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

Behind the lens

The family photograph is an established and at times, expected, habit creating a paper trace of firsts, familiars and all that falls in between. The act of taking a photograph - often described as the "photographic encounter" (Azoulay 2012) also functions as a constituent part of some human interactions. The family photograph also comes with a code of content governing both who is in the photograph and what the photograph captures, there is little room for the banal mechanics of housekeeping. Gillian Rose describes it best when she wryly observed that “[t]here are no photos of mum doing the ironing, or at work in her office in the family album" (Rose 2010). In the case of Japan, the family photograph has largely been a male pursuit and the Sunday father-photographer (otsoan kameraman) became iconic in the late 1950s although, stooped behind his camera tripod his historic trace is spoken for by his absence from the final prints. 

This module will explore the role and the results of one such otosan kameraman from 1941-1966. It does so in order to expand the spatial imagination surrounding the postwar family in Japan, so often stereotyped as consisting of a omnipresent mother and an absent father. The pages and pictures which follow address the potential that the photograph offers for expanding our imagination of the emotional, waged, and unwaged work which makes up a family and its historic trace in order to:
  1. consider who was behind the lens and what that means for our understanding of men's work at home
  2. ask how the points of connection between behind and in front of the camera offer a chance to write an emotional history of the home, one which takes into account the "everywhere but nowhere" figure of father (Tosh 1994)
  3. take family photographs seriously as a historical source and agent (rather than illustration)
  4. consider the potential for new, visual and male voices in the history of family in Japan

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