Feeling Around for Matter: Mikiko Hara's Quiet Observations
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Feeling Around for Matter: Mikiko Hara’s Quiet Observations https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0010.107/--feeling-around-for-... Jane Simon Volume 10, Issue 1: Writing Photo Histories, Fall 2019 Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0010.107 [http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0010.107] [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/] Mikiko Hara [1] [#N1] has steadily been gaining recognition for her work both in Japan and internationally since the publication of her first photobook, Hysteric Thirteen, in 2005. She received the prestigious 42nd Kimura Ihei Award, in 2017, for the 2016 photobook Change, she has had numerous solo exhibitions in Japan, and her work has been attracting the attention of curators outside of Japan. Hara’s eclectic photographs and her mode of practicing photography provide an opportunity to think about the relationship among photographer, camera, subject, and viewer as one of entanglement. Her photographs are not easy to categorize, which is part of what makes her work so compelling. Equally, though, this makes her work difficult to read according to received categories and understandings of photography. This article examines Hara’s work across two of her photobooks: Hysteric Thirteen (2005) and These Are Days (2014). I argue that Hara’s feeling around for matter — her photographic philosophy of “scooping up” what is around her — decenters the gaze and instead emphasizes a different hierarchy of the senses in the experience of taking and consuming photographs. The tactile format of the photobook meshes with Hara’s use of analogue photography, [2] [#N2] which has its own tactile materiality, and her emphasis on the camera as an apparatus that can grasp at things beyond our attention. 1 of 14 28/04/2020, 1:03 pm Feeling Around for Matter: Mikiko Hara’s Quiet Observations https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0010.107/--feeling-around-for-... [http://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tapic/x-7977573.0010.107-00000001/1?subview=detail;view=entry] Fig. 1. Hara, Mikiko, Untitled, from the Humoresque series, 2006, Image 13 from the book These Are Days, 2014, © Mikiko Hara, courtesy of Osiris, Tokyo. That many of Hara’s photographs are taken in the street, in public areas, and in areas of transit, with waiting a theme apparent in many of her images, does not mean her photographs fit neatly into the genre of street photography. As Lesley Martin writes, “To call it ‘street photography’ is ontologically correct, but not complete.” [3] [#N3] Although there is no one single and absolute definition of street photography, [4] [#N4] what Hara produces certainly exceeds the conventions of the genre and can be read in line with the street photographer’s emphasis on the transitory and fleeting. Too, her practice does often operate in “the borderland between intrusion and the observation” that is associated with the genre. [5] [#N5] And yet Hara is not seeking Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment,” which has historically driven street photography. [6] [#N6] Instead, she tries to “scoop up” the continuous life that surrounds her and practices a less directed, more contemplative gaze: “I don’t depend on coincidence, and it does not induce me to photograph either. Rather, I yield myself to the natural flow, go out and stop where I photograph.” [7] [#N7] Hara has repeatedly referred to her photographs as snapshots that accumulate daily moments. [8] [#N8] It is important to note that the term sunappu is a concept and tradition indigenous to Japanese photography and is distinct from the Western sense of the snapshot. [9] [#N9] Kai observes: “[U]nlike the snapshot in English, sunappu as a term used to discuss Japanese photography does not necessarily imply casualness.” [10] [#N10] Therefore, the word does not imply amateurism or a lack of care: “[T]he word sunappu can be used to describe a work of art photography without adding any pejorative overtones; for example, works by Henri Cartier- Bresson, Robert Frank, and Garry Winogrand have often been called sunappu or sunappu shotto, because they characteristically include candid photographs of people on the street.” [11] [#N11] Well-known Japanese photographers such as Shômei Tômatsu, Daido Moriyama, and Nobuyoshi Araki worked with — and transformed — the tradition of the snapshot, [12] [#N12] and the tradition holds relevance for contemporary Japanese photographers, [13] [#N13] among them, I argue, Hara. She employs the candid nature of the snapshot, but with her own intentional philosophy of attention. She uses the camera to glean what surrounds her, in the tradition of the sunappu. 