Limits. Photo by Nick Shere

Nick, a.k.a kukkurovaca, took this picture of Ellsworth Kelly’s Stele I in the SFMOMA Rooftop Garden. Looks like the person on the left is entering another dimension.  The dapper gentleman on the right may have just returned from it.

Nick says:

“There’s no real story to this photograph—If I remember correctly, I had just gone to see the Avedon exhibit for the first time, and the Adams-O’Keeffe for the third or fourth time, probably. I went up to the roof, got a beverage, and sat down to people-watch. I had my camera with me—I suspect I’m not alone in going to the roof in part to take out my pent-up photographic urges from the no-photography areas of the museum.

The composition that I wound up with is not quite what I had anticipated. At the time I brought up my camera, the fellow on the left was just standing and looking up at the piece; it was entirely fortuitous that at the moment I pressed the shutter release he began to step past it, or, thanks to the perspective, into it.“

“This trip was our honeymoon, and I was glad there were fabulous exhibitions in my favorite museum. I appreciate that you like these photos. It will be a special experience to see our photos on SFMOMA’s blog.”

Naoya Hatakeyama, Untitled, Osaka, 1998-1999.

(The second in a two-part series from assistant curator of photography Lisa Sutcliffe, who organized both of our current collection exhibitions of Asian photography: The Provoke Era and Photography Now. Lisa posed a single question to the artists whose works are included in Photography Now. Part one is here.)

This week we’re returning to the question Why Photography Now? Photography Now: China, Japan, Korea presents SFMOMA’s new acquisitions by contemporary photographers working in Asia, and was conceptualized as a companion to our current exhibition of postwar Japanese photography.

Even as globalization and technology have allowed for faster and more fluid cross-cultural influence, the artists represented in the show embrace varied approaches and offer diverse personal visions, from Byung-Hun Min’s minimal landscapes that reference traditional Korean ink painting to Hiromi Tsuchida’s distant and vibrantly colored examinations of urban crowds. What they all have in common is an interest in expressing themselves with photography. Since its inception, photography has been used both as a mechanical tool and a method of creating art. With this in mind, I asked each of the artists in Photography Now: China, Japan, Korea to answer the following question: why do you work in photography and how do the particular aspects of the medium affect your artistic decisions?

While Naoya Hatakeyama analyzes how humans consume and transform the environment from above, Chinese photographer Yan Changjiang bears witness to the changing landscape around the Three Gorges Dam as a form of protest. Osamu Kanemura draws inspiration from the 19th century photographer Eugène Atget, while Hiromi Tsuchida is interested in exploring the new possibilities available with digital technology. Below you’ll find the second installment of answers and I hope you’ll join me in thanking each of these artists for their participation.

Enjoy!

—Lisa Sutcliffe, SFMOMA assistant curator of photography

Naoya Hatakeyama, Untitled, Osaka, 1998-1999.

Naoya Hatakeyama (Japanese, b. 1958)
Photography was the most convenient way for me to find a kind of transcendence in the world without God. That transcendence has long been called Nature, which describes images on a sheet of paper. But today the notion of how we understand “Nature” is changed by technology; for example, when we look at an awe-inspiring photograph, we’re always asking if it’s Photoshopped or not . Since the answer is never truly apparent from the image itself, we need to keep facing it, and continue questioning it uncomfortably. Even if the answer is written, we’re no less uncomfortable, because we know words are not always true (this is what photography has taught us!).

This puzzled, suspended experience is called “reality” in photography of the 21st-century. This new reality in photography is quite phenomenological, is never physical or of Nature, is sometimes sad and uneasy, and perhaps teaches us the classic meaning of “reality” itself. “Reality” was always the word for something which resisted our process of cognition, wasn’t it?

Most of us feel that rupture of “reality” in the history of photography, and we know that photography does not simply mirror the world, and it doesn’t simply alter our perception of it, either.

Yu Haibo, Untitled No. 2, from the series Dafen Oil Painting Village in China, 2005. © Yu Haibo

Yu Haibo (Chinese, b. 1962)
Photography continues to be one of the most significant art forms in the twenty-first century. It offers me infinite possibilities to observe and document our physical existence and inner world. I consider photography an ideal means of artistic expression— it takes me to a surrealistic spiritual world while I look at the real world through the lens.

