Whilst working on the sections of the course on Photography, memory and place (on which I still have to write something, and particularly Exercise 3.6, my primary focus has been on the idea of the photograph itself being a site of and aid to memory. What I have to some extent lost of is the idea that the landscape itself does the very same, and that this is what is captured in the photograph. This is implicit in the work I did for Exercise 3.5 on local history (https://markrobinsonocalandscape.photo.blog/2020/02/16/exercise-3-5-local-history/) and is also a growing idea in the context of Assignment 3, on which I am continuing to work.

This thought occurred, or perhaps re-occurred, while looking at Yasuhiro Ozawa’s book (2014) which has recently been reissued. What caught my eye in particular is part of his introduction:

“On Japan’s outlying islands (off the larger main islands of the archipelago) you find a kind of build-up of history, almost like a bank of snow. Emotions and recollections of the people and fragments of time accumulate layer upon layer to exude an air unique to the islands. Sometimes, as I walk the islands, that distinctive air becomes overwhelming and I hurry to board the return ferry. Yet once back on the mainland, I am gripped by a feeling that I’ve left something precious behind, and I find myself heading to the islands again.”

That sense of landscape as a place of, shaped by, and in turn, shaping history is something I get very strongly from Ogawa’s work in this book (even some of his older work that does not relate at all to Japan) and is in a way helping to refine, and define, my own understanding of what makes a given landscape important, rather than simply picturesque.

Ogawa, Y, (2014). Shimagatari. Tokyo: Sokyu-Sha

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