2 of 14 28/04/2020, 1:03 pm Feeling Around for Matter: Mikiko Hara’s Quiet Observations https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0010.107/--feeling-around-for-... [http://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tapic/x-7977573.0010.107-00000002/1?subview=detail;view=entry] Fig. 2. Hara, Mikiko, Untitled, from the Is As It series, 1996, Image 1 from the book Hysteric Thirteen, 2005, © Mikiko Hara, courtesy of Osiris, Tokyo. After receiving her training in photography, Hara began a process of “unlearning,” letting go of traditional ideas about composition and framing. Hara’s philosophy turns away from Cartier-Bresson’s infamous one, which insists that “If a photograph is to communicate its subject in all its intensity, the relationship of form must be rigorously established.” [14] [#N14] Hara’s liberation from the constraints of composition and the standard protocols of photography has released from her a deluge of photographs that call for a different kind of attention, one that matches Hara’s own observant practice. Hara’s camera catches the small gazes and interchanges that happen without words, as we move through public spaces. This creates “a vague landscape of people whose sense of place is constantly interrupted by an apparent state of introspection.” [15] [#N15] The photographs hover, never quite settling into a specific time, place, or reading, and Hara takes us “through a territory that is fluid, temperamental and less-pronounced.” [16] [#N16] Her subjects are often in transit — walking, waiting for trains, running after a ball. These are interspersed with moments of stillness: empty landscapes, flowers tilting onto a fence, empty children’s swings. Many of the images are set in what Marc Auge would describe as a non-place, those “spaces of continuous movement and 3 of 14 28/04/2020, 1:03 pm Feeling Around for Matter: Mikiko Hara’s Quiet Observations https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0010.107/--feeling-around-for-... dislocation.” [17] [#N17] These non-places often produce the feeling of being together but apart, in a place “where people cohabitate without living together.” [18] [#N18] Some of Hara’s photos have been read as being about “distance and isolation of people in public spaces — especially of women.” [19] [#N19] But this doesn’t capture the whole story, because if her photos are about isolation and distance, they are also about connection, wry moments, and ambivalence. [http://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tapic/x-7977573.0010.107-00000003/1?subview=detail;view=entry] Fig. 3. Hara, Mikiko Untitled, 2003, Image 37 from the book Hysteric Thirteen, 2005, © Mikiko Hara, courtesy of Osiris, Tokyo. Hara’s photographs often present a tension between looking and not looking, images that show subjects looking aside or looking through. Hysteric Thirteen, for example, starts with a photograph of a cat with an eye missing and concludes with a photograph of a man talking on a phone in a carpark, an image taken from the inside of a car looking out. These motifs of partial and diffused vision are woven through the two books. Many of Hara’s images are taken through glass: Her camera catches rain on windows, peers through car windows 4 of 14 28/04/2020, 1:03 pm Feeling Around for Matter: Mikiko Hara’s Quiet Observations https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0010.107/--feeling-around-for-... and those of buildings. In one image, a girl looks through a net barrier around a diorama, her eye caught on something to the side of Hara’s camera. In These Are Days there are three photographs of subjects with their eyes closed, and there are three images of women who catch the camera’s gaze. In Hysteric Thirteen, there is, in addition to the one-eyed cat, a photograph of a female subject standing under a sign that reads NOTICE THIS IS EAST EXIT, her face in profile with a patch over one eye. Another photograph features a young woman standing on the street, both eyes closed to the movement of the street around her, the daylight illuminating her face. Another image, taken on a ferry or boat, shows a woman standing with her eyes closed, and a couple with the woman looking directly at the camera lens and the man gazing out to sea. All of these are, to some extent, photographs that capture the exteriorizing of an interior moment. [http://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tapic/x-7977573.0010.107-00000004/1?subview=detail;view=entry] Fig. 4. Hara, Mikiko Untitled, from the Is As It series, 1996, Image 28 from the book Hysteric Thirteen, 2005, © Mikiko Hara, courtesy of Osiris, Tokyo. Hara is not aiming to present her own perspective in her photographs, she insists: “I just want to exist as transparently as possible along the way.” [20] [#N20] She sees the camera as “more honest, simple, cool-headed 5 of 14 28/04/2020, 1:03 pm Feeling Around for Matter: Mikiko Hara’s Quiet Observations https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0010.107/--feeling-around-for-..