Daido Moriyama: Landscapes of Memory

 

 

Some photographers have a style that is so individual it comes to be understood as where the value of their work lies and Daido Moriyama is one such photographer. Of course, what he does is not entirely without precedent, but in the raw formalism of his pictures and the dogged, almost obsessive, nature of his approach, he has created something uniquely his own. It is an art that is intensely personal, but at the same time implies a kind of “democratic” regard for lived experience – it is, in this sense, as much a psychological history of his native Japan and its heritage of cultural dislocation in the post-war years, as it is a self-conscious expression of his own particular photographic vision. In these pictures there is a persistent sense of movement, of a restlessness which cannot be contained; each frame captures a scene hardly glimpsed, but tries to take all that can be gained from each. The very act of making a picture becomes an act of self-definition, an attempt to locate himself in the world and a way for him to document the theatre of self.

Photography becomes the medium that carries his identity and by extension, the identity of the country where he was born, the place that has been his most frequent, most intensely pictured, subject. Yet Moriyama as an observer often seems detached, his gaze astringent or even brutal and as a result his is not of an art of comfort or of easy resolve, but rather at its best (that is to say, at its most profound) his photographs offer a view of the world defined by a deep uncertainty, where even memory is eroded by time. Perhaps this accounts for the distinctive way in which Moriyama uses photographic materials, making his pictures without regard for conventional forms, but being carried by the process itself, catching fragments from the swell of urban life, that searching quality of his pictures, with their dark tonality giving light an almost physical presence – its action on the visual space of the photograph becomes a kind of corrosive element, working by alchemy to show how the same landscapes of memory, its aggregate layers, are shaped and eventually obscured. The compulsive rate of Moriyama’s picture making too is emblematic: each photograph he makes is a questioning of his own ever-changing relation to that (photographic) moment.

Just seven years old at the end of the Second World War, if he did not fully comprehend the devastating changes wrought by the atomic bombs and those blasted, skeletal landscapes, or the subsequent occupation by American forces, he must surely have felt and been witness to the effect these events had on those around him, indeed on the county as a whole, during his peripatetic childhood. He writes quite poignantly about the particular quality of those base towns, the centres of changing cultural values that swamped traditional mores, which fascinated him – as they did so many others, implying a kind of permissiveness not seen before. So it’s not surprising then that his most important and distinctive influences are largely American, which he fused in turn with elements of the (then) new, radical seeming Japanese literary avant-garde, not least the writing of Yuiko Mishima. The resulting style is defined by the charged over-lap between the two, driven by a sense of uncertainty or foreboding so characteristic of the post-war era – indeed, felt right up to the present day – the sense, perhaps, of some catastrophe, some incipient violence, undermining the foundations of social order and then of personal identity itself, where the individual is no longer the agent of that same (presumed) order, but is tossed in the chaos of a dystopian present. There is no future in Moriyama’s photographs, only a fugitive past, tentatively seen and slipping just beyond one’s grasp. So while the formal qualities of his pictures, the idiosyncratic use of grain and contrast for example, are very much his own, their stylistic energy and their intent have some clear (and admitted) precedents – when, most especially in an American context, that means the fascination with movement as a means of expression, as an artistic strategy in itself, the use of relentless self-questioning as a dark mirror to reflect the wider truth of social realities, and an obsession with the detritus of consumer culture, all the pitiful stuff left in its wake – but Moriyama’s work is in no way just the sum of his influences. What he has gained from his predecessors is so completely reconfigured as to be without parallel anywhere in the medium (which is basically a generic form), making something as singular as memory, a vision from inside the eye of one man.

He is the ever restless, brooding spirit of Japanese photography (with Araki posing as its trickster, let’s say) and it is the total narrative of his pictures, the work as a whole, that defines the scope of his achievements, which in the deep interiority of what he does, has been to articulate a radically personal vision, making photographs not just as objects but from the substance of his own memory, ephemeral and fragmented, where no aspect of reality seems wholly comprehensible or made to fit neatly into ordered frames, each with some designated meaning. Moriyama documents all those minute skips in the fabric of reality, of what is real to him; these are the flashing points where all multiple realities (collective and individual) converge, coming together and then apart in that infinitesimal fraction of a second, leaving its trace only as a negative, as an inverse of the fact – he reconstitutes memory in the photograph. What seems to matter most, however, is the photographic gesture itself, the action of pointing the camera and what that implies, its relation to perception; he doesn’t put the camera between himself and the world – he is the camera, the camera is his memory, and it really is as insubstantial as it seems, when it’s hard to sure what was seen, what has been lived. This is a landscape with no horizon; its perspectives are all skewed inward, but are at the same time a measure of the world beyond his own experience, where there is no separation between the living memory, as it is endlessly re-ordered, and the shifting patterns of our social landscape.

