Echoes – Crashing Waves

Yuki Miyake of White Conduit Projects interviews photographer Tomoko Yoneda for WE ARE Magazine

Tomoko Yoneda was born in Hyogo prefecture, Japan in 1965. Yoneda graduated from The University of Illinois in Chicago in 1989, the Royal College of Art, London in 1991 and now lives in London. Yoneda has been conducting thorough research on the subject of ideology in the 20th century. She continues to make photographs by visiting places where her memory remains strong in a wide range of regions such as Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia and Japan. Through photography, she approaches the historical truth layered behind a scene with poetic sensibilities to evoke memories.

Tomoko YONEDA, Echoes – Crashing waves

Saturday, June 4 – Saturday, July 9, 2022 ShugoArts Tokyo 12pm – 6pm, Closed on Sun, Mon and Public Holidays

River – view of earthquake regeneration housing project from a river flowing through a former location of evacuees' temporary accommodation, 2004 From the Series A Decade After

Hiroshima Peace Day, 2011 From the Series Cumulus

What made you start photography?

I travelled to the United States to study journalism in the Midwest. I thought there was pride and tradition in design and photography there. There is a new Bauhaus school (Institute of Design/ID at what is now the Illinois Institute of Technology) established by Lászlo Moholy-Nagy in 1937. Many of the professors at the University of Illinois, Chicago where I was enrolled have inherited the tradition of ID. I studied under professor Joseph Jachna who was taught by Aaron Siskin and Harry Callahan. This would make a lasting impression to shape my aesthetics. I lived where everyday life was in a modern cityscape, where photography was as important as, and even more important than art.

How do you decide on a theme?

Themes come out in response to the present, such as what I have been wondering about since I was a child and questions still remain at the present. It's a conversation with my timeline regarding my thoughts and feelings. Then I want to express or present question marks as a photograph.

You are active globally, but what kind of importance and character do you think that being Japanese adds to your work?

I don't particularly emphasise being Japanese and female but I can't escape from the facts. "I" exist but I am not a Japanese person who remained only in Japan. As I have lived in the United States, Europe and UK for a long time, I have an objective and critical gaze toward Japan.

After the Meiji Restoration, Japan had an era of advancing to imperialism together with other great powers. In 1945, the world's first nuclear bomb was dropped, the end of the war, and democratisation. Also, Japan always lives next to natural disasters. These factors have a large influence on my work.

Why are war, justice, humanity, love, and reconstruction related matters the subject of the majority of your works?

I think because I had heard about my parents' war experiences since an early age and the place and time when I grew up have an influence on me. During the midst of the Cold War, I was surrounded by various anxieties due to the threat to nuclear war, the various wars that followed after WW II and the fear of extremist terrorism.

As there was a Kawasaki aircraft factory near my home town, Akashi, it was hit by a heavy air raid and shelters remained nearby. As Hiroshima is not far away, I knew much about the atomic bomb. I think it was because I was praying when I was young that we are able to achieve utopia or Shangri-La to exist somewhere so as not to go back to the war and the militarism. After I moved to Europe, it was a big influential experience for me to face the possibility of dismantling a large social structure and various events that began with the Berlin Wall in 1989, which seemed to be the end of the Cold War.

Window I, Soviet Border Guardhouse, Saaremaa Island, Estonia, 2004 From the Series After the Thaw

In the solo exhibition Echoes―Crashing waves at ShugoArts in Tokyo in June, the theme is about endless conflict even in the 21st century. With that constant recovery, how do you perceive the Russian-Ukraine War? Russia's satellite cities are both countries that have achieved independence and democratisation over a long period of time, but democracy is once again threatened by peaceful independent countries.

War is an act that breaks ethics and allows murder under"rules" -overturning everyday life to make unrealistic violence and hatred routine. I felt during my life in London that it was achieved with the hope of opposition to the war and global coexistence. However, it is shocking that the great loss of life in this Russian-Ukraine war has become a major event that overturns what we have hoped for and progressed so far.

