One of the features of Okinawa’s subtropical climate is the sheer amount of rain that falls on the island throughout the year. While it’s manna to the local flora, and can make for a refreshing change from the plentiful dry, sun-drenched days that grace the place, at times Okinawa is unrecognizable from the idyllic travel posters that bear its name.
The tsuyu rainy season, which officially began early last month, is one of those times. The early rains delivered a fair soaking to the island but soon gave way to drier days. This week, though, tsuyu picked up where it left off with a vengeance. This week’s dark stormclouds brought heavy incessant downpours and with them came an oppressive humidity.
With the beaches closed under the current state of emergency, the only respite to be found was inside well sealed, air-cooled rooms.
Summer days, the light and heat of the sun filters that dull the senses. Glimpses of shimmering waters, softly floating cloud formations, graphic shadows and silhouettes drift across one’s consciousness, fragments floating out of a fervent dream.
Fashionable Hokkaido-based fishing brand South2 West8 recently collaborated on a Spring collection with über-streetwear label Supreme. Down at the other end of Japan, fashion is the last thing on the mind of Okinawa’s considerable fishing community. While you’ll struggle to see a branded fishing vest or wind breaker, it seems that along the shores and in the shallows everyone’s rocking a rod and reel. The appeal of fishing is global, and it’s so evidently popular here, embraced across genders and generations. It’s not a pursuit I ever got into but I can appreciate the appeal: the communion with nature, the meditative aspects of the activity or the chat and cameraderie — the National Health Service in Britain is prescribing it for patients with mental health issues. Then there’s the artistry: the crafting of flies and the deceptive simplicity of casting a rod that belies a long road to mastery.
Drive north along Route 58 past isolated resort hotels and villages and you eventually reach Cape Hedo, the northernmost point of Okinawa island. A visit here is a to-do list item on many tourists’ itineraries; the Point has expansive views of the South China Sea to the west and the Pacific Ocean to the east. To the south, lies the lush green hilly topography of the island. The rugged clifftop landscape has been tamed somewhat with simple tourist amenities, paths and fencing, but the natural beauty of the national park it lies within and the power of the sea below the cliffs are nonetheless revitalising.
What I want to talk about today is a certain kind of time and sequencing of images that shapes the way time is experienced within photographic books and I’m kind of calling this Real Time vs. Storytime.
Photographer Alec Soth has started a series of YouTube presentations that combine his professed love of teaching and an attempt to show books — and share his love of books — online. His approach is a digital show and tell as he takes viewers through various books from his extensive library, flicking through them to show links and similarities and variations on his chosen theme. The books in his hands are filmed from above while he’s inset as a talking head facing the camera in the corner of the screen. Not exactly exciting cinema, yet engrossing due to his knowledgeable enthusiasm for the photography he’s showing and the wonderful variety of his eclectic library. Soth humbly describes his sessions as rambling talks, and he may meander at times, but preparation goes into each session. He assembles the books he shows beforehand and has at least a sketched out narrative, so there’s a nice flow to his talks. So far, he’s given fascinating insights into photo albums, the use of images with text, and the work of William Eggleston and Kim Kardashian among others. The session linked to here, from which I’ve taken the quote above, is about expanding on Cartier-Bresson’s single decisive moment to show images that Soth describes as increments of momentary observation or stutters or flickers in time.
In a previous post I linked to a YouTube video in which Martin Parr talks to Alec Soth in one of his Sofa Sessions. Parr’s sessions are likeable enough, but in terms of the art of photography, these sessions by Alec Soth are so much better.
Real Time vs. Storytime – a talk by Alec Soth Copyright Alec Soth / Little Brown Mushroom 2021
A walk, an exploration, a camera. A record. A type of cartography.
The idea was to walk along the coast of Chatan, the town I curently call home. And, while walking, to look around and to photograph scenes that catch my eye, frames that capture the character of the place. Chatan has six coastal districts, each with its own character, that border a total of some ten kilometers of the island’s central west coast. A series of walks then, starting with the subject of this post, Kitamae, the town’s southernmost district.
The idea was that once I covered Chatan’s other five coastal districts, the combined images would become a photographic record of a place in time. The resulting photo essay — Coastal explorations — is a topographic map of sorts.
A series of walks, explorations, a camera. A record. A type of cartography.
Jazz. How do you picture it? For me, the music is visualized in the stark black and white Jazz Loft photos of jamming musicians, taken in New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Eugene Smith; or else it’s the striking duotone tinted images and funky graphics of dozens of mid-century Blue Note record sleeves also created in New York at around the same time by Reid Miles. Iconic: it’s an oft-used, often misused word, but it’s the perfect description of Miles’ work for Blue Note. As art director, he designed the covers — based on photos by Blue Note co-founder Francis Wolff, or at times his own — for hundreds of classic jazz recordings, and in doing so defined not only the look of Blue Note but also the look of jazz.
Borrowing Miles’ visual look, I decided to play with a few photos taken at some of my favorite local cafes and bars, processing them to give them a Blue Note vibe.
We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. — George Bernard Shaw
Play. A fundamental activity that kids totally get; get lost in; find focus; tap creativity; forge friendships; spark joy. Play is the realm of youth. It’s a tonic, a source of a lightness of being. For grown-ups play is more complicated. It’s often transformed into competition; it’s driven by goals; bound by rules. And tied up with money. The focus, creativity, friendships and joy are still all there, yet something — the purity, maybe, the spontaneity — is lost.
Still, it’s March. Here, at least, the winter lockdowns are over. It’s great to be outside. It’s Spring. It’s the perfect time to once again start to play.
A quarter of the land on Okinawa’s main island houses American military bases, 32 of them, and there are more than 30,000 US military personnel living on the island, many with migrated families.
This presence doesn’t go unnoticed. Where I‘m living, in Chatan, tacos are as commonplace as sushi, and there seem to be burgers and steaks on menus everywhere. The patrons at nearby restaurant tables are as likely to be American as Japanese. The local Irish pub screens American football matches and plenty of places play nothing but American rock music. At times it can feel like there’s a glitch in the matrix.
Yet it’s in the skies that the presence is most imposing, where fighter planes’ thunderous roars routinely echo above as pilots perform their aerial training drills, flights of raven colored helicopters make their rounds, blades thwacking insistently, and huge military transporters disappear with a low rumble behind tower blocks on their descent to land.
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