The Last Places: Michael Ackerman’s End Time City

 

 

Some places have been photographed so much that they effectively become invisible, blind-spots in our cultural lexicon and in photography’s repertoire; whatever seemed so profound at first is gradually eroded by familiarity, by a relentless attention in images. Benares (or Varanasi, if you prefer) is one such place, unique in both the staggering depth of its history and the crassness of how it has, at times, been portrayed. It seems to be the nature of the medium – in so far as we can think of photography as a coherent entity – that it easily facilitates the production of such archetypes, lazy shorthand forms coming to be understood as a substitute for properly considered experience – indeed for consideration itself. So it takes a photographer of some originality, or at least of real daring, to see a place as if for the first time, to see it stripped of casual assumptions, rendered all but unrecognisable, yet with its own particular mystery intact – to catch something, some presence, from the atmosphere and Michael Ackerman’s photographs of Benares in End Time City do just that, as frail glimmers from an eternity we cannot touch, in this shell of a place, its broken lines devouring light, a ghost city, built on shadows and ash – the last place, or perhaps the first. His work in this series is a delicate balancing act, between incoherence and the blurred recognition of some other, all but intangible truth – each picture should somehow be a failure, but never is; the varying choice of formats too (squares, rectangles and even panoramic) might, in less capable hands, suggest an aesthetically fatal indecision, but, again, it never does. In fact they represent a fundamentally unified, if disparate seeming vision, and not just of the place, but of all that photography can say about it (or what it cannot). His pictures reflect the multiple aspects of a place. This city is a labyrinth and you can lose yourself in its haunting depths, its contingent geography.

In fact, his pictures are fragments of near disappearance, of a negative energy, their uncertain contours the immateriality of place and of flesh, tracing perhaps that last dim coil of breath as it leaves the body, like static from a badly tuned radio, staining the air. Each photograph carries something phantasmagorical from the city, something barely seen, but apprehended with the uncommon sensitivity of a photographer dedicated not only to the visible fact, but to the myth-making of how a deeper historical time can suddenly rupture the habituated surfaces of everyday reality. Perhaps this is what brought Ackerman to India in the first place, the fact that it seemed more immediately permeable to the unseen realms of experience or more accepting of them, that it was a place of deep time and consequently if he was to explore all those accumulated layers he might find some clue, some thread to lead deeply into the mystery, to the heart of the labyrinth, groping blindly for whatever truth he might find there – or whatever else, in the darkness, in his own shadow. Looking at these pictures it becomes clear that this is not really a view of a particular city, with particular traditions and familiar twists of spatial logic. In fact they give the distinct impression that this is not a “city” at all, at least not in any predictable sense, but rather that it is a set of possibilities, of encounters that move between the real and the imagined, perversely offering illumination from the half-light of decay, from places where no light can touch. It will never appear the same way twice, but is re-formed moment to moment and Ackerman seems repeatedly drawn to these mutable places, first in New York, the darker fringes of an urban dream-time and now in Poland, right on the edge of Europe – the edge of history. But here India stands between them, altogether immovable, in another kind of consciousness where metaphor can become reality, a living fact, which may of course sound just as hopelessly “exotic” as anything else, but seems decidedly less so if we consider the India Ackerman is searching for (and I would say actually finds) is a place that never accepted the compromise of modernity, the narrow burdens of rational experience, but where reality itself is in endless flux.

What most reveals the scope of the work however is to see it in book form, where all the subtle connections between the images, their dissonant inner narrative, comes to the fore and if the waking dream that is Ackerman’s time in India, his journey through the imagined territory of the city and its environs, builds itself on certain archetypal forms it is only because these are the well-springs of human culture – gestures of devotion, the abjectness of death, all the architecture of our lives. This is, in fact, the archetypal city, deep in memory and if his exploration of it is actually quite conventional in terms of how the book is structured, along the dark warren of streets to the cremation grounds that line the river’s edge at the furthest reaches of the city, his movements play at the balance between inward and outward, between what he encounters and what he does not – the near misses of pursuit, that hint of something unseen around the next corner, of being lead onward by some force. Then Ackerman finds himself, finally, as a witness and an interloper at the cremations that have made Benares such a popular spectacle. Yet his pictures are so well judged, so much in harmony with the public nature of the occasion, the mysterious transformation of forms that it involves, that material (or bodily) release – the kind of alchemy that is, in many ways, a metaphorical double for the photographic process itself; there can be little doubt that Ackerman’s pictures are attuned to this insubstantial trace of human life-in-death, the whole continuum of ritual it implies, and reaching into the deepest chambers of the human heart, a visual archaeology touching regions that are all too often obscured by more “developed” cultural norms, the resolute factuality of death. So, what he arrives at in this (photographic) city is a very real point of uncertainty between what is present and what is a living past – perhaps this is, after all, a city at the end of time.