Fortune-telling for Urban Cities more

"I ';' shortened for" -ing." sounds agile and represents the ptesent progressive form. SILVER PASSIN' and LAST SEEIN' are the thyming titles for two photo series of ¥uraka Takanashi, and reveal "seeing" and "phorographing" ofthis phorographer. Every phoro here, unmistakably a shot of the pasr, compels the viewers ro currently experience "a passing moment." The phoros collecred in SILVER PASSIN' and WIND SCAPE were borh taken through the window of a moving vehicle. SILVER PASSIN' includes scenes taken from a transit bus he got aboard so many rimes, using his "silver pass" (a free pass for senior cirizens), while IVIND SCAPE offers rhe phoros he took from aJR rrain on his frequent rrips ro various places throughour the country with "Seishun 18 Ticket" (a convenient ricket for long disrance & long period of rime, inirially introduced for promoring rhe youth to rravel for long disrance). These rwo serie are the producrs of the clearly defined approach unique to this photographer, which enabled him ro "capture" a passing moment. orably, for these series the photographer deliberately cho e unfavorable condirion ofphotographing a scene through a window of running vehicle. A bus or train runs only the designated roures. The viewpoint is restricted to certain height and angle due ro the given window frame. Why did he boldly impose on himself uch a heavily reStricted photographing condition? Takanashi has drastically changed his photographing approach for urban cities corre ponding to the times. He has generated varied tactics and 10gi rics ba ed on his strategic approach, which was referred to as "the army-style" by Genpei Akasegawa, avant-garde artist and essayist, in his critique entitled "Essay on T-Nashi ¥utaka" carried in " OSTALGH1A" by ¥utaka Takanashi. The approach employed for SILVER PASSIN' and WIND SCAPE, thar is, to take a photo from a moving vehicle of public transportation, seems to be tOtally self-rorturing at a glance. Once for the series of "TOWN." Takanashi had imposed on himself a quasiritual process of carrying a big heavy camera to the phoro-taking site. This time, on the contrary, he chose a tactics of forcing the subject to photOgraph to be carried by a moving vehicle, and he ser such a form of transfer as a prerequisire. Isn't it extremely peculiar for a phorographer to be highly conscious of having such a strategic approach, almost of military-style? You could find an arti t-photographer. philo opher-phorographer. Iitterateur-phorographer, or scientist-photOgrapher, but Takanashi is not any of the kinds. If! had to name him, he is a scientist, but not a classic type ofa solid discipline. Having computed uncertainty itself in which his invoJvemenr in the object of urban citie should inevitably alter the observed values, Takanashi sets our a device ro reckon an unforeseeable image to arrive. Indeed. he has such paradOXical scrupulosity-a trait ofa scienti t. More speCifically, he is a field worker. A a matter of cour 'e, a photOgrapher should be always a "take-part-in" observer. But, as Takanashi is highly aware of the manner he takes part in, his phoros reflect his meta-level review of the approach and give a kind oflucent and abstract look. They are not the easy-to-see phoros, which rell stOries, nor those that simply convey a certain atmosphere through repetitive use of a certain technique, much less the photOgrapher's self-expression. For ¥utaka Takanashi, photo-raking, or making "take-part-in" observation means recording "ecological land cape" of urban cities. He has made his own approach formula by converting the unavoidable photographer's "take-part-in" element into a variable. And he carefully adjust it each time he aims at the object. Whar is "ecological landscape"? Regarding this tOpic, I have once discussed in my essay thar there are common trairs in the vast collection of photos by Tsuneichi MiyamotO, a rare field worker-folklore researcher, and the Charles Darwin's approach for ob erving creatures. (Ref. "Ecology of Approaches" contained in my book, The Urban Poetics, University of Tokyo Pres. 2007). The Darwin's ob. ervarion approach i specifically recording of the deed of earthworms he has observed such as covering the hole with leaves, as iIlusrrated in his book, Darwin on EdI·thwomls: The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Wimns with Observations on Their Habits (1881). Practically, however, I learned a lot about it from MasatO Sa aki, ecological psychologisr. And here is my hypothesis: The rraits of what Sasaki calls "the Darwin-style approach" of "obserVing and recording" should be traceable in the ¥utaka Takanashi's phoro of urban cities, just as in rhose ofTsuneichi Miyamoto. "Ecological land cape" must be the features ofurban cities, which have emerged by means ofsuch an approach. I have noted not a few of the MiyamotO' photos were also taken from rhe train through rhe window on his trip for the field work, visiting one place to another, while stayi ngshorr each place. According ro Daido Moriyama, photographer, "t11e view point of passers-by" is persistent in the Miyamoto's works, and I would acknowledge the same viewpoint in the phoros of SILVER PASSIN' and WIND SCAPE by Takanashi. Anorher common feature is t11ar their photOS are "flar" (nor hot nor cool piece deliberately crafted). There