Behind the lens
The family photograph is a habit, hobby and artefact. It forms a paper trace of firsts and familiars archived in albums, boxes and most recently the clouds surrounding our devices. This module focuses on the spatial act of taking a photograph and the spatial results of storing them. To do so it understands the taking of (and posing for) a photograph as an "encounter" (Azoulay 2012); a human interaction that produces a visual connection between space, time and body in appearing to freeze past moments of touch, sight and recognition.
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, the pages and pictures which form this module take family photographs seriously as a historical source and agent in order to challenge the stereotype of the absent man, by illuminating the unseen space behind the camera lens.
This module is structured through three pathways:
1. Yajima Isao: what can we learn about the photographic choices of this otōsan kameraman? How does his album archive challenge the archive's reliance on visibility as knowledge?
2. Albums from 1941-1966: which rules of space and time do Isao's albums play by?
3. The snappy family: how did the shift from posed photographs to candid snapshots transform what families made visible?
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