Remarkably, the exhibition The History of Japanese Photography at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts is the first ever comprehensive survey of its kind to take place in either the United States or Europe. Equally remarkable is the fact that the accompanying catalogue – with an impressive 432 pages and over 350 images – is the first survey of Japanese photography to be published in English. While the photographic histories of the US and Europe have for the most part been both well-documented and amassed into one single collective canon, Asia, along with Africa and South America, has largely been excluded from the West’s photographic history. This exhibition, with its 200 photographs, albums, and books by over 100 Japanese photographers, is a long overdue opportunity to readdress this situation, from photography’s arrival in Japan in 1854 to the present day.
While there have been other important but less comprehensive exhibitions of
Japanese photography in the West, notably at New York’s Museum of Modern Art
in 1953 and at the Pompidou in 1986, the aggregation of material at MFAH
reflects the explosion of research by Japanese scholars over the past two
decades. In the face of Japan’s strong tradition of handcraft and painting,
photography’s acceptance as an art medium was slow in coming. It was only in
the 1960s that photography started being exhibited, collected, and archived:
coupled with the language barrier, this dramatically limited the
accessibility of historic material outside Japan.
The History of Japanese Photography is important, then, not only because it
provides the first comprehensive survey of Japanese photography to English
speakers, but because it also offers a blow-by-blow account of the involved
and demanding task of assembling the fragile artefacts of one country’s
photographic activity into a cohesive ‘historical’ narrative. In an era
increasingly dominated by digital images, it reminds us of the physicality
of photographs, their inherent fragility and instability, and that
photographic histories are possible only on account of the hundreds of
individuals who have recorded and preserved the images over time.
Brainchild of a team of curators from Texas and Japan, including Ryuichi
Kaneko, guest curator at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the
exhibition was seven years in the making. Jointly organised by MFAH and the
Japan Foundation, its conceptual core is a classical chronology of
photography’s evolution in Japan. Its arrival in 1854 precisely parallels
two other major developments in that country: the growing influence of
Western culture and the rise of a middle class, whose tradesmen, scientists
and craftsmen would be the first to experiment with photography and who
facilitated its spread throughout Japan. As trade with Europe flourished,
entrepreneurs delivered staged photographs of cultural clichés popular among
Western travellers, marking the beginning of a two-part history of Japanese
photography: one seen through the eyes of Westerners, the other through the
eyes of the Japanese themselves. This mix of commerce and self-image
continues to mark photography in Japan to this day, as in Miwa Yanagi’s
critique of consumerism in Elevator Girl (1997), where the uniformed
mannequins flank the elevators in infinite conformity and obsequiousness.
The exhibition touches on major movements
such as Pictorialism, Surrealism, photojournalism, and contemporary
photography, although in relative degrees of thoroughness and with a few
regretful omissions. Fashion photographer Hiro, for example, has not been
included, disqualified by the fact that most of his career took place in
Europe. Moreover, because newspaper photojournalism is not included in the
exhibition, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Yasuji Nagao is not
represented either. Including key artefacts from nineteenth-century
portraits of samurai warriors and a 19-foot panoramic scroll, to
photo-essays on the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a rare book by
1990s ‘Girl Power’ photographer Hiromix, the selection of materials on view
is brilliantly diverse, ranging from eight-by-ten-inch hand-coloured albumen
portraits, mid-twentieth-century artists’ books, and large-scale
contemporary colour photographs.
Two sections in the exhibition offer access to rare material: the
nineteenth-century photographs which capture the decline of Japan’s feudal
system and the rise of the middle class, most of which have never before
been exhibited in the States or Europe; and the section on the artistic
roots of photographic Modernism during a period of increasingly isolation
prior to World War II.
It could be argued, however, that the classical structuring here into ‘portraits’, ‘imperial photographs’, ‘landscapes’, ‘war’, and ‘art’ photography, etc., minimises the major axis of conflict in the history of Japanese photography: that between handcraft, important in traditional Japanese art, and photography, a modern technology emblematic of mass culture. While this conflict is not exclusive to Japan’s photographic history, it does play a far more consequential role than in the States, for instance, because of the country’s deep-rooted painterly and ceramic traditions. The influence of handcraft can be seen even as late as 1938 in Terushichi Hirai’s Fantasies of the Moon which saturates Surrealist imagery in hand-coloured hues. The shift in Japanese photography after WWII towards an acceptance of the medium on its own terms can be seen for instance in the grainy, raw, unabashedly photographic images of Daido Moriyama, pictorially playing out the clash between contemporary and traditional Japanese aesthetics. The photojournalism of the 1960s also reflects the change in subject matter from the pastoral to the social and shows Japan’s corporate climate less than 100 years after the last portraits of the samurai warriors.
The greatest aesthetic and cultural shift
takes place here, as photography in the sixties and seventies became a
method of exploring personal pain and private lives in a country traumatised
by WWII’s legacy. Epitomised by Araki’s photographs of his wife from 1971,
this period in Japanese photography was later to influence such American
photographers as Nan Goldin. Photographic initiatives like the Vivo Group
and Provoke, while similar to William Klein and Robert Frank, created
photographic images resonant with a violence and extremism unexplored
publicly by their European and American counterparts. It is precisely this
work in the exhibition that makes clear the curatorial position: that to
understand and decipher these images, knowledge of the country’s political
and social past is paramount.
To confront this body of work is invariably to raise questions concerning
the relevance of Japan’s photographic history to its current love affair
with the snapshot on the one hand, and its dominance of the market for
advanced photographic equipment on the other. These questions remind us that
the evolution of photographic technology in Japan today, which began as a
Western ‘import’, is a window for us all into the future of the medium and
our photographic self-image. The rich history of Japanese photography
demonstrates that the Western ‘lineage’ itself is not singular in its
evolution and that its history would be well served to incorporate the
influences of Japan.
The History of Japanese Photography is at
the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2 March – 27 April 2003, touring to the
Cleveland
Museum of Art, 18 May – 27 July 2003.
www.mfah.org
Noel Daniel is the commissioning editor of photography books at Phaidon Press Miwa Yanagi, Elevator Girl House (detail), 1997, diptych, chromogenic photographs, Plexiglas, wood panel. Collection of National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto