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- Convenors:
-
Kelly McCormick
(UCLA)
Carrie Cushman (Wellesley College)
Maggie Mustard (Columbia University)
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- Chair:
-
Jonathan Reynolds
(Barnard College)
- Discussant:
-
Jonathan Reynolds
(Barnard College)
- Stream:
- Visual Arts
- Location:
- Torre B, Piso 5, Auditório 3
- Sessions:
- Friday 1 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel argues for a history of photography told through the object cultures that have contributed to the formation of photographic practice. Focusing on photobooks, printing processes, and camera design, we examine how a material turn reveals new perspectives on postwar Japanese photography.
Long Abstract:
This panel argues for a history of photography told through the various object cultures that have been crucial to the formation of photographic practice. From the end of World War Two to post-bubble-era Japan, photographers, designers, and avid viewers constructed a vibrant photographic culture. Seeking to examine the history of photography in Japan through a combination of disciplinary perspectives, this panel provides an occasion to explore the many intersections of the material culture of photography. Beginning in the 1950s, we look to the ways in which industrial and graphic designers approached the camera as a modern design object by examining the role that the camera played in new imaginings of Japan as a "design nation." Through an investigation of its packaging design, advertising, and user interactions, we examine the history of marketing photography to mass audiences as well as the professionalization of graphic and industrial designers in the1950s. From the late 1950s through 1970s, the rise in the production of photobooks signaled radical new conceptions of the photograph as a material object. Innovative book and object designs, technical experimentation, and collaborative projects from this period in the history of the postwar Japanese photobook allowed for more expansive notions of the viewer-image relationship, and for multisensory theories of the photograph. Finally, we turn to an examination of the return to originary forms of the camera and photographing practices in the 1980s and 1990s. From the construction of handmade pinhole cameras to experimentation with tactile printing processes such as the daguerreotype, we explore the appeal of the hands-on nature of these "primitive" processes in reaction to the dawn of the digital era. Our examination of this fifty-year period of Japanese photographic history seeks to position photography's diverse practices as necessitating methodological approaches that highlight disciplinary border-crossing as we look to the material makeup of photography.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 1 September, 2017, -Kelly McCormick (UCLA)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I examine the role of the construction of "Japanese Design" and "Japanese Photography" as unifying cultural categories in the postwar period.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I examine the role of the construction of "Japanese Design" and "Japanese Photography" as unifying cultural categories in the postwar period. The Japanese camera is an important point of connection between these two labels and through its postwar success, I examine the ways in which designers, photographers, and corporate figureheads alike invested in new forms of national visibility. I argue for an understanding of "Japanese Design" as a constructed category which developed beginning in the 1940s in Japan and the United States as a response to allegations that Japanese industries were appropriating the designs of manufacturers around the world. In response to these charges, the camera industry looked for ways to construct its own unique identity both as a means to sell products abroad, and to appeal to new domestic customers. In 1957, upon the establishment of the Good Design Selection System by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, the most recent Canon 35mm camera was the first product selected to receive the "Good Design Award." For the next thirty years, cameras continued to be one of the most highly awarded categories of products and thus played a large role in creating a domestic and international image of Japanese design. As Companies, organizations, and individuals turned the "Made in Japan" brand into a successful moniker, it not only applied to consumer products, but visual style and sense making. In this way I argue that central to this discussion are the ways in which new organizations such as the Photographic Society of Japan seized upon domestic enthusiasm for new Japanese-produced cameras to launch events such as a national "Photography Day" on June 1st, 1951 through which it sought to define and disseminate a particular vision of what photography made in Japan looked like. Through the combined perspectives of design history and mass photographic practice in postwar Japan, I examine at the role that individuals and institutions had in constructing official spaces to celebrate the Japanese camera.
Maggie Mustard (Columbia University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that the postwar Japanese photobook offers a radical conception of the materiality of the photograph. The technical innovations and design experiments of the period posit a multisensory photographic theory, one rooted in the physical and sensorial experience of the reader's body.
Paper long abstract:
From the late 1950s through the 1970s, the rise in the production of Japanese photobooks signaled radical new conceptions of the photograph as a material object. Innovative book designs, technical experimentation, and collaborative projects from this period in the history of the postwar Japanese photobook allowed for more expansive notions of the viewer-image relationship, and for multisensory theories of the photograph. Through sustained analysis of case studies of seminal photobooks such as Hosoe Eikoh's Barakei [Ordeal by Roses] (1963), Kawada Kikuji's Chizu [The Map] (1965), and Takanashi Yutaka's Toshi-e [Towards the City] (1974), this paper will argue for the significance of postwar Japanese photobooks as material objects whose meanings and messages are deeply imbricated in the subjective perceptual experience of the reader/viewer. Fundamentally different from the photobook publications of the early postwar period, which owed a debt to prewar traditions and theories of hōdō shashin ("news photography") and kumi shashin ("photo groups," or "photo essays"), the second generation of postwar photobooks eschewed the idea that photographs and text could be bound together in clear and objective narratives. Instead, through their revolutionary designs, unstable images, and underlying theories of the role of the photograph in society, these publications posit a multisensory, contingent relationship with the reader: a relationship in which the physical reality and the perceptual experience of the reader's body are a fundamental component of the photobook's existence as material object.
Carrie Cushman (Wellesley College)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the return to "primitive" photographic practices in reaction to the dawn of the digital era in Japan. I argue for a material turn in artistic practice that coincides with the material turn in the theory in the 1990s.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the return to "primitive" photographic practices in reaction to the dawn of the digital era in Japan. From the pinhole camera to platinum prints, antiquarian approaches to photography spiked in the late 1980s and continue to flourish in the present day. Antiquarian photography is well represented in exhibitions and photobooks of the 1990s, but it also appears in how-to manuals and popular photography journals. New galleries have opened that are devoted entirely to originary forms of the camera and photographic practices. Thus, this paper considers not only the methods of celebrated photographers such as Yamanaka Nobuo, Miyamoto Ryūji and Takashi Homma, but also the perspective of amateur photographers, viewership and public reception. I argue that the contemporary appeal of antiquarian photography lies in both the tactility of the process itself - the construction of a camera obscura or the control over a print in the darkroom - as well as in the materiality of the final product. Both the process and the resulting photograph challenge the desensitized nature of the digital image and encourage sustained acts of creating and viewing photography.