is however a distinct difference between their works. While Miyamoto' were the product of anonymou amateurism, tho e by Takanashi were brought fOtth by the intentionally chosen conditions. Incidentally, as Genpei Akasegawa ha pOinted out, "it is virtually impossible to aim at the exact point of the scene beyond the train window, as the scene passes by one after another as if each one is abour to explode any second." And the photO-taking usually ends "in failure." However, his shooting of high preci ion never allows him ro miss the target. It is not simply becau e of rhe technique he u es, but because of his focusing precision being set as a function ofthe chosen approach. When a landscape which is otherwise overlooked in a daily life can be fixed on a printing paper, owing \\FORTUNE-TELLING FOR URBAN CITIES" Jun Tanaka 142 to the high focusing preci ion, an unconscious visual experience can be made into a conscious one. Where on earth in Takanashi'. photos are found any traits of the Darwin-style approach? When Darwin recorded the earthworms' deed of covering the hole by various materials, he did not adopt the approach of writing an easy-to-undersrand story by taking up the earthworms as the subject. Instead, he intently enumerared in a concrere manner how earthworms have u ed leaves and pieces of paper he had provided for the experiment, and rhereby he indirectly illuminated ecological environment around the earthworms. In other words. in tead of de cribing the earthworm's deed to unfold before our eyes, Dandn coUected and recorded traces of leaves and the like which the earthworm had u ed in their various deeds, and through such collection of trace a dim ourline of the ecological environment had ultimately emerged. Rather than the description In language required of the central subjecr of the srory, or rather than motion pictures which demand a rructure and narrative. it must be photography that i' the medium suitable for Darwin- tyle ob ervation and recording. The amateur phoros ofTsuneichi Miyamoto happened to haye such a Darwin- ryle feature. Now, from behind a number of photos enwnerated in SILVER PASSIN' and WIND SCAPE by Takanashi appear the features of "ecological landscape" for instance. how a certain environment such as living space has been arrificially formed along the transportation path such as a road or railroad and hm . they have been utilized by the inhabitants. In order to convey the particular meaning of"ecological landscape ," I would think it helpful to quote the releyant deSCription ofAkasegawa. A feel of the photo i omethingproduced when the relation between the lens and the object, or the r laoon of seeing and being has to be compressed in a high speed ar once, to pop up a moment ofone's life, developed on the printing paper. Thi mu t be "a feel" of the photograph. I may not be \\TOng if! tell that "a feel of the photO" IS what "ecolOgical landscape" stands for. Such a landscape i nota ph.'Sica1 environment by itself-·something which anyone can obsen'e and record easily. An environment corresponding to rhe un·ival of a certain species of the animal is called "ecological nich ." but. again, it is not the phYSical environment. but it is the pace that can be found only alter some sort ofdeeds were repeatedly taken place bv the animal . Likewise, "livable urban cities" are not merely a body of buildings and architecture, bur must be ecological niche for the current human specie. In order to record ecological land ape or ecolOgical mche, it is not sufficient to objectively rake a photo of the environment, bur it is essential to capture "a feel of the phoro." Furthermore, what' most worth for the medium of photOgraphy is the face that the photographer's deed of recording the landscape i· also recorded in the exact one he has taken. A photographer is a Darwin, an observer, and, at the same time, an earthworm. the obiece to be observed. In the case of Sasaki, as an ecological approach to the rheory of urban citie, he took up the environment of rhe handicapped with senses and funcrionaf disorders. Through his consistent observation of their deem, he ha cried to projecr the ecological niche for the handicapped, entirely different from that of rhose with a normal health.body. By analogy, I would assume rhar Takanashi did eek a specific ecologICal land cape which he could not have obsen·cd and recorded unless he has not imposed a heavy load onto himselfas a prerequisite for raking phoros of urban cities. Now, wh,lt do the recorded scenes of landscape look like? Fir t, lc£ see some from SILVER PASSIN'. Except only two photo of the interior ofthL bus and a few ofcomplete view ofbuilding , and tr in tows, mosr of the phoros have the composition of a close-range, and looked-down view captured rhrough a car window. A majority ofthe buildmgs stand with their farrade facing the street. You can ee. hop wirh ignboards and even price tags as well; cars are displayed for safe in rhe showroom windows of the building; a word of "happin ~ brushed III Chinese Ietrers is put up in a row on the display board along the street. Then, comes into our eyes a scone monumenr inscribed with rhe word of "unity." And repeatedly shown are thc photos of same motifs such as a banner of "cemetery for pets" being pur up next to a temple building, religious-related facilities and a Buddhist monk