In Wim Wenders' 1984 film "Paris, Texas," Walt (Dean Stockwell) picks up his younger brother Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), who had disappeared in the desert four years earlier, to drive him back to Los Angeles. As Walt drives, Travis shows him a weathered picture of an empty plot of land he bought in some nondescript part of Texas called Paris, a place he vaguely remembers. Over the course of the film Travis' memory returns as he connects his seemingly uninteresting photograph and the real vacant piece of landscape.
In a similar manner, "Kozo Miyoshi: 1972~," the current show at Gallery 916, brings together photography and landscape to reveal an appreciation of passing time, the "personalities" of locations and the cultural backgrounds that define them. As MOMAT's Curator of Photography Rei Matsuda remarks in the accompanying catalog, this show is very much an "unearthing" of both the history and culture of the places that photographer Miyoshi visits.
Born in Chiba Prefecture in 1947, Kozo Miyoshi graduated from Nihon University's Department of Photography in 1971. With the aid of the government overseas training program, he moved to the United States for a one-year internship at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he lived until returning to Japan in 1996. His images give a brief glimpse of places that over time became barometers of a cultural change across the American Midwest, documenting a migrating culture that grew and receded against the ever-present landscape. In this respect Miyoshi is as much a behaviorist as he is a photographer.