Japanese photos: a lesson - Letters - Letter to the Editor

To the Editors:

Thanks to Lyle Rexer for his article on the exhibition "The History of Japanese Photography" that was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Japan Foundation [A.i.A., July '03]. Both the show and its accompanying catalogue are welcome introductions to a vast and (to judge by current histories of photography in Western languages) unexplored area of photography.

However, one or two points should be mentioned. Contrary to Rexer, as the catalogue suggests and all Japanese sources confirm, daguerreotype photographs were made in Japan a few years before Commodore Perry's arrival in 1854. The local photographers used equipment imported through the Dutch outpost in Nagasaki, but the earliest images did not survive. Original prints and even photographic publications done prior to 1945 are extremely rare, due to wartime bombing and lack of curatorial attention (which came even later to Japan than to the U.S.). Awareness of the Japanese quality of their photography, which Rexer strives to infer through comparative analysis with Western pictures, was clearly expounded by Fukuhara Shinzo, of the Shiseido Company, in The Japan Photographic Annual 1927-1928 (written in English). As for Araki Nobuyoshi's photographic essay on his marriage ("Sentimental Journey"), which represents the smallest fraction of his work, the whole series needs to be seen. It is not about a "honeymoon trip," and it ends with the death of his wife, Yoko.

The text of the catalogue is historically informative, an excellent introduction to a complicated subject. It is also much in the Japanese style of writing about art: names, dates, movements and awards (the last meaningless to most foreign readers). Valuable details of individual photographers are consigned to an "Artists Profiles" section. And women photographers are neglected in the show and catalogue: e.g., Oishi Yoshino, Yoshida Ruiko, Sawamoto Reiko. Also, some important museums are not mentioned: the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Hosoe Eikoh, director; and the especially fine Yokohama Museum of Art collection. Of course selecting photographers and photographs from the past 50 years will try the patience, temper and sanity of any curator or writer. Example: Izu Kenro is missing.

Publications from the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, with some English text and excellent reproductions, would be a fine next step as an introduction to the field. But keep in mind that the Iwanami Company has recently published a 40-volume survey of Japanese photography (no English), and the historian lizawa Kotaro, with 20 books on photography, shows no sign of slowing his production.

Edward Putzar

Tucson

To the Editors:

Having walked through Ann Tucker's marvelous exhibition "The History of Japanese Photography" three times, I found Lyle Rexer's account confusing.

The first half of his article makes the case that photography in Japan was just like photography everywhere else in the world. Rexer sums up his initial five paragraphs by saying, "We might just as easily be describing the same period in Czechoslovakia or Hungary."

Yet in the next third of the essay, he argues with his own prior conclusion and makes an observation that seems obvious to me. Rexer accurately reports, "The Japanese equivalent of the early Photo-Secession--with its emphasis on texturally dense, labor-intensive printing processes such as bromoil and gum bichromate--flourished well into the 1930s, much longer than its counterparts in the U.S. or Europe." How, then, can he have opined earlier in the review that "Japanese art photography likewise evolved as it did elsewhere in the world, from hazy pictorialism in the early 20th century to a formal and sharp-edged modernism with surrealist undercurrents...."?

Japanese photography, like the rest of that nation's culture, is different from ours, and this monumental show deserved a review that discerned those differences.

Paul Sack

San Francisco

Lyle Rexer replies:

Many thanks to Edward Putzar for his detailed response. Where was he when I needed him? A few clarifications, though. In my conversations with the curators and with photographers, I could not confirm, as he seemingly has, what we are all convinced of--that the Japanese made photographs before Perry. The reason is exactly the one Putzar cites: no examples have survived. Scholars are, however, certain they tried. In any case, I could have been more explicit about the fact that, by 1854, the Japanese were already intensely interested in the medium and ready to take it up.

As for the concern about the Japaneseness of their photography, it is a Japanese preoccupation, but see my response to Paul Sack, below. Putzar's point about women photographers I also addressed, but not at enough length. Likewise, his bibliographic citations only make more glaring the fact that there is still lamentably little Japanese material readily available in U.S. bookshops--and on museum walls. We should all be lucky enough to own those 40 volumes. Finally, as to Araki's work, the first group of photos about his wife was a honeymoon series, "Sentimental Journey," published as such, and the last, published 20 years later, was about her illness. I, too, wish we could have seen some of those images-and the outrageous stuff, too.

To Paul Sack, I admit contradicting myself--to a point. I don't think the fact that Pictorialism lasted for an extended period in Japan undermines the notion that Japanese photography evolved along broadly the same trajectory as work elsewhere. To my mind, it makes the pattern more striking. Why should the Japanese have adopted, for example, Surrealist photo-collage? Was it something in the "national character" or in Japan's artistic traditions? I think the issue is industrial modernity, a leveling experience of which camera-mediated imagery is a feature.

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