The Factory of Permanence

“I don't want to remember or know myself.  We are too many if we look at who we are.” (Fernando Pessoa)

 

 Chino Otsuka. “Imagine finding me”, 1997 and 2009. Jardin du Luxemburg, Paris 2009

There is a young Japanese photographer, Chino Otsuka, who loves to wonder about her past, about childhood, especially in the 2005 work “Imagine finding me", in which she digitally mixes images of her at the present in old photos where she appears as little baby or young girl.

They are alienating images, but also deeply melancholic, sweet and funny as only the Japanese know how to be; in tender poses but with a sad aftertaste. “Things are not quite past or present, or somewhere in between... that has reflected from my upbringing, where I'm neither here nor there, and I'm not really Japanese or English,” she says.

Chino Otsuka. “Imagine finding me”, 1980 and 2009. Nagayama, Japan 2009

In another of her works, “Photo Album”, she shows a series of shots of old photo albums from which she removed the photographs to leave only the empty spaces, or the captions and notes, written by hand.

In the first series there are two of her, in a zero dimension of time, where the present collapses in the past: “As the digital process becomes a tool, almost like a time machine, I embark on a journey to where I once belonged, while at the same time becoming a tourist of my own history.”

In the second work she asks us to imagine the invisible photographs that filled the empty spaces. On the one hand an excess of existence, on the other its emptiness.

Chino Otsuka. “Photo Album” No. 4, 2012

 

I am fascinated by the theme of memory, by old photos, by personal or family relationship with images. The father of the photographer, Ferdinando Scianna, portrayed people for the images on the tombstones, and in his writings we read this fascination for the mystery that exists in this relationship between photography and memory, as was also in the title of his famous book.

I have already spoken of a very romantic work that I was lucky enough to buy some time ago, which is not even a book but looks like an old newspaper: Richard and Pablo Bartholomew's Father and Son, published by Fishbar in 2011 in a thousand copies. In this book, Pablo retrieves and prints the photographs taken by his father Richard, who fled Myanmar during the Japanese attack in the Second World War. 

Arriving in India, the father marries Rati, and Pablo grows up to whom he transmits the love for photography, ending an existence imbued with art and culture there. Many years after Richard's death, Pablo, for the love of his father, continues his work and publishes it divided into two mirror parts: the first with photos taken by his father, in which there is also Pablo as a child, and then that of the son grown up as a professional photographer, including also the portraits of his father.

Richard Bartholomew, “Self-portrait”. Almara, c.1957

Pablo Bartholomew, “My Parents Richard & Rati at Home”. New Delhi, 1975

In these black and white images, it really seems to read a love dialogue between father and son, while in the work of the Japanese photographer it is always she who appears in the manipulated photographs, existing twice.

 

I believe that this morbid love of mine for photographs, especially the old ones or those that speak of the past (but which photograph doesn’t?), of strangers or of ourselves, is inextricably linked to the fear of death. Diego Mormorio writes flawlessly in his essay “Meditation and Photography”:

“Normally, the gesture of looking is done thinking about something else, sunk in an armchair or taking a quick look now at this now at that thing. You look without seeing, with the belief that what you are looking at or that you will be able to look more closely in the future is not too important. In this way, the present has been lost and nobody can assure us that there will be a future or that this will be different from the present that we are superficially experiencing. We are so dead to life and in this death, we believe that there are things that do not deserve a careful look. In reality, the importance of things is in our gaze, in our ability to recognize the world as it is.”

The look, the photographs, become a way to cure the wound of the disappearance. 

Not just photography, but every form of culture. 

The sociologist Bauman wrote an entire book on this theme, The Theater of Immortality: “Culture, another 'exclusively human' quality, was from the outset a tool to achieve this suppression," that is, the suppression of death that annihilates our hearts from terror. “Culture chases that permanence and durability that is atrociously lacking in life as such.” Culture, as well as photography, we could say, are the “factory of permanence”.

I read in Otsuka's work, yes a way of making dialogue between herself and her childhood, as if space and time did not exist, but also – thanks to this cancellation of time imploded in the coincidence of the two Chinos – a way to freeze the future, the only element missing in this photo; as if placing herself in the past of her childhood prevented her from moving forward and disappearing. Just like the photographs that disappeared from the family albums.

That same machine of permanence pushes Pablo to print the photos taken by his deceased father to make them live forever with his.

The more I think about it, the more I realize the deeply melancholy soul of photography. Whatever we photograph, the people we care about, the places we love, our dogs or cats, the flowers, are our unconscious way of filling the void that is always under our feet, which—as the western believed—philosophy tried to fill with thought and religions with God.

It's funny. This reflection of mine was born through looking at the photographs of Otsuka a few months ago, but above all because my mother recently pulled out of a drawer some letters that my elementary school friends wrote to me in 1982, when I was 8 years old and had to undergo a heart operation.

These sheets with the lines of the primary school notebooks have the funny tone and melancholy of Otsuka's photos. They speak of a child I not really remember a lot, but those words written in a crooked way push me strongly to my 8-year-old, in that empty school desk where my classmates look with affection.

I don't remember anything, but I know I made them laugh, that I was joking a lot, they missed my jokes. True, I always laughed, even in the hospital, even if I trembled with fear.

I read and reread them, and a mosaic of a Stefano that I don't know forms before my eyes, just like the two-life photo of the Japanese photographer.

In a letter, there is a phrase that hits me to tears, written by an Alessandra of whom I remember absolutely nothing: “I'm sorry because you're there I don't know what you do and I like how you draw and how you color and you don't go out and you're nice.”

Rome, 1982. 

“...I like your drawings and how you color and you never go out and you are nice and I wish you to leave the hospital very soon.”

Don't go out meant when you color and do not come out of the edges of the figure, a sign of precision when making drawings as a child.

Thanks to these few words of a little girl, I can see a myself that has been lost but that is still inside me, changed, transformed by life and time.

 Rome, 1982. 

“Dear Stefano, I hope your operation goes well and that you learn to color and come back to us. 

Your gang is waiting for you. I'm fine with Mauro but I was fine with you too.”

Rome,1982.

“Dear Stefano, 

How are you? 

We wrote to you because we miss you very much, come back soon. We all hold you in the heart. 

We always look at your place because there, in that place there is no joy. 

We have written you in four and your jokes are not there as before. 

We hope you come back soon. Sorry for that temporary kiss, but I wanted to give you my best wishes.”

      

This is why I am still here, at almost fifty years of age, fighting the fear of emptiness like each of us, deluding myself that my photographs save me from the abyss, bringing with me in this salvation all the people I portray.

With precision, passion and madness.

As if the passion with which I take photographs is my time machine to return to those school desks; pushing with care and love the whole world that is before my eyes within the established forms of a photo.

Without ever going outside the edges.

“In reality, the importance of things is in our gaze, in our ability to recognize the world as it is.”

Rome, 2020

 

“New Trends in Japanese Photography” (SKIRA, 2016) 

Richard and Pablo Bartholomew: “Father and son” (Fishbar, 2011) 

Ferdinando Scianna: “Lo specchio vuoto. Fotografia, identità, memoria” (Editori Laterza, 2018) 

Diego Mormorio: “Meditazione e fotografia. Vedendo e ascoltando passare l'attimo” (Contrasto, 2010) 

Zygmut Bauman: “Il teatro dell'immortalità” (Il Mulino, 1995)

See Chino Otsuka’s work here: https://www.designboom.com/art/chino-otsuka-inserts-her-adult-self-into-photos-from-her-youth-01-13-2014/

Italian version