On Photography, Photographers and Japanese Schoolgirls

For the past few days, I’ve had with me an unlikely mix sharing my bed.

The first was Susan Sontag’s On Photography, and the others, three issues of a strange Japanese photographic magazine named Out of Photographers.

Sontag’s On Photography is a classic and needs no introduction, that is, if you consider yourself among the photographic cognoscenti. If you’re less than a cognoscenti though, then I must warn you (ahem) that On Photography is no picture book. It does not even contain photographs at all, except the author’s wonderfully rendered backcover portrait by no less than Annie Leibovitz.

No, I wouldn’t be attempting to do a book review of Sontag’s slim volume for that is beyond my writing competence. Just to give you an idea though,: Adams, Herschel, Cartier-Bresson, Brandt, Strand, Talbot, Weston, Steiglitz, McCullin, Capa, Brady, Lange, are just a few of a long list of names dropped in the book. The small collection of essays is bursting with erudition. Imagine reading views from the heaviest weights in photographic history and mixing in Sontag’s own intelligent discourse and analyses. The tome exhibits the author’s genius for having produced a whole book on photography with nothing but words, and still garner endless praises from a majority of its highly visual readers.

Out of Photographers on the other hand, was a happy accident. A chance discovery on one of our literary ‘ukay-ukay’ adventures here in Japan. Were it not for those three words in English, the magazine never would have caught my attention because everthing else was in Japanese, and therefore unintelligible to me. I still can’t even figure out what 'Out of Photographers' means.

Upon opening one issue though, I found myself leafing through the entire volume until I decided to grab the only two other issues left. Out of Photographers is entirely a picture book as far as I’m concerned and with this I feel it can stand proud. If I end up being able to eke out what might appear to be a review of the magazine, consider it a dead review because the publication itself is, well, dead. No website, no new issues, no signs of life.

A quick google search on the magazine’s editor, Yasumasa Yonehara, yielded such descriptions as ‘photographer/editor of girlie magazines,’ and ‘King of Pervs.’…hmm. I trust his descriptions in Japanese would be more kind and constructive. Anyway…..

The earthy images in Out of Photographers lack the polish and perfection you would expect from glossy photographic magazines. They are what aesthetic snobs would probably term as ‘kitsch’. However, they are what they were intended to be because,

Yonehara stumbled on the idea for "Out of Photographers" four years ago when he was working for the magazine "Egg". Through this magazine with a popular following amongst Japanese schoolgirls, he came into contact with this group in his capacity as a journalist. Yonehara discovered that practically every girl carried a compact private photo album with her. These snapshots showed events at school, friends, outings and hobbies.

For the girls, the content of the photo was central: the snaps must represent their lives as fully as possible, ‘pretty' or ‘ugly' were just secondary matters. It is exactly this quest for content that gives "Out of Photographers" a greater power. The magazine acts as a faithful and private photoalbum for the Japanese.
(http://www.mamamedia.nl/projects/outofphotos.cfm)

After browsing through the three issues however, it is clear that the contents were not exclusively from Japanese schoolgirls. In fact, they could have come from any other young, and not so young japanese you met on the street. Out there is an army of untrained japanese photographers who do not care much about the rules of composition, lens sharpness, effective megapixels and other peripheral issues “advanced amateurs�? and professionals concern themselves with. This horde of informal photojournalists record everything about themselves and the lives of those around them, even scenes that formal society would consider photographic improprieties or even taboos. I saw in these images a much more realistic rendition of Japanese young life, not confined to the pits and peaks polarity that is the usual fare in publicity.

I saw in the pages people with their tongues stuck out and with the ubiquitous ‘peace’ finger signs prevalent in Japanese snapshottery. I saw scenes in parks, beaches, theaters, offices, living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, places where you would expect people to be and in the usual circumstances they would be in.

I saw pictures of adolescence, innocence, love, sexual discovery, daring, respect, irreverence, fun, mortality, family, friendships, relationships, trust and betrayal. I saw the full spectrum of unplanned, unadorned japanese young life with no makeovers and no elaborate setups

Looking at the pictures I was stirred, I laughed, I wondered. I felt curious, tittilated. I felt alive.

Altough I may seem to have painted the impression that On Photography and Out of Photographers are poles apart, I actually found the timing of their acquistions quite serendipitous. Surprisingly, with all of Sontag’s exposure to the works of the most famous photographers, she has this to say in her book:

“But it is clear that there is no inherent conflict between the mechanical or naïve use of the camera and formal beauty of a very high order…an unassuming functional snapshot may be as visually interpreting, as eloquent, as beautiful as the most acclaimed fine-art photographs."

To someone who is, as Sontag calls, “image surfeited�? as myself, Out of Photographers is, or was, a breath of fresh, albeit unfiltered, air.