Behind the lens
The family photograph plays by a collection of rules. It comes with a code of content governing both who is in the photograph and what time or space the photograph captures. For example, there is little room for the banal mechanics of housekeeping - the historian Gillian Rose wryly observed that “[t]here are no photos of mum doing the ironing, or at work in her office in the family album" (2010). In the case of Japan, taking photographs has been largely a male pursuit and in the late 1950s, the Sunday father-photographer (otōsan kameraman) became an iconic cultural figure. Yet, stooped behind his camera tripod or cocooned in his makeshift darkroom, stories of his presence are told most loudly 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. Scholarship and popular representations on the work of living and loving in the postwar family have largely reproduced the stereotypes of a omnipresent mother and an absent father. However, by talking about the unseen space behind the camera lens, the pages and pictures which form this module seek to challenge the stereotype of the absent father.
This module is structured through three pathways:
1. Yajima Isao: what can we learn about the photographic choices of this otōsan kameraman?
2. Where in his world: where did Isao choose to take photographs?
3. The snappy family: how did the shift from posed photographs to candid snapshots transform what families made visible?
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