Yan Changjiang, Outang, from the series The Three Gorges, 2006. © Yan Changjiang

Yan Changjiang (Chinese, b. 1968)
We have reached the peak of thousands of years of civilization but it is also a time of “uncertainty”, or of insecurity and doubt. Photography, with its capacity to “ascertain”, becomes a very powerful mode of exploration. It has a physical and material reality that one cannot find in painting or other traditional modes. When I am facing reality and depicting it with a camera, I feel fully assured and confident, and capable of convincing other people. I think even in fictional or staged photography, the essence of its appeal lies in its physical reality. In The Three Gorges I felt that I was facing a massive historical and cultural transformation, and that photography would be the most effective channel for testimony and protest.

Li Lang, Riha, Zhaojue, Sichuan, China. A boy holding an eagle standing in the snow. From the series The Yi People, 2002. © Li Lang

Li Lang (Chinese, b. 1969)
Photography? I find that this term appears less and less in my daily thinking about art and creation. I make use of photography, I make use of its ability to accurately mirror the world. But then I must re-think “accuracy”, which leads to doubt about photographic accuracy and reality.

I doubt almost everything. Taking photos, or photography as a form, helps me find a way to ask questions.

Byung-Hun Min, Untitled, from the series Gloom,

Byung-Hun Min (Korean, b. 1955)
I took up photography out of boredom and found it fascinating. I never studied photography in school but I had a wonderful teacher and the more I get into it, the hungrier and thirstier I am for more. I do not think about theory, trends, or storytelling in photography. I take pictures when, where, and how I see and feel.
I’m seeking purity in my work and for the moment, photography seems to fulfill that.

Dustin Shum, Shenzhen, 2006. ©Dustin Shum

Dustin Shum (Chinese, b. 1971)
I chose photography because I was fascinated by the documentary factor of the medium. It was not just a way to portray the world, but also a way to counter the sometimes overwhelmingly sentimentalized, poeticized or romanticized vision toward reality. While that’s the bright side of the moon, I would like to deal with the aspects of photography that are like the dark side of the moon.  These aspects may not be romantic, poetic, or sentimental at all, and just like the dark side of the moon, [they are] always hiding from the public’s consciousness. Photography walks the line between the two.

I try to employ an objective style in my work, with as little aesthetic involvement as possible. I rely on observation more than graphic manipulation or careful composition. It’s a bit of a cliché, but I always think this is very much a Chinese way of thinking. Bruce Lee put it well: “Using no way as way.”

Osamu Kanemura, Someday OK Prince Will Come, from the series Spider's Strategy, 1999. © Osamu Kanemura

Osamu Kanemura (Japanese, b. 1964)
In Eugène Atget’s photographs, when subjects are depicted precisely, they become transformed into something different. When details appear clearly and sharply his photographs represent a world which is rather different from reality. This was what I feel when I look at photographs by Atget.

These superbly detailed descriptions do not serve only to represent their subjects honestly and accurately. When the details are precise, and have no ambiguity, each seems to speak self-indulgently and to have its own presence. Beyond the specific understanding of the whole photograph, details give us various perspectives. The details often exceed the whole.

I became interested in photography because of Atget. He doesn’t only capture the world accurately; his camera also creates a different vision than what he might have been aiming for. I learned from Atget that the camera is a device which will produce something that the photographer cannot control. This is the reason I chose to work in photography. A photographer is like Victor Frankenstein, the fictional chemist whose experiments produced unexpected results, or an alchemist who always fails.

Hiromi Tsuchida, Tottori, from the series New Counting Grains of Sand, 2001. Promised gift of John “Launny” Steffens

Hiromi Tsuchida (Japanese, b. 1939)
I try to find the meaning of a time, the present, where I live, and express it using a camera. When taking pictures, I sometimes feel I am a participant in the time of now. This may be an illusion, but subjectively true.

I think that “objectivity” is strongly controlled by the physicality of the person who takes the picture, including his or her personal gestures and behavior. And what guides that physicality is the independent thought of the person, thus making certain that “objectivity” can hardly go beyond subjective thought. It is this inherent ambivalence that attracts me to the camera. Additionally, the process of photographic expression—camera in my hands—is thrilling in that I feel I am able to confront a sometimes “crude” reality and immerse myself in it. This, really, is my obsession.

