Soba salt

Thanks to a recent post on 100 Hundred Mountains I discovered Okinawa Soba aka Rob Oechsle, a collector of Meiji and Taisho Japanese photography. Along with an amazing flickr collection, he also has a labyrinthine website devoted to T. Enami a turn of the century photographer based in Yokohama. There are about 3,000 images on his flickr profile, many with including Fuji as the central subject or used as a back drop. I spent several hours this afternoon trawling through his collections loosing myself in beauty and wonder. Although this is not an image by T. Enami, I have decided to post the following salt print with Okinawa Soba commentary in full. It gives a feel for his writing style and for the seriousness of his collecting and generosity with sharing his research. It's a fascinating project by an unusual man.

THE HEADLESS HORESMAN OF JAPAN'S MEIJI MADNESS

-- or, How Light Areas of a Salt Print Tend to Fade Away First ("Salt Print" # 11)

No Photoshop or Paint Eraser here. Posting un-retouched AS IS !!! This ca.1890s photograph was printed as a postcard size image around 1905 by a commercial photographer using the "Salted Paper Print" process. No standard albumen, collodian, or gelatin emulsion coatings for this guy. He was going to do it the "Classic" way like the old "Salt Print" and "Calotype" days of yore....and color it when he was done.

I will be the first to admit that the commercial revival of the classic salt print is pretty cool...and pretty rare for the late Meiji era. But, depending on how they were processed, these rare and often beautiful "revival salt prints" sometimes had a strange side effect: Very light areas, such as the face, or light clothing, had a tendency to lose the details -- and sometimes disappear altogether.

On some of these pictures (not all), the dreaded "fade-out" syndrome would hit those extremely light portions within a relatively short time, but leave the darker areas untouched. Even the once delineated summit-line of Mt. Fuji has reached a touch-and-go point in this image.

And our poor fellow on the horse, whose head was wrapped in a white winter "turban towel", just happened to line himself (and his neck) directly with the slope of the hill behind him. It was only a matter of time before he.....well, before he LOST HIS HEAD !.

Another mountain

I've been travelling to Hobart pretty regularly since November 2003, mostly to make art. Last week I finally got to show my work in Tasmania at CAST gallery.

When I was down there last week I had a very odd realisation- Mt Wellington was my first "Mt Fuji". It's shape is completely different but the way it's celebrated in art history and how you watch it is similar.

From the moment it greets you as you come over the ridge from the airport it shapes your experience of the city and the weather.

You search for views out of hotel windows, friends balconies,

check its peak to gage the weather,

admire its many moods.

I'm not the only one who has had this association. Below is a electrical street box near Parliament House.

Perhaps my attraction to Mt Wellington had primed me for my Fuji obsession and certainly if I lived in Hobart I would want to at least have one window that had a view towards the mountain (although not in the valley of South Hobart where you are in the shadow of the peak and some houses do not get any direct sunlight for six months). Also, I keep saying one day I will climb from the base to the summit- instead of the usual walk across heathland.

My story with Tasmania is starting a new chapter as I will mostly be travelling to Launceston for the next 6 months and after that I hope to have a break from the south and spend some time in the dry centre, or wet north.

Illustrated fuji

Bigger image on flickr

Fuji on the side of Illustrated Man- one of Sydney's oldest and most famous tattoo parlors- disappearing behind a security screen door.
I would be curious to see who has a Fuji tattoo. As most tattoos are made to memorialise a person or event, I'm interested in what exactly they were associating with the mountain?

There is one photo of a Fuji tattoo on the Illustrated Man website gallery. The shape of the mountain is totally wrong, and the file was called "Wave", which I find interesting as I suspect that being a beach culture, most people in Australia focus on the energy of the wave not the stillness of the mountain. Oddly the boat is in the tattoo but not the occupants.

"Wave" tattoo by Elliot

When I see this witches hat Fuji I think of the wonderful quote that Project Hyakumeizan posted recently from the Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan) by Fukada Kyūya (1964) who in turn is quoting Kojima Usui:

this arc, slanting, somewhat steeply yet always in an easy, serene, almost carefree way, across a flawless sky

That curve and flat roofed peak is so perfect and calming to gaze upon, in fact its shape is everything- which makes me think that its inclusion in tattoo above is an after thought rather than its motivation.

On one of the entries on the British Museum database there is a quote by an artist describing how getting the perfection of Fuji's shape as a lifetimes work- I found it one night while procrastinating and now have no hope of remembering which of the 619 entries it was.