The still-swaying world situation and the constant conflict are all historical beginnings and endings of the road show. The story of "events" in the past is not taboo, but because it is an era where we can listen to various voices of each person and talk openly and democratically about "events" . We want to be able to illuminate the light of hope for the next era. That feeling is within the series [After the Thaw]. In 2004, I was selected as one of the participants for photography projects in EU countries. I chose to shoot in Estonia and Hungary, which had just joined the EU. Both countries achieved democratisation and independence again after the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the dismantling of the Soviet Union. Visiting that memorable year, I felt greatly that their sealed memories have definitely been revived. The theme of Hungary is "water" . I followed the places where people's history of the 20th century remains deep, the lakeside areas, and the 1989 Pan-European Picnic that triggered the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Estonia, under the theme of"forest, "I traced the resistance which was hiding deep in the forest fighting for independence and the secret Estonian exclusion zone which was an area of the Soviet army.

Chrysanthemums, 2011 From the Series Cumulus

The series The Island of Sakhalin is based on the reportage "Sakhalin Island" written by Anton Chekhov. Why did you use a past book? Similarly, in Dialogue with Albert Camus, his exposure to Camus's "Neither Victim nor Executioner" or “The Stranger" seems to have been the starting point for this series, but literature seems to be the starting point for that event and person. Is it indispensable in the production to imagine and create for the work?

Unlike photographs and paintings, texts do not directly challenge us visually, but they inspire us, plot imagination and shake our emotions. The image visualised by words will be different depending on the reader. Like art, literature exists in history and lives with sociality in the memory of self, individual, masses and various factors. Many of my works are interested in what lies between the images, hidden behind the surface images, emerging images by different viewers. Many of my works are inspired by literature.

The first reason I wanted to go to Sakhalin was when I saw a picture of Sakhalin as a penal colony at a bookstore in Moscow immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Also hearing the fact that Japan ruled the area south of 50 degrees north latitude until 1945 and a story about a Japanese director and actress who ran offt ogether to cross the border of Sakhalin and became a victim of Stalin's Great Purge.

While reading "Sakhalin Island” I became interested in them as an island where various historic shadows intersect. The prisoners sent from every corner of Imperial Russia depicted the harsh nature, the indigenous people, Japanese and the people who were at the mercy of history. Although it is close to Japan, it is a distant island due to political relations.

The 50th Parallel, former border between Russia and Japan, 2012 From the Series The Island of Sakhalin

A statue in a pond and sky seen through palm trees. Botanical Garden of Hamma, Algiers, Algeria, 2017 From the Series CORRESPONDENCE – Letter to a Friend

The Parallel Lives of Others brilliantly revived the existence of a spy, Sorge, through photographs, as if reading a detective novel set in history. Is this based on some novel, or is it composed solely of research?

I have read various documents including archives of Sorge’s interrogation hearing, writing by himself, by his mistress, his inspectors, former German ambassadors and requisitioned files from German ambassadors in the National Archives.

The photography was done in Japan and in the former area of Manchuria following what is documented in his interrogation records. These images may also appear to capture the uncertain first secret meeting of the spies. By shooting quickly with the Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, I couldn't be sure of the image until the end. Being unprompted is the process of producing this work.

For CORRESPONDENCE – Letter to a Friend, I used my father’s Olympus Pen which divides one frame into two. It is not a single-lens reflex type but a range finder. The pair of photographs reflects the dialogue of distress of [Albert] Camus who was suffering between the Algerian independence movement and France and the world that shakes greatly even now.

In Between Visible & Invisible uses a technique such as inviting the viewer to see through the eyes of a historical figure, but why did you add these dignitaries' glasses to the subject without shooting the letter as it is?

In 1998, I was in Europe and felt a big change in the times. When we entered the new century, I had the opportunity to look back on 100 years and begin to shoot the glasses of Freud, Hesse, Trotsky, and those in the memory of the masses who have been tossed by great history. Serving as a buffer between viewer and the objects, by arranging dignitary’s glasses between the object and the lens rather than the audience looking directly at the object, the audience feels as if they have obtained their gaze and is more likely to immerse themselves in the subject object.

History does not only appear in monuments and buildings, but also exists intangibly. We can't just look carefreely at the sight in front of us. Sometimes we need a force to see the reason behind the scene.

The impact received from the inconspicuous peripheral things and the negative traces around them shock us. I think that comparing the past with the present will lead to rebirth and hope and a warning to ephemeral peace.

Sartre’s Glasses—Viewing a letter by Albert Camus addressed to Sartre when he was the director of Les Temps Modernes, 2018 From the Series Between Visible and Invisible