This page is referenced by:

• 1 2019-12-27T12:48:13-05:00 Snappy Family 21 The cultural and gendered shifts from portrait to happy snap image_header 7792 2020-09-10T06:09:41-04:00 Emily Chapman

  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.

• 1 media/The newlyweds pose outside the Atami Ocean Hotel 1 January 1941.jpg 2019-11-18T17:24:06-05:00 Absence and place 12 How the family photograph operates and challenges historians as a spatial source image_header 5473 2020-08-11T19:10:25-04:00 Emily Chapman

  When an unknown photographer took a photograph of a moderately wealthy family in his studio in northeastern Japan’s Tōhoku region, the father was not there. The studio, although designed to be invisible, is revealed to viewers upon closer inspection; notice the mock-grand door frame behind the group and the painted outline of a door behind the partly pulled curtain. A professional photographer took the photograph of the assembled family members – six children, their grandmother or maid, and a young woman who was likely the mother of one, some, or all of the children. However, using a technique known as kessei waku or “frame of absence,” the photographer materialised the absent patriarch. The result is that father seems to float and preside over the family image, which is as comical as it is indicative of the aesthetic malleability of both the photographic moment and the social purpose of the image. In the case of this unknown family, the floating father reinforces the purpose of the family photograph as an exercise designed to display all members. It also suggests that the photograph offered a way to be present while absent.

  The potential of the photograph to reframe men's absence from historic stereotype to a gendered space, is at the heart of the work this module hopes to do in talking about men and the ideas and experiences of family spaces in postwar Japan. This loose image, while separate to the albums that make up most of this module, offers us something to "think with" (Darnton 1984) in using images of and from families to consider the gendered power play behind who or what is "made visible" in the historic record - both personal and public (Thomas 2008).

• 1 media/The newlyweds pose outside the Atami Ocean Hotel 1 January 1941.jpg media/The newlyweds pose outside the Atami Ocean Hotel 1 January 1941.jpg 2019-11-18T17:24:06-05:00 Behind the lens 5 Emily Chapman plain 2019-12-27T12:23:14-05:00 <add camera shot as cover image>
  
  The family photograph is an established habit. It forms a paper trace of firsts and familiars. The act of taking a photograph, when described as the "photographic encounter" (Azoulay 2012), can also be seen to function as a constituent part of some human interactions and work as a way for certain groups to spend time together.
  
  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 (otōsan 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. Scholarship and popular representations on the labour entailed in living and loving in the  postwar family have largely reproduced the stereotypes of a omnipresent mother and an absent father. However, the pages and pictures which form this module will situate the photograph as a method and a source which can expand our imagination of the emotional, waged, and unwaged work which makes up a family and its historic trace in order to:
  1. consider the family photograph as emotional labour
  2. explore what it means that many men took photos of their family but are absent from the final prints
  3. 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)
  4. take family photographs seriously as a historical source and agent (rather than illustration)
  5. consider the potential for new, visual and male voices in the history of family in Japan