Tokyo Museum of Photography

After staying in the Manga Café and getting only a couple hours of sleep, I planned on visiting the Photography Museum in Ebisu. The museum had a few exhibits – all of which interested me quite a lot. One exhibit was the first in what will be a 3 part series on portraiture. This instalment was on the earlier developments on photographic portraits in Japan. Even though there was a lot of scepticism towards the technology leading into the 20th century – it was a common belief that taking a photograph was a means to stealing one’s soul, it grew in popularity because it was much cheaper than having a portrait drawn or painted. In fact, several samurai had their portraits taken in full samurai garb for the preservation of their cultural identities. There were a few samurai who actually travelled abroad and had their portraits taken in San Francisco. These portraits are nothing short of amazing. After showing a friend the book I bought from the exhibition, he commented that there was something almost jarring about seeing actual representations of real samurai in photographic form. The katana and the camera, both presented according to their inceptive purposes, just don’t seem to be technologies that fit together in the same particular frame.

Another exhibition was the 10th instalment of the World Press Photo. I think that this was/is something of a contest where an organization chooses the most relevant documentary photos from the previous year. They were arranged according to categories such as, ‘confict,’ ‘personal lives, ‘sports,’ etc. There were too many great photos to try to mention here.

The third exhibit was a collection of photographs from the memoirs of Seiichi Furuya. Furuya is a Japanese photographer who moved to Austria at a young age and married a European woman. The exhibition was mostly a documentation of his relationship with his wife who eventually committed suicide in 1985.

The series begins with photos of his wife (there are no self portraits, so we never actually get to see Furuya) in the late 70’s in Austria, probably early on in their relationship. We see them in their apartment, which sets a voyeuristic scene of the microcosm of their lives. Very quickly a child enters the picture and almost every frame contains both his wife and his son. In her arms the boy looks happy – and very uninterested in photography as he rarely looks at the camera. Instead he can be seen looking off to the side of the frame, or head down in a pillow, or looking through keyholes. The woman, from how she directs her eyes, seems to have only two interests, the person behind the camera, and her son. With her son, she seems always warm and caring, inquisitive, and often a bit goofy. In front of the camera, she is someone who is comfortable in front of the lens – either willing to exhibit herself and her personal life, or able to look at the photographer through the lens.

As the child begins to age, we can see the wife begin to lose weight and bags begin to form under her eyes; seems to lose a lot of the humour in her expression that she had when she was younger. Eventually, she appears with a shaved head, and there are a few frames taken in rapid succession after each other where she is standing over her child – her child in his own infantile world, and her face is filled with tears and anguish.

In 1985, the wife disappears from the frames and we see the son begin to grow up without his mother. One of the first frames where the child is alone, he is lying on his stomach beneath a window. He probably has chicken pox or the measles because small white dabs of ointment are dotted across his back, which beneath the light of the window, look like they’ve been applied with ethereal care. Another frame shows the boy, maybe a couple of years older, sitting on the floor in the living room with a few toys and a book on the coffee table; in the background is a large framed black and white print of his mother. Eventually, we see the boy at his graduation. He is standing alone in the shade and even though his visage has distinct resemblance to a Japanese father, his piercing look into the camera is a clear reminiscence to his mother.

This graduation photo is the chronological culmination of this memoir, but from here, we revisit new photos that take us back in time to when the wife was much younger – probably back to when they first met. We initially see her at her worst, lying in a bed beneath white sheets eating an apple, but then her hair comes back and the bags under her eyes disappear, and eventually she smiles again. One of the more iconic images from the collection is a photo of her standing with a camera around her neck and a stick in her hand, standing in front of a great body of water with a brilliant youthful smile on her face – it is also one of the last photos from the collection, leaving us with what seems also to be the most quintessential to her personality.

Throughout these photos, I remember searching for some tangible vein of personality, or character-trait that could be present in each photo – traceable within this small window of her life, possibly linking her to the circumstances of her eventual death. I wanted to see if there was some indication, some visual proof of a quality that was always inherent to her person that could demonstrate or foreshadow what was to happen. I wanted to see some element that could tie her life together. I think such an expectation was unrealistic given the diverseness of any person’s character.

What was interesting though, was that after following the progression leading to the wife’s death, and then continuing through the series back towards her youth, there was very late in the collection an image of the young wife with what looked like her mother, and in the light of the photo, there was a large scar across her neck. In this light, the scar is very conspicuous and given that she is very young in the photo, I had to retrace back to the beginning of the exhibit to confirm that the scar was in fact there from the beginning. It wasn’t until the end of the exhibit, when she is very young for the second time, that the scar is less hidden, or more pronounced. Maybe early on in Furuya’s career, which is represented at the beginning and end of the exhibit, he wasn’t quite as savvy to the details of his compositions, or maybe he wanted to reveal more in less heavy-handed composition. After these early portraits of his wife, there is some quite deliberate covering of the scar, either with the high necks or scarves of her attire, or with lighting, where she is often lit from the right side in order to cast a shadow over the scar. I suspect also some burning/blurring effects were performed on this part of the image in the darkroom. It’s a very minute detail, but having only noticed such a conspicuous – and potentially symbolic mark, only at the tail end of the series, made me re-evaluate all of my previous interpretations of both the subject and the author of these photos. The presentation or concealment of such a scar represents such important decision of representation, and I think it draws attention to both the attention to detail of the photographer to his craft, as well as to his relationship with the subject of his photos.

There was a lot for me to think about at the museum. Something I have a new appreciation for is to see actual prints of photos – rather than print or digital representations. I’ve definitely become accustomed to looking at my photos through the glow of my computer screen – probably a trend that will only continue to grow. I look forward to going back home however, and making some ‘real-life copies’ that I can look at without plugging into the wall.