Update:

I just had another look at my post about Sarah's shoes (I link to it above) and just noticed that the Fuji on the bottom of her shoe is also a witches hat. Time for a new tag I think...

trademarks and grey clouds

I have been spending the evenings half watching television and looking through museum digital databases for Fuji-san images. This is a 1949 calender published by Fujisawa Pharmaceutical Company and is in the British Museum. The upward-looking composition with a solitary grey cloud in a large field of pink sky creates a striking image. This feeling is given an uncanny twist with the unusually placed heads of the two female "Americans" right along the base of the image, as though they were humpty-dumpty on the edge of a wall, or body-less phantoms.

I was wondering whether it had been mislabeled as a Fuji image till I enlarged the image and saw the companies logo.

The woodcut print is titled Ginza no tasogare-doki - Dusk in Ginza and is by the artist Onchi Koshiro. On the back there is printed a haunting melancohic text written by the artist, each line rich in poetic imagery.

A suit and one grey painting brush are sufficient. The neon of the PX is still like a dream. The new culture of Japan comes flashing from those sharp words. When one walks here, there comes a feeling that the days when we were struck to the ground are already from a distant world. Probably everybody would like quickly to wash away their hateful memories. The narrow pavements make our shoulders rub together. Through this congestion tall Americans stride. Already there is a sort of magnificence here, but the truth is that Japan is under Occupation. It is not necessary to wait for dusk. People have already lost sight of themselves.


There are 445 Onchi pieces in the Museum's collection, unfortunately most of it is not digitally archived but there are a few more Fuji pieces to save for a another post.

Update:

The store in the image is the Tokyo PX, the post office and stores for American servicemen, then located in the Wako Store in Ginza. Ginza was the fashionable going out district in post -war Tokyo

I don't know how I missed this detail before in the notes but the use of Mt Fuji in the logo above is a pun, as the character used for Fujisawa Pharmaceutical has nothing to do with the mountain. The writer of the object notes also comments that the Fugaku Publishing company, which published the calender and other works by Onchi and other post war print artists also uses Fuji in the logo- Unfortunately I couldn't find a scan on the interweb of their logo- only expensive rare books...

Update #2:
Lawrence Smith speculates that Onchi poetic text was for a Japanese audience as it was printed in Japanese only, which was unusual during the period of American occupation.

in all seasons

After I made the decision to start a project about Mt Fuji, February started and it was one cloudy or grey day after another. The above photo is taken from my kitchen in Shibuya. I had been thinking mostly about seeing Fuji was different locations, not particularly seeing different weather phenomena, although that certainly becomes a theme when you start obsessively trying to see it daily and looking at artistic representations of the mountain.

One of the artist projects that has particularly resonated with the desire to observe and record is a scroll by Minamoto Sadayoshi. Started in the early spring of 1818, after a heavy snow fall, he records Mt Fuji's receding snow line and other weather phenomena twice a month, at the beginning and the middle. Apart from this scroll there is not much know about the artist. I found the reference to it in Timothy Clarke's catalogue 100 Views of Mount Fuji, held at the British Museum in 2001. The inscription on the front panel of the scroll is:

Thirty-one views of summit of Mt Fuji, seen from the west in all seasons

The west side is opposite side to Tokyo and Mt Hoei is visible on the right hand side. The mountain's silhouette is almost the same as the view from the shinkansen.

The above panel is one of seven additional panels included in the scroll, of unusual weather phenomena and is of a cloud formation known as a 'travelling hat' formation. I am wondering whether the cloud on the diamond Fuji postcard is a travelling hat. The cloud depicted here looks really solid with a definite cone shape, rather than the misty halo on the postcard.

I didn't trim the photo above as I particularly like the museum archiving around the painting: the ruler, accession number, and colour chart; and the teasing edges of the next drawing. Unfortunately this is the only image from the scroll on the digital database.

The decision- taken more a year ago

If you can't see the mountain very well, there is a a high res image on my flickr.

A little more than a year ago I was faced with having to make a decision about a whether to start a new artwork somehow dealing with my Fuji obsession, with only 8 weeks to the exhibition deadline. 

With all decisions that take a bit of thinking, I like to go and sit on a train or bus and watch the landscape go past. I think this is a by-product of the all the commuting I did during my 20's to the city to hang out with friends and to go to work and uni.

While it Tokyo, the place where I felt there was space for my brain to work was the edges of the city- especially Kamakura. So I headed off to Kenchoji temple hoping to get a view of Fuji. I had started the day a little late and on the train line I could see that it was pretty misty with only the slightest outline of Fuji. By the time I got out at Kita Kamakura I wasn't sure of my chances of seeing it at all. The photo above is taken from higher up the hill than the lookout at the temple. At the lookout itself you could hardly see the outline of the mountain.