In the 21st century we have seen a rapid shift from film, which has physical structure, to digital images based on electronic signals. The signals that constitute a digital image have no permanent substance and are easily transformed, and manipulated after the picture is taken. Film guaranteed that the photographer and the subject were actually in the same place at that time, but with digital photography, more and more, there can be doubt. Digital technology has increasingly made us aware that what we see in a picture is a “photographic fact” rather than a “fact.” This is not to say that photographic expression via film is free from the issues of doubt accompanying a “photographic fact,” as I have touched on here, and this, too, is becoming increasingly evident.

Because of this, I have started including “doubtful” elements in my pictures. In “New Counting Grains of Sand,” I explore crowds of people and create a heightened sense of artificiality through exaggerated color —something that cannot be seen with silver halide film. I also subtly include myself, by digitally pasting my image in each picture. In this way, I try to express that the homogeneous relationship between reality and a photograph has been broken. Yet they are still pictures. I think it expresses the current state of photography because it floats in both realms. Today’s information networks bring us the world through computers—another manifestation of virtual reality. In that sense, too, I think “New Counting Grains of Sand” is real.

In the 1990s, prior to “New Counting Grains of Sand” (shot with a digital camera), I began scanning, digitalizing and printing images that were originally produced on film. It was in that process that I clarified my own artistic vision.

Photo: Marco Sanchez

I was instantly charmed by this image of stockings that match the SFMOMA grand staircase and walls.  Thanks Marco!

Here’s what he had to say about the shot:

“The legs belong to my girlfriend Holly. The story is nothing special, I was feeling creative after we saw the Robert Frank and Richard Avedon photographs and I saw the similarity between the wall and Holly’s stockings. So I whipped out my point & shoot and took the shot.”

How to Saw a Woman in Half. Photo by Rita Harowitz

Rita, a.k.a Seenyarita, snapped this picture at the entrance to the current Richard Avedon exhibition.  From time to time, the SFMOMA freight elevator is in use during public hours and the doors open, much to the surprise of visitors.  Rita explains her picture better than I could:

“I’ve been to see the Avedon show 3 times now. Probably will go back at least one more time before it’s over.  I was intrigued by the way that the image on the elevator parts to reveal another world. I feel that Avedon was able to show worlds to us through portraits on a white background. There was no need to see anything in the background beyond the subject since the portraits themselves spoke volumes.“

Wang Yishu, Untitled, inkjet print, 2005

(The first in a two-part series from assistant curator of photography Lisa Sutcliffe, who organized both of our current collection exhibitions of Asian photography: The Provoke Era and Photography Now. Lisa posed a single question to the artists whose works are included in Photography Now.)

Photography, with its ability to “mirror” reality, has a more direct connection to the visible world than most other media, including painting and sculpture. It can also alter our perception of reality, either through the artist’s unique perspective, or by manipulation. Examining artistic decisions can reveal quite a bit about how a photograph is understood. Why was this picture made? Who is the intended audience? What did the artist decide to keep inside the frame or to crop out and how does that change our interpretation of the scene? Or perhaps the artist digitally manipulated the image to create something from his or her own imagination. In the digital age, the photographic medium is being redefined and artists are freer to create whatever image they imagine.

Photography Now: China, Japan, Korea presents SFMOMA’s recent acquisitions of photographs by artists working in Asia, and was conceptualized as a companion to our current exhibition of postwar Japanese photography. Even as globalization and technology have allowed for faster and more fluid cross-cultural influence, the artists represented in the show embrace varied approaches and offer diverse personal visions. Many record the changing urban fabric and the development of a new migratory population. What they all have in common is an interest in expressing themselves with photography.

I began to wonder how the rapid cultural transformations, especially in China, might be influencing the growing interest in photography. In addition, I was hoping to find out what intrigues these artists about working with and manipulating the visible world. With this in mind, I asked each artist in the exhibition to answer the same question: why do you work in photography and how do the particular qualities of the medium affect your artistic decisions?

