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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Gaze

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Contents of this annotation:
1. Gaze
2. Isao looks off-camera

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The albums
This page introduces the albums as a collective. While this module's structure separates the albums into separate pathways, this page features at the start of each of these pathways to emphasise the aesthetic, personal and spatial connections between the three volumes.

Isao's albums are largely chronological, they also create a version of Yajima family life that is distilled through concentrating on certain spaces. Aside from the touchable, foxed pages of the albums themselves, a viewer of the family albums comes to know their curated life through the time they spent outside the home. On the few occasions when the home was photographed, it was nearly always its threshold spaces of doorstep, window, veranda or garden that were captured to speak for the home as a place the Yajimas were. Isao made this choice consistently across images of both Yajima homes but it was a choice isolated to the home; when the family were staying at hotels or with friends, the inner rooms were eagerly captured as seen in the photograph below from Isao and Eiko's 1961 trip to Atami.

Why are there so few images taken inside the Yajima home? It may have been a question of aesthetic consistency with the outside of the house offering a consistent backdrop. Practically it could have been that the house interior was too dark to get a good photo - but as there are a few photographs taken indoors, we know a hearth snap was not impossible. There may have been a performative element at play, with Isao wanting to be seen outside with his camera. Whatever the motivation behind the choice not to include many images of the home in these albums, the result is that the domestic interior emerges as a subject through its absence. As Isao ran the family dental practice from within the structure of his home for most of his professional life, the invisibility of the domestic space in the albums is not explained by his sustained physical absence. Instead, the invisibility of the home suggests both what Isao thought photography was for and where he thought it should happen. Like most otosan kamerman taking pictures of his family was part of a public performance, rather than a private practice, and most of the pictures Isao took reflected this.

The photo reel below tracks how Isao used threshold spaces across all three albums to speak for his home - often with distinct pride. Looking across them, observe the differences between how and where Isao and Eiko pose; while Isao is always external to the house almost like a sentinel, Eiko is occasionally captured from the inside, looking out - transforming Isao momentarily into a domestic voyeur. It might be tempting to wonder whether the spaces in which his photos were taken represented the limits – geographic and emotional – of his fathering. Instead this module argues that the distance between himself and his home visible in his photographs signifies where the findable parts of his fathering happened. The recurrence of threshold images in the albums also suggests that the family home becomes visible through his separation from it; much like the snaps of his car in Album 3, his physical removal from the home was an act of class and status – he had time and wealth enough for spending time outside with his family through camera clicks and day trips.
Without a visual grasp on the interior life of the Yajima home, the albums testify to the Yajima home as a material and inhabited space. The pages are sunbleached, curled with the memory of moisture and some images carry sticky fingerprints. While albums are not rooms or passing places between them, the linear stacking of images conjures a feeling of architecture and the movement between inside and out. Isao deftly shows this on an early page in the first album where he pasted three sequential studio portraits of himself in a loose circle around a photograph of the family dental practice.

This is not just a record of ageing and place, but a visual playing out of connections between individuals, space and identity. It is as if the hereditary pull of the family practice took paper form, but Isao was kept somehow at its periphery. As much as the taking of a photograph created a space between subject and photographer, between threshold and beyond, the sticking and cutting of making an album also created a domestic space.
Snappy Family
Before cameras were something families could afford to buy and use at home, photographs were composed, taken, and developed by photography studios. Photographers took the photographs in their studios through advanced booking or walk-in trade, and they also travelled to customer’s houses or pre-designated locations. Having your photo taken in a studio was an experience that cost money, generated a story to tell others, and provided evidence which could be displayed at home, carried on one’s body, or kept safe for future viewers.
By the 1930s, the photographic act was an established middle–class family habit, but one which, following the progression of Japan’s war in China, was almost universally interrupted as metal, chemicals, rubber, leather, bodies, and free time were mobilized for the war effort. Following Japanese surrender in August 1945, the postwar households of Japan renewed the practice of family photography with remarkable swiftness, and resumed buying, selling, using, and breaking cameras and associated paraphernalia in a sustained upward trend until 1990.
The particular surge of camera ownership in the late 1950s was heralded as “camera fever” (kamera netsu), and was buoyed by increased international export and a growing international reputation for the “Japanese Camera.” At the centre of this fever were male amateur photographers, a substantial portion of whom were otōsan kameraman (camera man fathers). Anecdotally, these new cultural figures were said to only emerge on Sundays, and were found with their cameras, capturing their families at leisure in parks and popular picnic spots rather than documenting the domestic spaces and labours of house and home. The photographs these Sunday photographers were taking were mainly posed portraits, or kinen shashin. However, starting in the early 1950s, the kinen shashin was criticised for its old-fashioned feel, as commentators lamented that the stiff expressions in photographs came from forced poses that were produced by the familiar refrain to stop and pose. Instead, the zeitgeist called on amateurs to “snap” (snappu).
The “snap” was initially more defined by its opposition to the posed photograph than by any prescriptive coordinates of style. In contrast to kinen shashin, for example, it was not expected to be taken as part of an institutionally-sanctioned record. Snaps were resolutely personal, informal, and designed to be taken quickly and instinctively. Lauded in postwar amateur photography discourse, the “snap” was described as the only way the amateur photographer could really catch reality and the best way to ensure photographs were more emotionally accurate. The development of the happy snapper and the photos they took had two influences. The first was the postwar artistic turn toward realism, or rearizmu, taken by Japanese art photographers, a thorough account of which has been made by Julia Thomas (2008). The second influence was the profit ambitions of the national camera industry. The encouragement to snap away was aimed at both reducing the skills barrier holding people back from having a camera and at getting people to use and buy more exposures. Snap advocacy was specifically geared at getting women behind the lens and getting everyday family life in the frame. The assumed daily, physical contact women had with their children was seen as the optimum condition for “snapping,” whereas photographs that benefitted from physical distance, such as outings or school sports’ days (undō kai), were suggested as more appropriate subjects for fathers to capture.
There are two threads concerning how the snap folds into Isao's story. The first is in the development of his style of photography. While he did experiment with the snappu he largely preferred posed photographs. Second, the scarcity of snaps in the family albums reflects how he spent his time and the time-space constraints of the snap. The snappish turn that professionals advocated were unrealistic for many otōsan kameraman; capturing your child napping, fighting, or lost in play was therefore handed to the emergent figure of the snappy mother.
Isao is that you?
When taking self-portraits, Isao often retreated alone to the garden and used the timer. He rarely looked directly at the camera, refusing as it were, to look himself in the eye and re–enact the style of studio pose he was used to. Instead, he developed a style of self–portrait where he looked at a point beyond the camera, usually to his right. This reminds viewers, one of whom was of course Isao, that there is much the camera cannot see. It is also possible that Isao’s middle-distance stare was the result of his own discomfort as a photographic subject, and he found himself able to dislodge this awkwardness by not looking directly at the camera.