Mentor Paper Anna Groman

Anna Groman Final Photobook Essay

Whilst creating my photobook I was inspired by “Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ‘70s”, compiled by Ryuichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian. This book was published in 2009 to rave reviews, showing many Japanese photobooks that had never been seen before. The book centers around 40 photobooks and the stories behind them, focusing not only on the history of each book but also the different printing processes used as well as design decisions.

In the 1960s post World-War Japan made a complete economic recovery and began to flourish due to its highly acclaimed educational system. As their economy boomed less people worked in agriculture and small family farms began to disappear. This process of modernization affected artists as photography magazines became extremely popular and heavily influenced how photographers viewed their work and began to contemplate layout. The 1970s featured new photographers that rewrote the history of photography in Japan and established the photobook as its own form of art.

The publication of photobooks in Japan set a new standard for how photography was shown as new aspects had to be considered. Photobooks merged graphic design, photography, and printing techniques to create something completely different from exhibit prints. Japanese photobooks cannot all be grouped together as the decisions made by each artist vary greatly. These decisions included sequencing, cropping, text, and printing techniques – Vartanian even says that “Japanese photography is best understood via the photobook.”

One thing that can be seen in most Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and 1970s is the use of photogravure printing. This was an intaglio process that created high contrast images which made the

physical quality of the ink very noticeable. The fact that touching these images would leave ink on the fingers added to this, and Japanese photographers used this process so as to highlight the photobook as an object to be experienced. This printing technique is no longer used and was not very popular in other countries at the time because new developments in offset printing meant that other photographers much preferred this faster printing technique.

Many photobooks in Japan were self-published in small quantities for close friends and family and it was this intimacy which they played on. Photographers would completely re-edit their images for the photobook, thus making the photobook its own art form. They would use it as a form of storytelling and many Japanese photobooks of the 60s and 70s try to show the reality of social conditions at the time and the disturbing effects the war had on Japan in an intimate manner so as to appeal to ones emotions. In this way the personal and the factual were brought together and the personal life behind the camera was revealed.

It was this intimacy that most appealed to me as a photographer as well as the way in which Japanese photographers were able to capture things that were so momentary and fleeting. With the new developments made postwar came a new kind of society in Japan, and this brought along the slow loss of tradition. This deterioration was captured by the photographers as if by capturing pictures they could hold onto things that were slowly going away. This is where the idea for my photobook came from. I began thinking about how we are always leaving, no matter whether we are coming or going. As humans we are meant to leave – our bodies are built to eventually decompose. As morbid as this thought is, it caused me a great deal of comfort to come to this conclusion.

Even though they may not have been aware of this, Japanese photographers captured this feeling of senseless loss perfectly by using are-bure-boke. Are-bure-boke is a kind of photography that means “grainy, blurry, out of focus” and it was used as a “pure” form of photography because it

removed the factual from a photograph and made it an expression. These photographs capture a momentary reality and I wanted to mimic this blurriness in my own photographs. I did this by using photographs taken using a disposable camera as well as clearer black and white photographs taken using an analog camera.

The photobook that most influenced by work at the beginning was “Picture Book” by Shuntaro Tanikawa. This book was made in 1956 in a manner that could be considered very modern. The pages are minimalist, featuring photographs that take up barely a third of the page, with text on the right hand page. The layout is simple in that sense, but the photographs are presented in various shapes and sizes.

Tanikawa was a famous poet in Japan at the time and so “Picture Book” is actually a poetry book featuring his own photography. All of the photographs are of hands and his unconventional way of cropping made his book a success. This appealed to me originally because I really enjoyed using cropping as a tool to draw in the viewers’ attention with my other work, however I didn’t want to use a repeated motif. I used cropping in my final photobook as a way to show the passing of time and how things get distorted with memory and how they eventually disappear.

Two other amazing photobooks that inspired me are “Europe: Where Time Has Stopped” by Ikko Narahara and “For a Language to Come” by Takuma Nakahira. Both book concentrated on the passing of time and inspired me in different ways. “Europe: Where Time Has Stopped” features many colorful images that inspired the very high contrast color photographs in my own book, whilst “For a Language to Come” features many blurry full bleed black and white photographs that inspired my own black and white photography.

I liked how “Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ‘70s” focused on the physical aspect of the photobook and the importance of the photographer’s choices. The relationships among photographs are set by the artist, and thus context is created by the artist. I used sequencing similar to these

Japanese photobooks in which linear time did not need to be present. I decided to juxtapose very colorful images that were out of focus with black and white photos that were in focus so as to play on the idea of always leaving. Although many of the Japanese photobooks didn’t include page numbers, I decided to use them to show my theme. I did this by counting upwards and then counting back down, never getting to 0.

“Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ‘70s” was a huge inspiration whilst creating my photobook. It helped me solve layout problems as well as decisions about color and photography choice in general. It helped me better understand what I react to aesthetically as there was an entire set of photobooks to choose from, and learning about this allowed me to create something I am genuinely happy about.

Works Cited "Japan in the 1960s." Social Science Japan. N.p., Mar. 1999. Web. 1 May 2013.

Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and '70s. New York: Aperture, 2009. Print.