Institutionalization of Photography."
Past and future combine in works such as Sugimoto Hiroshi's "Hall of Thirty-Three Bays" (1995), which consists of 48 photographs using the 30th-century wood pavilion in Kyoto which is packed with 1,001 five-and-a-half-foot tall bodhisattva statues. As Friis-Hansen describes the photographs, "each claustrophobically packed edge to edge with statuary, as if to provide the perfect counterpoint to the calm, empty theaters."
The richness, beauty and variety of the photographs in this exhibition are truly absorbing. And the catalogue captures the exhibit for those of us who can't make the trip to Cleveland to see it for ourselves. If you can make the Cleveland trip, the exhibit runs through July 27.
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