standing in front of the pulled down shutter of a building, and a yOlmg man with a traw bladed hat on hi ba . sugge·tive of a pilgrim. (His appearance also reminds us of a statue of Kinjiro Ninomiya , a prominent 19th century Japanese agricultural leader,who carried a load of firewood on his back, hown in a diffi rem photo.) And, nor ro mention, most of the people in the photo are sranding on the sidewalk, either tanding vertically co the roadwa~. trying to eros the street, or walking along the roadway horizonraUy. These are the two basic patterns ofpeople's posture. Variations ofsuch walkers' postures are caught in the shots of the Cro sing of Shinjuku Streer and Meiji Street. Since most ofrhe pho[Qs follow some basic composition parrerns. exceptional ones stand out conspicuously, such as the one with a monk facing the shutter, a washing machine standing with the back coward rhe roadway, a half nude man standing on his head on the side\\.aJk. and the site of a building being demolished, and the like. What to bt noted are people on the roadway, and not those on rhe sidewalk. On the roadway are a policeman wirh a mask over rhe mouth and glov on hands, looking up for something. a policewoman directing the rraffic, while her face looking at the camera (her appearance corresponds [Q a guardian deity ofchildren sranding in a small hrine behind her), and in contrast ofthese two, a boy wirll a ball in his hand_ 143 Also, there is a photo of two car windows each of which are seen plural policemen beyond. Repeated appearance of policemen may be telling us that the current traffic space i being managed and watched for safety. And just because they are embodiment of authority to control the traffic, they could exclusively tand on the roadway. If that is the case, would an agile boy with a ball in his hand an intruder to the well-ordered space? A man standing on his head may well be regarded as an alien against the "road" designated with a specific purpose to be walked on. Now, apart from reviewing the opposing relarion ofobjects in terms of semantics, let's take up a photo, which creates such an effect as to break the sequential Sight of roadsides, that is, the scene ofrunners on the road photographed from the bridge above. The range of the vision is expanded vertically to the road level on which the transit bus is running, and further higher to the dually elevated highways. Probably due to the effect of our memory of pet cemetery and figures of monks which we saw earlier, strangely enough, a group of runners on the riverbed road we are looking at now eventually come to look like pilgrims, as the back of runners' white uniforms are so suggestive of the white outfits of pilgrims. And again, the ornament of cherry blossom flowers given to the handrails of the bridge strangely has turned into the flower dedicated to the pilgrims. Would these impressions of mine be a product of subjective association of visions? Such a feel caught by SILVER PASSIN'seems to represent symbolic places such as traffic space of "roadway" and spaces like "bridges" and "riverbeds." Such symboli m ha been retained to date. In the medieval Japan roadway was considered to be rhe place filled with unclean things as well as the space infested with evil sprits. A bridge, which connores "the edge," meant a kind of boundary, and the intermediary area between something acred and something worldly, or an eerie area between the living and the dead. Furthermore, a riverbed that is always looked down from a bridge used to be a place for seeing off the dead, a place where an execution was taken place, and a place which was owned by nobody. And as the expre~sion of "Sai-no-Kawara" represents, the riverbed has been regarded as a boundary between this world (present life) and the other world (rhe afterlife). And on the riverbed were inhabited by "odd-looking" groups of people such as prostitutes, beggars, entertainers and other people engaged in so-called "looked-down" rype oflabor. As we have seen, SILVER PASSIN' could be regarded as a collection of records from journeys to such an uncanny world. Just because of being inside the transit bus, detached from our fan1iliar world we live in just by a glass window, although being 0 clo~e ro it, the passenger can take a glimpse of the other world of evil spirits. While being aboard rhe bus, we see a kind of prototype srructure of urban cities rhrough the glass window, but the minute we have gotten off the bus, we get back to our old familiar world. Nevertheless, owing to rhis glass window of rhe bus, the photographer wirh a silver pass was able ro discover the other world in the familiar looking urban citie. No wonder, a policewoman directing the traffic at the inter ection comes to look like a guardian deity of children for the place. On the contrary, it is pOSSible a policeman hiding his face while moving his hand~ to make a strange gesture comes to look like one of the odd-looking people or a gho t. Factory building that look like ghost houses and the weird tree's silhouette also give a similar feel, only when they are photographed through the eyes ofthe passersby. The place called "chimata" meaning a street or crossroad used to be a popular place where markets were held, and busy and crowded with a lot ofpeople pas ing by. And by dusk when you cannot distinguish a face of the pa sers-by