I was surprised by the poetic nature of the answers, and I would like to highlight a few common themes I noticed in the texts. Many of the artists express a desire to simultaneously depict the outer world and the inner self – to transcend reality. They discuss the existence of multiple realities and how different ways of seeing and multiple points of view can be compressed into two dimensions. And there was a strong desire to record the changing environment – either as a means of saving a piece of history, or as a commentary on rapid development. It is heartening to see that even with the digital revolution photography is still ideally suited for this type of cultural examination. I hope you enjoy reading the following responses as much as I did.

Feng Bin, Shuai Cao Hutong, from the series Hutong at Night, gelatin silver print, 2006

Feng Bin (Chinese, b. 1962)

Confucius, the ancient Chinese philosopher who lived more than 2500 years ago, once stood by a river and said: “Everything flows like this, without ceasing, day and night.” In my opinion, photography continues to be the best method of arresting that “flow.” Its contact with reality is more direct when compared with other forms of art.

I very much appreciate traditional Chinese lifestyles, which are doomed to gradually disappear under the effects of economic development and population expansion. My projects up until now include documenting Beijing Hutong, ancient villages in my hometown, and the residential community in Beijing constructed from the 1950s through the 1980s. For me, photography is a tool to save the things I like from fading away and to present the world the way it appears to me. I believe most photographic works are subjective enough to reveal the artist who made them. I choose to work with a large-format camera, as the slow, methodical approach it requires allows me to observe in a more meditative way. With the focusing cloth over my head, I am quite separated from my surroundings and left alone with a world on the ground glass. As the moments flow in the world, they flow in me as well. By freezing those moments in still pictures, I’m presenting my view of the world in that constant flow. And photography becomes a way for me to explore the outside world as well as my inner self.

Luo Dan, Hubei Wuhan, from the series China Route 318, inkjet print, 2006

Luo Dan (Chinese, b. 1968)

From an early age, I perceived the world by thinking through images. I have a multitude of visual images and fragments in my memory. Although there are numerous roads in the world, I am just walking in this way right now, using photography to connect me to this archive of mental images. Photography gives me great strength, and is a means of communicating with myself, of raising a question and answering it. The window of photography seems to present a series of riddles, and the answers are sometimes clear and sometimes vague; like memory, they’re unreliable. I believe the answer is always inside or outside the window. Fortunately, each of us has the window.

Chen Nong, Gugong 9 (Forbidden City 9), hand-painted gelatin silver prints

Chen Nong (Chinese, b. 1966)

Recently, it has become easier and easier to present anything that could be seen through our eyes in a photograph. However, I don’t really think a photograph can mirror reality; everything has multiple viewpoints, which depend on your personal insight, or your angle of view; perhaps what the photo shows us is something primal. I cannot deny that this is why photographs fascinate me so much. I like to intuitively find an image and let nature take its course.

Wang Yishu, Untitled, inkjet print, 2005

Wang Yishu (Chinese, b. 1973)

Obviously, the world still has its surprising secrets beneath the surface.

Life is a journey. Photography is one way to reach the unseen through the seeable. I tried to imagine a vision that only belongs to me, trying to explore some very basic ideas and rules. These photos exemplify this: they lead to questions about these hidden secrets and they are also the answers I received.

Miyako Ishiuchi, Mother's #24, gelatin silver print, 2001

Miyako Ishiuchi (Japanese, b. 1947)

I chose photography because I was interested in the darkroom. An artist’s atelier, where an art work is generally born, needs light. No matter if it is painting, or sculpture, art is normally created in the light. However, to make a photograph, every possible light source has to be closed off. Even a thin ray or a tiny spot of light is not allowed. I was thrilled by the fact that you need to create a space of absolute darkness in order to create a photograph. It is also interesting to think about the fact that the science, photochemistry, and machineries of this 19-20th century invention have not changed much since the origin of the medium, and it is still available to us in the 21st century.

I think that capturing and cropping a scene in a rectangular format is a very intentional act of expression. A photograph is a reproduction of the surface of what you see, but the image of the photograph continues beyond the frame, and reflects the artist’s self, with many layers of concern and intention, widely, deeply, and beautifully. I want to make photographs that don’t draw attention to photography’s technical ability to accurately record. However, the medium’s abilities and limitations do sometimes affect my artistic decisions, and these technical considerations do form part of the background of my artistic creativity.

