Continuing to indulge my interest in and fascination with Japanese photography I have just picked up a couple of books by Koji Onaka. I have been particularly struck by how similar thematic threads are running through the work of a number of artists whose work I have been looking at of late that are relevant to some of the issues addressed in this course.
These two books have something in common with Ogawa (2014) in so far as they are exploring parts of Japan, islands and smaller towns, away from the metropolitan centres, exploring a sense of memory of and in these places, memorialising them as they were, while they now change and are in danger of losing their original character. Onaka though takes the idea of the memory device a bit further.
Although put together quite recently both of these books are made up of photographs taken in the 1980s and 90s. They are, in a way, little memory capsules of Onaka’s time visiting and photographing these places. There are two points though that I find particularly interesting. In the earlier of the two books Onaka writes:
“I have plenty of negatives, which I’ve already forgotten, in which situation I shoot the films. So it was up to me to label them as old pictures, nonetheless, I somehow knew that it doesn’t matter when and where I took them and why I took those pictures.”
As photographs are generally unreliable so far as “truth” is concerned, so too are they unreliable as memory devices. The photographer’s memories, embedded in the images, are no longer accessible even to the person who made them.
The other point, which reinforces this last observation, comes from the more recent book. Onaka did not edit this set of images but left it to someone else. His editor has chosen and sequenced this set in such a way that they can be read as telling particular story, as Onaka puts it, of adolescent first love, a story that he says he could not have produced himself. The original memories have again become inaccessible and in their place has grown a new “memory” that is in fact entirely fictional. Nevertheless, there it now is, embedded in specific places at specific times. Or has the editor taken her own memories, from different places and times, and overlaid them on Onaka’s memories, obscuring their origins?
Ogawa, Y, (2014). Shimagatari. Tokyo: Sokyu-Sha
Onaka, K, (2019). Faraway Boat. Tokyo: Kaido Books
Onaka, K, (2013). twin boat. New York: Session Press
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