Observational photography. Intrepid photography. Itinerant Photography. How does one deal with and parse out the general economy of images when abroad, away from home? What is home for a photographer who has moved from place to place over the 21st Century? There is an argument regarding the intrepid photographer, one that covers the ground, seeks new places, and makes images, that somehow they are not supposed to give into observing a place through a camera as they remove agency from the subject, encourage an exoticism by way of making photographs of what they see from the position of a stranger. Of course, this discussion affects people working in photography more than most people who use photography as an everyday experience of recording new experiences.
This tendency to read photography and its motivation in this manner is built on a very real set of colonial circumstances dating back to the 19th Century, photography’s beginnings. Yet, it is a principal cautioned toward the West and very few other places on earth. For example, when someone travels to America to make images from afar or takes photographs of Europe, little is said if they happen to be from Japan, South America, the Global South, etc. Though we might argue about nuance, ideas of “punching down,” etc., I am for people making photographs as they choose, with some further nuance or understanding incorporated within, loose ethics about what it means to produce said images. With outright do’s and don’ts, we paint ourselves into a corner, and we might as well make photography redundant for the masses if we are to understand its inherent flaws as a detriment by the din of its relationship to place both familiar and unfamiliar.
I bring this up as I am always curious about how we will proceed with photography if we continually paint roadblocks around every picture and set a trap for every picture conceived. It feels fair to mention that much of this discourse has sprung up in the last twenty years as we discuss author/subject positions. The gross effect is to blanket photography’s meaning through a series of imposed permissions and im-permissions. It feels somewhat retrograde to the realities of making photographs in a time when images are harvested through non-human capture at an exponential and dastardly rate. We attack each other for the sake of our conceived ideas about another person’s motivations. Yet, we tacitly sign up to have our images and those of others given up to technology, the actual great colonizer of pictures, as if expected, part of our agreements for the sake of the state, social media, etc. So, where can we argue the position that there are rules?
With Mikael Gregorsky’s Sun, a limited-edition artist book, I found great joy perusing the images of a sojourn he took to Japan. Some of the traditional tropes appear and are purposefully negotiated. Mt. Fuji, traditional kimonos, and Japan’s interest in baseball appear. What I find refreshing is that it is not, like so many of its Western counterparts in photography, not trying to ape the high-contrast Provoke-era musings of grain, nor is it attempting to explore various Japanese subcultures ala Yakuza voyeurism and Flash-up by Seiiji Kurat, an, etc. Nor is it playing into the contemporary fetish for hyper-pop and saturation that we see emanating from a younger generation of artists who love (as I do) Taisuke Koyama or Kenta Kobayashi. Instead, amid his black-and-white photographs, Gregorsky is an observer who plays into what a Westerner might understand of Japan from the outside. He is not bent on making cliches but seems to be commenting on them, thus allowing his position to be known. He is also making observations instead of seeking out this type of surface calculation.
In the book, there are nods to Japanese culture. Still, there is also an implied distance in which these motifs are played out through photographic games such as telegraphy and multiple frame sequences, with isolated elements contributing to the slightly cryptic view of what is in the frame. The occasional abstraction amplifies these images, a light refraction that is more in line with the work of Daisuke Morinshita than Takashi Homma or Rinko Kawauchi, two eminent artists who also play with Japanese tropes and light phenomena, respectively. This weighs the book toward an ephemeral and fleeting pass over Japan. In its honest illustration,n does not set about a conceptual over-aggrandizing but instead insists on declaring the experience of a foreigner in a rich land filled with images, which has been photographed ad nausea, therefore asking the photographer to lean in and look.
The images in Sun remind me obliquely of Ihei Kimura or Ken Domon’s more traditional photos of Japan from the 1950s and 60s, the last of the post-war humanists who sought to embrace Japan as a nation and its tradition before the steamroller of Western consumer society pushed its ideals, through occupation onto the land. There is something soft, mercurial, and kind about the images for the most part. This suggests a compassion for Japan and its people that almost feels anachronistic were it not for the clarity of the sequence and book-making process, suggesting something more contemporary in feel. It is a deeply appreciated gesture and feels honest overall. I am gravitating increasingly toward small-run books like this, which feel poignant and purposeful and are crafted with care and deliver observations based on something less forced than many other projects being shoveled into books with some vague notion of a conceptual overload elicited to impress. Here, photography matters, and it can be translated easily without an extended essay about the history of Japan. It simply is. I may also reference Tokyo by Yasuhiro Ismimoto here, which also feels apt for the observational yet slightly skewed abstractions present in the city. Sun is a Great score if you can get yourself a copy.
Sun
Self-Published