Asako Harahashi, Jonanjima #1, from the series half awake and half asleep in the water, chromogenic print, 2002

Asako Narahashi (Japanese, b. 1959)

I studied oil painting, but I was so bored sitting in rooms waiting for paint to dry! During my college years, I worked with a team making a film, but I think I prefer working autonomously. I was very much attracted to photography because of its rapidity, its quick reactions, and systematic work flow. It gave me a well-balanced life with outdoor and indoor activities: going out for shooting and staying in the darkroom alone to make the prints, no team-work needed. Every part of the process can be done alone.

Going outside, taking photographs, using a lot of films, making contact sheets, and seeing each shot — After all of that, while I’m making a selection, I sometimes notice an attractive image I was completely unaware of when I photographed it. I find more than I expect to find, and this ‘discovery’ brings me great pleasure. It feels like a kind of a gift from heaven. I believe this interesting experience of ‘discovery’ in work comes from the depth of photography. I feel happy that, even though I wasn’t noticing it in the moment, I released the shutter in response to ‘something’ and then I’m glad I’m able to find the shot later in my contact sheets.

For my works, I don’t need the modifications available with digital imaging, and I don’t stage settings. I look at the thing in front of me and take pictures of it. I’m there when I release the shutter, and after the thing has been transformed into a two-dimensional photograph, I encounter it newly, and look at it again. I make public what I saw, and how I saw it. The entire process—including discovery—is photography for me; nothing more and nothing less.

Hiroyo Kaneko, Untitled, from the series The Three Cornered World, chromogenic print, 2007

Hiroyo Kaneko (Japanese, b. 1963)

A photograph is a mediator between time and space, the audience and the photographer.

It is here in front of us but the image is from another time and place. Compared to other media, a photograph does not hide its origin; as you indicate, it has the ability to accurately mirror the world.

A photograph approaches the same level of vulnerability and adaptability as a human. It can evoke something invisible such as mood, emotion, a sense of history, or a social criticism.

Like people, photographs attempt to absorb personal moments and subtly reveal their varying facets.

I think it’s this quality that drives me to the mystery of working in photography.

( Look for part two, with responses from Naoya Hatakeyama and others, on Nov 9. Photography Now: China, Japan, Korea is on view through December 20.)

Eikoh Hosoe, Yukio Mishima, Ordeal by Roses #6, 1961-1962. Gift of Howard Greenberg © Eikoh Hosoe

One of our current collection exhibitions, The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography presents a number of pictures from that turbulent moment in Japanese history. After the devastation of World War II, Japan entered a period of American military occupation and modernization. Photographers reacted to the drastic sociocultural changes taking place by forging a new visual language that broke with tradition while it memorialized the old culture and recorded the new. SFMOMA began collecting this work in the 1970s, under curators John Humphrey and Van Deren Coke, but the bulk of the collection has been built by senior curator of photography Sandra Phillips over the last two decades. Here, she joins in conversation with poet, essayist, and translator W.S. Di Piero, an avid fan of postwar Japanese photography.

Shomei Tomatsu, Untitled (Yokosuka) , from the series Chewing Gum and Chocolate). 1966, printed 1974. Collection of the Sack Photographic Trust © Shomei Tomatsu

W.S. Di Piero : I’m interested in it for two reasons: it has the archival memorializing street photography does, and it’s archival memorializing that’s taking place in one of the most critical periods of Japanese history—that time from1945 to roughly the late 1960s, when the American presence was felt first in a terrifying way, and then later in a very different way during the occupation. And all of that was experienced and taken in by these photographers. I think Daido Moriyama was seven or eight years old when they dropped the bomb. He was young, but he was of consciousness when that happened.

SP: Shomei Tomatsu talks about being a kid of, I think, eleven, when he would not go down into the bomb shelters. Instead, he stayed upstairs in his room and looked at the bombs exploding, as though they were fireworks. He was both terrified and fascinated by them. I think that’s the whole key to his work, frankly, being terrified and fascinated by what’s happened. These photographers who experienced the war as children grew up and were—like the Japanese people as a whole—trying to deal with the fact that the Americans were still there, on all these military bases.

WSD: Looking at a lot of these pictures, I can admire them, and like them as pictures, and there’s also always a feeling of being behind a kind of cultural plate of glass. Something between me and whatever is transpiring before the lens. What about you? Why your attraction to this work?

