Bob Dylan revisits his past through the recent release of a studio outtake of Not Dark Yet, a song from his 1997 album Time Out of Mind. The song is hauntingly beautiful, with its intimations of loss and mortality, the dream-like atmosphere of its arrangements and Dylan’s weathered voice. The video created for this release is something else, essentially a slide-show comprising dozens of photos, the most exquisite photos, revisiting America during the Twentieth Century, showing the haunting beauty of historical documentary photography at its best.
Susan Sontag summed it up perfectly in a line from her book On Photography:
Indeed, the most enduring triumph of photography has been its aptitude for discovering beauty in the humble, the inane, the decrepit. At the very least, the real has a pathos. And that pathos is—beauty.
Fitzroy, Melbourne’s first suburb, sits at the northern perimeter of its commercial heart — what locals call ‘The City’. The kilometre-and-a-half grid of streets situated on Wurundjeri land has a checkered history, transitioning through the decades from a genteel residential neighborhood of stately Victorian homes, when Fitzroy was conceived in 1839, to a working class area of boarding houses and small factories, a centre for immigrants — first from China, then Europe, later for arrivals from Vietnam and Africa, a mecca for students, artists and musicians, to its inevitable gentrification, becoming an expensive inner-city lifestyle hub; though public housing estates in the area ensure a diversity of residents, these days the area is defined by its many cafes, restaurants and bars, its art galleries and live music venues, and by the extensive vibrant street art, bold ornate tags and scrappy graffiti that adorn walls everywhere.
Travel. Not too long ago it was a pedestrian experience; these last years it’s become impossible for many, less than pleasant and wrapped in the paperwork of pandemic-fueled bureaucracy for those who can. And still, even now, with travel can come moments of delight. For me, one of the small pleasures of arriving in a new destination has always been the anticipation of what lies behind the door of a new hotel room: the space and light; the furnishings and decor; the bathroom facilities. And then going to the window, perhaps looking over the balcony: sometimes delighted; at other times disappointed, but always gifted a new and different view.
The camera through history has often looked through windows, peering into rooms and also looking out. Recently I’ve been able to do a little bit of traveling, stay in a few hotel rooms, and with my camera look out their windows.
Since Japan was defeated in the Second World War the US military have maintained a presence in the country. Nowhere is this more evident than Okinawa, a prefecture that comprises less than one per cent of Japan’s land mass yet houses around seventy per cent of America’s Japanese military facilities.
It seems somewhat ironic then that this year — today, in fact — Okinawa celebrates the fiftieth anniverary of regaining its sovereignty, control of its lands transferred back to Japan in the Okinawa Reversion Agreement of 1971 — the transfer occurring on May 15, 1972. Something, it should be noted, that was achieved twenty years after the rest of the country. During that period Okinawa was practically a foreign nation: not only was the place governed by the Americans, the US dollar remained the prefecture’s official currency and locals needed a special travel permit to visit other parts of Japan.
Unsurprisingly, Okinawa has a complicated historical relationship with both the US military and Japan’s central government. The prefectural government, which feels both misunderstood and taken for granted, has a fractious relationship with both. While there’s an understanding of the strategic security benefits of the island bases and the population generally feel no antipathy to their American neighbors, who have over the decades had some impact on the islands’ culture, there are mixed feelings and resentments towards their bases given concerns about environmental damage, accidents, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, aircraft noise, crowding and crime. As for Japan, which annexed the independent Kingdom in 1879, Okinawans march to the beat of their own drum, a recent survey of residents showing that some seventy percent of people identified as Okinawan more than Japanese — something unthinkable in other parts of a country that has a unwavering sense of national identity.
Amid a sea of photography books there are few that engage with the medium in an intellectually meaningful way — critical thinkers such as John Berger, Roland Barthes or Susan Sontag with their decades-old contributions to photography are notable exceptions. A more recent addition is Geoff Dyer — a wonderful writer whom I’ve only recently discovered — whose book The Ongoing Moment (2005) is an absorbing and illuminating read.
Dyer’s extended essay is an investigation of sorts that takes the reader, via a series of vignettes and ancedotes, on a meandering tour through the history of photography, bringing to life the obsessions, irritations, grievances, squabbles, affairs and of course the work, especially the work, of many notable European and American photographers.
Dyer’s chosen subjects are introduced and linked through various tropes or motifs. The book opens for instance with thoughts on a 1916 portrait of a blind woman taken in New York by Paul Strand, moving on to explain how strongly Walker Evans was influenced by this photo before drawing in thematically relevant poetry by William Wordsworth. The topic is then expanded to include a 1911 photo of a blind beggar by Lewis Hine — who happened to be an instructor of Strand’s. Next, Dyer skips over to 1968 to look at another image of a blind man in New York, this one taken by Garry Winogrand. A little later he moves on to André Kertész, describing a number of his images, including one of a blind man taken in 1955, before summing up that photographer’s grievances thus: His vision was sharp, melodic, subtle, humane, but he was treated as though he were blind.
And so it goes, this interplay of topic, time and place repeated with such motifs as solitary figures in hats, picket fences, doors, windows, roads and fruit: oranges in particular, which become the catalyst for a trip through the origins of color photography and its practitioners.
The Ongoing Moment is exhaustively researched — a quick look at the extensive end notes and bibliography tell us as much — but this thoroughly enjoyable book is worlds away from any dry academic text.
The sakura trees in Tokyo are once again enjoying their time in the sun, their delicate blossoms marking yet another year. Amid the city’s cold brutalist landscape, those pale pastel blossoms — both joyous and wistful, beautiful yet ephemeral, much like life itself — transform their surroundings like the brush strokes of a master painter bring a canvas to life; soothe us like the sweetest caresses of a loving hand; lift our spirits like the brightest of rose-colored glasses.
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