The central question that has been on my mind in the last couple of years, partly due to my PhD but also from the dialogue in visual arts at the moment about relational aesthetics and the challange to the art object from critics engaging with environmental sustainability, anti-art market and the dematerialisation of the art object. I am never sure where my work sits in all this dialogue. On the one hand I think the content of my work is connected strongly to post-conceptual practice (and by extension relational aesthetics??) but I remain resolutely interested in the art object as a thing, which has the potential to contain and gather meaning. And besides which, I enjoy making, doing, drawing, and I think in images. It would be cutting of a large part of myself to just ignore that and deny myself the pleasure of a studio practice.

So the two questions I turned over in my mind while I watched the veils of clouds drift down slowly obscuring Fuji were:

• Would there be many good viewing days left? How likely was it that I was going to see the mountain very much from that late January day till early April?

• In what way could the act of searching and viewing become an artwork that made itself complete through audience interaction? How could this interaction speak of the daily action of some of the people who lived within view of Fuji, or came into contact with Fuji, that would speak of the action of collecting - experiences and vistas, and memorialising such experiences. By concentrating on the act of collecting would it be possible to avoid overly nationalistic, or touristic, sentiments in a work which, no matter how carefully avoided, would nevertheless garner?

I decide to abandon a project I was thinking about and focus myself of finding a way of working with these question if I hoped to have some work by the exhibition deadline of early April. In retrospect I think it was a good idea to change course, as it also refocused my "bird projects" resulting in the films which I was invited to show in the Aichi Triennale.

I don't think these questions are answered yet (for me the work is ongoing). I thought this blog was a way of opening up myself and my practice to some kind of discussion- something I have avoided for 5 or so years. (long story!)

More than one year on I am enjoying writing the blog and the contact it bring me with other bloggers and readers.

returning slowly

2 weeks ago the Tohoku Earthquake struck off the coast of Japan causing a tsunami and ten of thousands of deaths and injuries. Its hard to imagine the anxiety, nauseousness and seasickness the aftershocks are causing those people in affected areas - let alone the grief of the lost of so many lives and the ongoing anxiety of the nuclear accidents at the Fukushima plant.


It's been hard to think about posting on Magnetic Glimpses at this time. I guess I do this see this blog as an ongoing artwork and sometimes its best to put art aside and respond in another way- which I have been doing on my more eclectic blog Tokyo Birdsong. 


In a very strange moment of serendipitous posting One Hundred Mountains the morning of the earthquake had posted an entry about Fuji. No sooner had I commented, that I noticed that my friend living in Osaka had updated her facebook status to say that there had been a large earthquake north of Tokyo. After several anxious days of watching the news with horror, Jules- a photographer (among other things)- posted to her blog a series of photos from that day's sunset at Kamakura with Fuji visible. I'm not sure if she did, but in some way, I took comfort in the beauty of the mountain. 

Diamond Fuji wishes

for your Valentines Day

The Lonely Planets guide to Hiking in Japan was my first point of contact about the craze of Fuji-viewing. Along with learning about nori-mono from this source, they also mentioned the Diamond Fuji phenomena:

For romantic spotters in Tokyo, 14 February (Valentine's Day) is the best day to see Fuji-san, 100kms away, with the sun going down directly behind its dish shaped peak. At the exact moment the sun dips behind the summit its rays appear as a giant diamond sitting on top of the mountain. The ultimate viewing point is from the top of the Ferris wheel at trendy Odaiba, but be warned, your planning and timing mist be better than good to spot this very special 'diamond Fuji' moment.

I didn't even try to see Fuji last Valentines Day as just about the whole of February was a consistent grey.

From youtube a series of shorts:
This one is of a Double Diamond (shot on the Red camera- resolution is amazing) rising sun with a reflection in one of the Lakes near the mountain, and this one of the sun setting by the same film makers at Lake Yamanaka; and finally another one from with a view from Tokyo city centre. The first one is the best to get a sense of what it must be like to see it.

This one is much lower resolution but it shows really well the sun setting exactly on the crest, the effect of the light and the view the mountain through the humidity and haze from Tokyo city.

Fujiyama Journal posted a beautiful shot yesterday with the snow covering the valley floor as well as the mountain down to the tree line.

Dear Fuji, my heart is broken that I wont see you this year, but I know you will be there waiting for me.

sunrise from Mt Shichimen

Two Mt Fuji postcards on A postcard a day.

new blog on the list

One Hundred Mountains is blog about the Japanese Alps, about climbing them now and the cultural history of climbing, in particular the book "Nihon Hyakumeizan" written by Fukada Kyūya about Japan's 100 famous mountains over 2,000 feet. (I have climbed two, one being Yufu-dake)


They have a great cartoon on today's post that anthropomorphises the mountains of Japan. The cartoon shows a detail of the island of Honshu with Fuji at the centre.