In her text to this important collection of photographs, Asako Imaeda writes of its "strange harmony, a precarious harmony that is the result of the introduction of human activities and artifice into the landscape." Amid the concrete and the asphalt burgeon bushes and vines, flowers and grasses. An abandoned factory in the paddies, a concrete block wall topped with barbed wire, a sump in reclaimed land -- all are home to weeds and sprouts, mosses and sedge.
Yet the images are not to be interpreted as an expose of Japan's man-made ugliness, nor as a celebration of beautiful nature's revenge. Rather, the equality of what man has made and what he has not lies in the balance of these pages. With carefully calculated "natural color," with no anecdotal nor even symbolic intent, with not a human being in sight, these photos do not stand as "mute evidence" since they do not condemn.
Yoshiko Seino at first glance appears to have photographed what most photographers would have avoided. "Japan," now a matter of a selective eye artfully getting around the gas stand in front of the pagoda, is nowhere in sight. Neither is there any ecological message.
In this the photos are different from, say, that ubiquitous series of advertisements for an alcoholic beverage that show a pristine scene with a modest bottle in its midst and the product name in humble lower-case font. The creative director thinks we will thus find the beverage equally "natural." What we notice, however, is just another discarded bottle fouling the landscape.
Seino's landscapes carry no such message. In fact, they seem to carry no message at all. At the most there is a hint at boundaries: a distant gate, a wall topped with barbed-wire, an accordion car-gate, nothing behind it except an empty field, but given such centrality in the photo, so formally placed, so certain of our attention, that we are forced to "read" the image as depicting something being kept out (or in) and wonder which it is.
And this is, in a way, what the collection is about. Look at the illustration accompanying this review. It was taken a couple of years ago in Chiba (all pictures in the book were photographed during 2000-2002, mostly in Chiba but also in Saitama and Kanagawa), and its title, hidden away in the back of the book, is "A Flag."
So it is -- a red flag, taken against the wind-carved hills, standing in the middle of the road rutted with car tracks. But what kind of flag? Our efforts to read anecdotal interest (golf course, demolition site) are frustrated in that no further information is offered. Perhaps we are to see the flag as an indication of some future construction project and hence view it as an intruder.
But no. We see what a primitive flag it is, a bamboo pole with something red at one end -- not even cloth, merely paper perhaps. It does not seem to speak of encroaching technological threats. But, if not, of what then does it speak?
The colors alert us. Seino takes great pains to get her colors just right. Here, if we look, we find that the color of the bamboo is the same color as the background grasses. In fact (we now remember) bamboo is a kind of grass. Which is which? Neither, both.
In this way, the photographer implies her strange and precarious harmony. The sign of life, a phrase she dignifies by making it the title of her collection, is not the man-made flag nor the nature-made hills. It is both. And something more.
As writer Eudora Welty said of the photographs of William Eggleston, "these landscapes are also our portraits." In this sense, then, Seino has taken the picture of a resourceful people, expert at reconciling presumed opposites, who traditionally do not practice either/or but embrace both/and, for whom case-by-case is the case and no excluding notions of the supernal are recognized. Signs of life are all-inclusive.
This collection, beautifully designed and printed, is not exactly buyer-friendly. It is expensive and sold locally in only a number of stores. To order it directly from the publishers, contact Osiris at Higashi 3, 21-14 (402), Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-0011, fax (03) 5485-0993 or e-mail: [email protected]. It is worth all the bother it might cause you.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.