Another day has started in the mountains of Japan. It seem to be yet a very relaxed day. I don’t mind, I’m happy here. We’re staying with friends of Björns, who I now also call friends of mine. The Maeda family is nothing but fantastic! An entity of laughter, conversations, food, nature, creativity, contemplation, serenity, expressiveness, and many things more.
I learn a little every hour here. Chiyako told me how butoh dance is about the darker aspects of life, I learn about the feelings in my body and head after an hour at an onsen, the japanese hot springs, and I learn about eating tempura. And I keep falling for Japan.
As I sit here sunken deep into one of the soft couches in the Maeda family’s living room, the soft sounds from the massage chair vibrates through the air as Koji sleeps in it. On the floor in front of me sits Chiyako working on new lyrics for her and her brother Yuji’s upcoming album. At the same time I listen to their old albums in the headphones that are tucked deep inside my ears. Chiyako’s voice live in the living room combined with the continuous humming from the massage chair, at times, breaks through the songs I listen to. What has already been created blends with what is being created. Past and present fusing in a finish wooden house tucked on a densly populated hillside in Nara.
As I close my eyes listening to the different sounds my mind drifts as usual on to strange and meandering paths. I think of how best to express the darkness that surrounds us. As usual I don’t feel it and I am sure their isn’t much darkness around me at present. Lately I seem to have been spared from it. And I am happy about it. A teacher once said that it seemed like I’ve gone through life without much resistance. I can’t neither begin to say how wrong she was nor can I say how right she probably is. For most people such is life, neither good nor bad. Life is not a bonzai tree. It is not an idealized image of what a life should be. It just is.
When it comes to photography I often question the simplicity that is inherent in images. Maybe that isn’t fair. Images can be complex but yet the knowledge we gain from them seem to stand on some very loose foundations. One of the most quoted writers on photography, Susan Sontag, paraphrased an equally too often quoted sentence when she stated that “just as a picture can say more than a thousand words, one word can falsify a thousand images”. Context rules the photographic experience?
Why do I come back to this now? I think it has to do with to things that I read or saw this morning and it might also be due to the recently finished competition season in the photography world and the debates that often follows it. One of the things that I came to yet again this morning is Goya’s series of etchings Los desastres de la Guerra. I started looking at them a long time ago but the music I currently listen to here in Nara, combined with the just recently gained knowledge of butoh dancing, led me back to them. I can’t start to express the emotions that I feel when I look at them. These renderings of war are some of the most powerful images of war I’ve seen. As are the gruesome and awful pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison. I have started to wonder why these two sets of images are affecting me so much and I’ve yet to come up with an answer that feels sufficient.
An other thing that I came to this morning was the reduction of the culture section of one of the biggest daily newspapers in Sweden. They are cutting back with approximately forty per cent. I don’t know if this is good or bad for this specific news paper, nor do I know if this is a good or bad trend in general. My gut feeling is that it is deeply problematic. I often see the culture section of swedish papers as at least one place for debate, external as well as internal. It is often in this section one might encounter a differential view from the rest of the paper. But then again it often differs to fit a more liberal, or in a swedish context leftist perspective. If this criticism is true I don’t really know, but wouldn’t mind too much since it would mostly correspond with my own views. What I believe is erroneous though is that there might be even less space for dissenting views and with that, I begin to question the institutions themselves even further. This I believe is good in general but horrible for all of us that try to use these platforms to share our stories with the readers.
If photography is context sensitive then one of the biggest context is the media institutions themselves. The less trusted they are I would argue the less trusted we are. This is obvious for different reasons. Photojournalists and journalists alike are not in any way separated from the papers/magazine we work for, we are an integral part of them. Even when we’re freelancing; the forums we get published in, we become part of, though we have less influence over them. Thus I’d argue, the strong trusted institution is vital for photojournalism. Not only when we get published in them but in general. Photojournalism seem to live and breathe with the notion that it’s truthful. Well, maybe that’s not so true any more. Now I’d say that it strives to at least be perceived as trustworthy. Many photojournalists have long argued over how and/or how much photoshop is allowed to be used. I think this is just a drop in the water when it comes to (re)building the trust for photojournalism. I rather think that this shows the limited aspects of our medium and maybe the limited purview of photojournalist in general. The trust of our readers don’t come and go with technical advances. It comes and out most leaves with the trust for the institutions we work within. Thus our debate over how we work with photos is good but our criticisms of our own field should not end there. We need to look beyond our own limited field of expression and look at the slightly bigger picture of the forum we work within.
From that perspective I believe that for any big and strong institution to gain trust they need to be transparent and open for critique and maybe even more important for self-criticism. Cutting the forum where this seem to be the most common place for such things therefore seem like a slow, deliberate, and self-imposed death for these media outlets. I hope I’m utterly wrong.