SP: I saw a show when I was in New York in 1974 that John Szarkowski had put on, called New Japanese Photography. It seemed to me so different from anything else I’d seen that I’ve been trying to figure out what it’s all about ever since. It wasa a culture riven by its experience with America, both attracted to and made distraught by it.

I think there’s something fascinatingly ambiguous about a lot of these pictures. The question, what is Japan now? Is it something to be proud of or something to forget? What is the role of the American presence? And the destructiveness of the Americans? Our culture is so strange and ambiguous. How astounding it must be to see it through another culture’s eyes. I mean, we are amazingly violent and amazingly free. That’s something that’s been very liberating for the Japanese to digest, I think.

WSD: Yes, it’s a curious thing. In a sense these photographers were liberated by certain American things, like car culture. Or take this picture of Yukio Mishima [at top]—to my eye, it is as far as one can get from militaristic culture. What are those things wrapped around his neck?

SP: It’s a garden hose. You know, Mishima was a very wealthy man. And he lived in a neo-baroque or rococo palace, almost, with a very elaborate garden. So, when that picture was made, the photographer, Hosoe, who was very involved in dance, found this hose, wrapped it around him and made this strange and wonderful picture.

Katsumi Watanabe, Untitled , ca. 1970, printed 1985; Promised gift of Paul Sack to the Sack Photographic Trust © Estate of Katsumi Watanabe

Shomei Tomatsu, Coca-Cola, Tokyo, 1969, printed 1980. Collection of the Sack Photographic Trust © Shomei Tomatsu

SP: She’s probably on acid or something. The picture appears in a book Tomatsu did about a part of Tokyo called Shinjuku, where all the wild nightlife was. The Golden-gai, as it was called, was made up of old barracks left over from the war—a holdover from the occupation. There were tiny little bars for all the different groups—the people who admired French New Wave movies would have their own bar, and the photographers like Tomatsu and his pals had a bar. And they’re tiny places, and you can only fit maybe twelve people, they’re just crammed in, but there are gazillions of them. And there were also movie theaters there, and after the movies were over, street performers would be out doing their thing, too. Tomatsu’s book is about the small theater groups that evolved on the street and the rebellious student activity that took place there, and the drug-taking and the sex and, you know, just being in the sixties.

WSD: Another thing that strikes me is there’s an extreme phosphorescence to the light in a number of these photographs.

SP: A lot of it is night light.

Takuma Nakahira, La nuit 5, ca. 1968. Promised gift of a private collector © Takuma Nakahira

WSD: A lot of it is night light, and sometimes the light barely seems to have a shape; like in Takuma Nakahira’s La nuit series. He’s letting light explode, you know?

SP: Yes, the light in Nakahira’s pictures is amazing— kind of blindingly disturbing. Nakahira is a very interesting guy. He was very interested in Sartre and the French sixties student rebellion. For a very few, wonderful years, he made these amazing pictures, very large, which are not, strictly speaking, photographs. Politically, he didn’t want to make fine art objects, and instead produced what are really more like big posters. They’re original, one-of-a-kind pieces, meant to be tacked up on the wall. We’re very fortunate to have them.

And you’re right, there’s a really consistent interest in light, especially non-natural light, in a lot of this work.

WSD: Eikoh Hosoe’s Kamaitachi #31 is a fantastic picture. There’s that light again. The human presence seems to be something that is just sort of momentarily visiting.

Eikoh Hosoe, Kamaitachi #31, 1968, printed 1971. Promised gift of Paul Sack to the Sack Photographic Trust.

Or consider Nobuyoshi Araki, who is famous for being the most prominent erotic photographer of Japan, and interested in the fragile, momentary beauty of women’s bodies. However he’s more complex than just that. He also made, especially when he was a younger person, pictures like this one, which I find so strange, from the Pseudo-Reportage series:

Nobuyoshi Araki, Untitled, from the series Pseudo-Reportage, 1980; Accessions Committee Fund © Nobuyoshi Araki

WSD: The picture shows a very tanned man carrying— Is that a woman he’s carrying? Can you tell?

SP: I can’t tell, for sure, but I think it’s another man he’s carrying out of the sea; it looks like he’s being rescued from drowning.

