A father behind: one family's photographs (1941-1966)
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 by looking at the photographs contained in three of the family's albums. The goal of the module is to expand the spatial imagination surrounding the postwar family in Japan, particularly the role of men. The scholarship and popular representations surrounding 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 spaces behind the camera lens, the pages and pictures which form this module will talk about absence as a place men were.
This module is structured through three interlocking pathways:
1. Yajima Isao: introducing the man and his camera and his absences
2. Where in his world: considering where and of what, Isao took photographs
3. The snappy family: lookings at the wider cultural and aesthetic shift from posed photographs to candid snapshots and how this transformed what families made visible
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