Behind the lens
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:
- consider the family photograph as emotional labour
- explore what it means that many men took photos of their family but are absent from the final prints
- 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)
- take family photographs seriously as a historical source and agent (rather than illustration)
- consider the potential for new, visual and male voices in the history of family in Japan
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