WSD: It only seems. It suggests a narrative, but doesn’t give you one. It keeps its secret.

SP: Yes, that’s true. Which is maybe why it’s so compelling.

WSD: These pictures by Yamazaki, are these time-lapse pictures?

Hiroshi Yamazaki, The Sun Is Longing for the Sea, 1978, printed 2000; Promised gift of a private collector © Hiroshi Yamazaki

SP: It’s a series called The Sun is Longing for the Sea. The odd effect is produced by the photographer moving the camera.

WSD: This reminds me of something Moriyama said, that he often wouldn’t even look through the viewfinder, but just carry a camera around and snap pictures. His whole body became the camera. This idea of being in motion, that what the camera is recording is the motion of the body of the maker, and not even necessarily the eye of the maker is something I find really interesting.

In this Moriyama picture from the Eros series:  What’s going on here? Did he hire a model? Or did he find a prostitute to pose?

Daido Moriyama, Hotel, Shibuya, 1969. Gelatin silver print. Promised gift of a private collector.

SP: I think this is a girlfriend, actually. And I think this was taken in what are called ‘love hotels’. In this series the pictures are all slightly out of focus, and very beautiful. They were published in a magazine called Provoke, which was the most important magazine dealing with photography of this period—the alternative photography of the late sixties, early seventies. Provoke only lasted, I think, three issues, but these were published in them.

WSD: They almost look like he’s trying to find a way of taking certain kinds of pictorialist values and do something new with them.

SP: They’re very erotic pictures, and a little bit raw. And by taking them a little out of focus, he makes them, I think, exactly what you say, kind of pictorialist, in a way. Kohei Yoshiyuki is a photographer who was also part of this moment, or a little bit later. He made totally voyeuristic pictures, taken after the invention of the infrared light bulb, of people in public parks, usually having sex, or in places where there is sex, or has been sex.  For example, this untitled picture [below] was taken in a park in Shinjuku, where urban development was newly underway.

WSD: It’s a make-out spot as well?

Kohei Yoshiyuki, Untitled, from the series The Park, 1973; Anonymous Fund © Kohei Yoshiyuki

SP: Yes. It’s amazing! You can see the lights in the distance.

WSD: Well, this wasn’t taken with a long lens! He must’ve been pretty close.

SP: He was definitely close. [They laugh.]

WSD: The halo lights of the city appear almost as if they’re watching. It looks like a scene out of Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s so bucolic.

SP:  Simone, of these Japanese photographers, who most interests you?

WSD: The two that really capture my attention are Moriyama and Hosoe. I feel a certain sympathy with Moriyama, because there’s so much about him that was contrary. I think he wrote somewhere that he’s not against consumerism, he’s not against America, he’s not against American culture: he’s against photography. I find that most appealing. The work feels to me like it is coming out of a kind of resistance—whether the pressures are formal pressures or social, political pressures. And there’s a real urgency to all of these pictures, as if the photographers can’t possibly take in as much as they really want to take in, and so are moving as quickly as they can.

SP: This is a cultural moment that’s specifically Japanese.

WSD: What’s our equivalent here, a period when American photographers might have felt similar compulsions?

SP: Maybe the thirties, when things were so vulnerable and life was changing, and not what it was before. People were coming to California from Texas and
Oklahoma and living in tents. It seems to me there was a very profound cultural reaction to real events, both physical events—you know, the climate—and economic events. Maybe that was, in some way, equivalent to what the Japanese were trying to deal with during the postwar period.

Sandra S. Phillips and W.S. Di Piero photo: Winni Wintermeyer

WSD: That makes a lot of sense to me. There was also a sort of visual voraciousness, to take in as much as possible of what was happening.

SP: To try and understand it, maybe.

WSD: Yes. I think the understanding always comes later. First you make the archive, and then you try to figure out what has happened.

Composer, philospher, poet, artist John Cage was born on this day in 1912. This video was made last winter, during The Art of Participation exhibition, when we were treated to daily noontime performances (usually with staff performers) of Cage’s seminal work 4′33″. Thanks to Tammy Fortin as always for fantastic video gesture.

—Melissa Pellico, ‘John Cage’, The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now

Robert Frank, Elevator—Miami Beach, 1955; gelatin silver print; 12 3/8 × 18 13/16 in.; Collection Philadelphia Museum of Art, purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1969; © Robert Frank

“Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.

