Yasumasete agetai
Early last month, I mentioned my idea to create something visual from the Japanese green tea I drink. In part, my motivation was conceptual (of sorts). Photography is a way of translating one experience into another. How can this be done when it comes to the tea I enjoy every day?
I don't want to bore you with all the details, but in the end, I concluded that if I insisted on a perfect translation I would chase the impossible. I had started out with cyanotypes, given that I still had the materials available in my work space. Furthermore, given that you can see differences between green teas by simply looking at the tea leaves, following in Anna Atkins' footsteps seemed like a good idea -- or at least a good way to start.
Long story short, all of my initial ideas were much too literal and reductive. It was largely a number of mistakes and accidents that brought me to what I'm doing now. You can see an example above (shot with my iPhone).
What I'm doing is the following: I will take all the tea leaves left after the three infusions and place them on a coated sheet of paper. There's not much thinking behind the placement (I had tried something else before that turned out to be so reductive that I'm frankly too embarrassed to even reveal it). I leave the leaves in place, sometimes overnight, sometimes just for an hour or two. And then I expose the paper.
One of the early accidents involved actual tea dripping on a sheet. I shrugged it off, thinking I might as well accept a little imperfection. But it turned out -- and I should have known this beforehand, but didn't think about it -- that green tea contains tannins, and those tannins tone a cyanotype brown. So parts of these cyanotypes come out brown, based on where the tea leaves are still wet enough to transfer the tannins. My strainer typically has a very small amount of tea at the bottom, and often I'll sprinkle that over the sheet as well.
I quite like some of the results I'm getting. I also realized how I am actually not all that interested in process-based work: I like the idea (here is a unique print of the tea I had on some day) a lot better than the pictures themselves.
Two weeks ago, I got a little bit depressed over seeing how all efforts had basically gone into making pictures that I don't enjoy as much as I had hoped. I had to remind myself that that happens all the time. It's not the process that's responsible. It's simply photography. From what I can tell, most photographers have the same problem.
But I do think that there's a lesson here beyond whatever mini lessons might (or might not) be contained in the above: if you want to learn something, you'll have to see things through. I don't know if you have had this problem. But I have vastly more photo (or writing) projects that I started and abandoned than projects I saw all the way through.
Even when the rewards might not be quite as rich as one would have hoped, it's only in the seeing something through that they will be had. Every abandoned project, however, is only a source of frustration: time wasted for nothing in return.
Onto the real stuff I want to share today. Last time, I felt that maybe I had included too many grim articles. But there was one more, and I thought I'd share it later. It's a long, very well researched, and incredibly disheartening article about a German photographer known for his photographs of children who is now awaiting trial for sexual abuse.
After the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, discussions have erupted in the US over whether or not the public should see photographs of the victims. The idea is that if only people were able to see maybe this would finally trigger a meaningful political response. I don't believe that photographs have that power (after all, there are gruesome medical images on European cigarette boxes, but people still buy them and smoke). But there have been a number of good articles that are worth your read.
Susie Linfield wrote in the New York Times:
A violent society ought, at the very least, to regard its handiwork, however ugly, whether it be the toll on the men and women who fight in our name, on “ordinary” crime victims killed or wounded by guns or on children whose right to grow up has been sacrificed to the right to bear arms. But seeing and doing are not the same, nor should they be. Images are slippery things, and it is both naïve and arrogant to assume that an image will be interpreted in only one way (that is, yours) and that it will lead to direct political change (the kind you support).
Also in the New York Times, Kim Phuc Phan Thi wrote about her experience. I was particularly struck by this part of the article:
The child running down the street became a symbol of the horrors of war. The real person looked on from the shadows, fearful that I would somehow be exposed as a damaged person. Photographs, by definition, capture a moment in time. But the surviving people in these photographs, especially the children, must somehow go on. We are not symbols. We are human. We must find work, people to love, communities to embrace, places to learn and to be nurtured.
Kim Phuc Phan Thi concludes at the end of her article that we should see pictures from Uvalde. The very personal parts of her article should serve as a reminder that the people in our photographs are real. They have lives to live, and our pictures might have the ability to make that task more difficult. I think we're well served not to forget that fact.
There's a very famous photograph by W. Eugene Smith that shows a Japanese mother bathing her severely disabled child (Tomoko). It's one of the many Pietà images you can find in the history of photography. There is an interesting story to the photograph. After Tomoko had died and following a request from the family, Aileen Mioko Smith (who had worked with her husband on the Minamata project and who had been in the room when the picture was taken) decided that it cannot be shown any longer. For sure, you want to read her very touching statement. In part, it reads:
To be honest, over the years it became a greater and greater burden for me to continue to answer requests for publication of this photograph. I kept telling myself, “I know people have been moved, even their lives changed by this image. I must continue to release it to the world. It is my duty.” But gradually this act was turning into something ugly. I knew that Tomoko's parents, now nearly a quarter-century since her death,wanted Tomoko to rest. “Yasumasete agetai” (“we want to let her rest”) were their words. And I felt the same.
One more long read, very much worth it: An interview with the incredible Svetlana Alexievich. Read it! And buy her books and read them, too!
Lastly, a video portrait of painter Miriam Cahn (click on the image above). I keep reminding myself to buy a book of her work, but somehow, I always put it off.
Thank you for reading!
-- Jörg