from ano.ther in the dim light, a fortune telling called "Yu-u-ke" (literally meaning "evening fortunetelling"), later called "Tuji-ura" (street fortune-telling), and was taken place. Fortunes were told by the teller based on fragments of words uttered by the passers-by. When our cognitive capability of visual sense gets deteriorated in the dusk, our audio sense gets sharpened and what was overheard by the teller, though merely some fragments of words, must have sounded like a prophecy. I have learned that there is a case even roday a patient of schizophrenia in the recovery stage may have his symptom worsened again, if he ride on a bike and runs through a busy street. For, he took rhe bits of conversation from the people he had passed by as a blaming against him. The teason why the dusk is called "the Time to Encounter the Evil Spirits" i that chi particular time of the day may well give a similar effect, that i , to affect our mental condition. Should a photographer take picrures through the window of a transit bu ,contrary to the case ofevening fortune-telling, his hearing information is to be cut off, and only visual sense gets sharpened. Besides, he is forced to make an instantaneous decision to take a photo. Under such a mental ituation impo ed with an extraordinary load, a mental state of"the time to encounter the evil spirits" may well be created in rhe photographer, and he perceives ever}' fragment of scenes bulleting into his eye one after another ar extremely high speed as a warning sign of something to come, JUSt as did rhe forrune-reller in rhedu k. Therefore, SILVER PASSIN' is a collection of rarot-like scenes, which the photographer obrained after he had run through roadways and crossroads, and he tells the fortune of utban cities. And through the deed ofseeing these scenes we experience for ourselves what he has gone through-"the time to encounter the evil spirits." On the contrary to SILVER PASSIN', a resolute space strucrure is not reflected in photos of WIND SCAPE. The field of vision gained through a train window is wider and deeper than that of a bus. What were caught through the train window are a mountain, mountain, 144 aoub essly, uniformly oacls,. sndu ltezturc should not be regarded ~, b.~ ;zs ::he ·a:::[comc~ c:· the positive approach ~r:a;:~r ~I~ ~nh~:d~tJSi~precision via rting Japanese landscape onto which is written the logan of "To protect our town from a flood." These photos barely tell that there is a valley where water is running. Now, what impres es viewer more would be the photographer's subtle humor, or almost ab urdity, which can be acknowledged in the contrastive layout of the objectS in the scene; along with the several dog sculptures laid on the grass a pair of boot are placed as if intentionally added to make a perfect morphological contrast, or rwo real dogs sit in a baby buggy in contrast to the dog sculpture, and further, the sculptures of GeGeGe-no-KitaTo and Nezumi Otoko tand behind the dogs and babies. All of these combinations ofobjects forge a funny feel. Another impressive scene shows a bird-looking object, excessively deformed in an abstract manner, or possibly an ashrra.; placed in the park. Its eyes are funny, though very weird. In this series the non-human objects look by far lively than men. And toward the end of the series it provide scene in succ ·ion to make you feel that you've seen something unusual. Among the drawings by children the one thar caught my attention was howin a Rower replaced by a skull, and the other that looked like a monster with bare fangs. A man sleeping on a bench like a dead man also makes us feel uneasy. One ofthe most striking photos i the last scene in the en . £ ch ofthe pUlar lined in a row to prevent cars' entry bears a sign of" tOP' Stop" poorly hand-written in two styles of hiragana and katak.ana. On one of those pillars was hung a child's overcoat, from which. ~on doubt, a warning scream is being transmitted loud to us, tho voicele s. I am tempted to interpret LAST SEE/N' as "The Eye of e Degenerate World." Because I like to indicate that the camera point d at urban cities ofour time inevitably takes on "the eye ofthe degcnenre world." At a glance, such a feel held by the ecological landscape of urban cities has been readily scooped in every photo by Takanash And I see there even a touch of dry humor. I would assume that . substance of the "eye" should be, in fact, something tran -emonona! unearthly and apocalyptic. In the end of the series of scenes showing the moment of pas in in the progressive form, the photographer has placed a warn' 0 "Stop! Stop!" Would this be also his black humor? The -oied scream is telling us that omething which we cannot stop should arme here soon. Would thi be an Ulusion of the degenerate world tha- I happened to see in his photos because of the dusk called "the rime '0 encounter the evil spirits"? No, it must be an auditory hallucination I happened to hear. Even if that is the case, the feel of the urban an that had induced such a hallucination is reality of the ecolOgical niche we live in caught by the photographer's precise focusmg techni Thus, by recording those feels, the photogtapher tell the fortune of urban cities which they themselves have dreamed of. Professor of the University ofTokyo (Culm", and Rcpr=nation, Histol')' oflhoughr. Urban Studio) 145