To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.

And I say: That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what’s her name & address?”

Such are the closing words of Jack Kerouac’s introduction to Robert Frank’s book of photographs, The Americans. For me, these three sentences sum up in beautiful Beat wisdom the bittersweet essence of Frank’s work. America is a sad poem, but nestled within that sadness is a sweetness that calls us siren-songlike into something profound.

Aside from the incredible pay that accompanies a museum job there is an entire array of employee perks that make working at a nonprofit worth your while. We get to meet artists behind the scenes, see art that is not on display, enter all museums free, and roller skate through the galleries during off hours (okay, I was kidding about seeing art not on display). We also—and this is my favorite—have staff “walkthroughs” of the exhibitions: a sneak peak with a curator where you get to hear all the great stories behind the exhibition.

During The Americans walkthrough Assistant Curator Lisa Sutcliffe regaled us with a couple great stories about Frank’s work. Interestingly, one of the most amusing involved a piece of yellowed paper covered with typewriter scrawl that turned out to be Kerouac’s original draft for the introduction of The Americans. It differs slightly from the citation above (the last part of the draft contains a booze-fueled stream of misspelled brilliance that I highly suggest you track down) but that last line about the elevator girl is still there. Sutcliffe showed us the photo Kerouac references [above] and we all had a good laugh about how Kerouac had essentially used one of the most important photographic oeuvres of the 20th century for what amounted to a Craigslist “missed connection.” I was particularly intrigued because part of my job at SFMOMA is doing our Twitter feed, and Kerouac’s pickup line, weighing in at just over 130 characters, was exactly the sort of thing I would love to “Tweet.” I spent the rest of the walkthrough planning how I was going to word my next post…

My tweet was not to be, however, for as soon as I returned to my desk the phone rang. This is usually what it’s like coming back from walkthroughs—you’re riding this wonderful high from seeing all the art that tricked you years ago into majoring in Art History instead of Business only to return to your cubicle and be slapped by the reality of work. The phone rang a second and third time and I sat there resisting whatever marketing salesperson waited on the other end. I was about to let it go to voicemail when, for whatever reason (it’s my job?), I picked up. What I heard next was worthy of a Twilight Zone episode:

“Hello! My name is Sharon and I just saw my picture in the Chronicle —I was the girl in the Robert Frank elevator picture!”

Long story short: Several days before the staff walkthrough Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle came and reviewed the Robert Frank show. He then proceeded to write his review and included in his article the very same picture to which Kerouac had dedicated his amorous last line. His article was edited, formatted, and finally printed and sent off to the delivery vans. One of those vans delivered one of the copies of that Chronicle to the house of a certain Sharon C. of San Francisco, who opened it and found, sadly staring into space, her very own 15-year-old face. After what was probably a moment of surreal disbelief also worthy of a Twilight-Zone episode, she picked up the phone and called the SFMOMA Communications office. After ringing several times her call was finally answered by a young man who had just gone through a Robert Frank exhibition walkthrough and who was less than happy about answering the phone.

That, my friends, is not only the most awesome museum story of my life, but it’s almost entirely true (I might have made up Kenneth Baker’s writing process). I met up with Sharon later that day and we went to the galleries with photography curators Corey Keller and Lisa Sutcliffe. We talked about Sharon’s life, and we even went into one of the SFMOMA elevators and updated the pic:

Photo: Ian Padgham.

It turns out Sharon has been a longtime member of SFMOMA but despite her love of photography and the arts she never knew about the introduction to the book. So now, 54 years after Frank snapped a shot that would leave a great American poet yearning, I can finally bring it all full circle and tweet:

—————————————-

Ian Padgham does the Twitter (@SFMOMA) and Facebook for the museum. He also makes art: http://www.origiful.com

The murals depict Mount Vernon and Monticello, the estates of American presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Half-hidden in the paintings are also depictions of the slaves who supported plantation life. Appropriately, the SFMOMA Tammy-and-Megan team chronicled the muralists’ labors as the project unfolded. Thanks muralists! Thanks team! Thanks Kerry!

[See post to watch Flash video]

[Muralists at work last winter. Poster image: Christo Oropeza.]