After the jump: ways of seeing, photography, and temples in Japan.
British art critic John Ruskin made his greatest mark by passionately educating his fellow Britons in the art of drawing. The key to Ruskin's impact was his total lack of snobbery: as Alain de Botton summarizes it, the act of drawing had nothing to do with the end product meeting any aesthetic or even objective criteria. Rather, the act of drawing -- sustained study, selective focus, and even faltering recreation -- opened up a new way of seeing. de Botton's essay on Ruskin details how his attempts to follow Ruskin's program enhanced his travels as well as his alertness in more familiar environs. (More on de Botton's own excellent writing on travel in a future post.)
Reading about Ruskin sparked a series of delightful recognitions, largely because I've been playing with cameras since I first started traveling more expansively in 2016. The act of photography (and more often, of snagging a few seconds of footage) has shaped how I see the world, even when I'm not carrying a camera or not on the road, and this is largely to the good. I'm more attentive to details, particularly to surface textures and light; not coincidentally, I find these qualities among the hardest to capture on digital film even as I try to educate myself on aperture, shutter speed, exposure, etc. And even on my commutes, when I'm not too tired, when I remember not to let the cold and familiarity turn my focus inward, I'm actively engaged in my surroundings in a way that feels new and fresh.
For Ruskin, however, the invention of photography threatened to unravel all his work in teaching Britain profoundly connect with their environment through sketching. The snap of a shutter unlocked a cheaper sense of ownership of the image before the viewer's eyes, and Ruskin feared that people would become less observant than ever. His instincts on this point have obviously proven out, and in fact the introduction of the camera had a massive effect in how we think about images altogether. Walter Benjamin's writing on this was probably most engagingly reworked in John Berger's documentary series and book Ways of Seeing. (Check it out, it's fantastic -- basically a leftist response to traditional BBC views of art and art history.)
Benjamin and Berger point out that the proliferation of duplicative images has utterly reworked what art and image once meant, and replaced it with something we are still working out. At one time, the only way to see a work of art was to make a pilgrimage to the site where it lay; and to gain access only if you had the money, piety, or elite privilege to be admitted. By the 1970s, these works were accessible to anyone who could pick up a magazine where the work might be photographed or even repurposed into an ad for cigarettes. By now, it's even more so: images flood modern society. As my advisor likes to point out, most people will see more images by the time they have lunch than almost anyone in the Renaissance would have seen in their entire lives. Inundated by images, we pay less attention to them, they hold our focus less, they have less power.
So you sort of have Ruskin's idea (creating images draws you closer to the world around you, trains you to observe, and deepens your appreciation for the details of all that you see) butting up against Benjamin's and Berger's (creating images cheapens the thing you're depicting, doubly so when your image is duplicative rather than creative, photographic rather than artistic). It's not a true clash, I don't think - and instinctively there's a felt distinction here. We all have disappointing photos we've taken on vacation: the Eiffel Tower looking flat and lifeless in front of a gray sky, center-frame, maybe we're in front of it, maybe not, but all the image does is confirm that we are worse at the job than the person who makes the postcards. And we are drawn, I think, to the photograph that instead draws out a detail or a quality we hadn't noticed before. Maybe we can see rain spraying through the metal latticework in a close shot. Maybe we only see a rivet and the edge of a shaft, both out of focus with the clarity of Paris filling the rest of the frame. Almost certainly this photograph doesn't have the whole tower in it - or if it is entirely visible, it's unlikely to be the main or only point of interest. The photographer of this image has sculpted a deliberate point of view, perhaps less arduous than Ruskin's hand-drawn sketches but requiring some measure of the same focus and selectivity.
This is a long way round of saying that I find photography and videography alternately delightful in rousing my focus and waking up my senses, and frustrating when I let it become a chore of documentation. When I'm pulling my camera out because I've been struck by an unnoticed angle or shaft of light, it's energizing. When it's because I've reached The Big Thing I Hiked To See and Need To Point A Camera At It, it's enervating and I start to get frustrated with the whole process of "being awake" and "looking around me" and "breathing."
I mention all of this because some of my favorite corners of Japan were the unphotographable ones. Not in the sense that their magnificence outstripped my abilities as a camera-pointer (although yes often that too) but because the temples or museums in question forbade photography. And unlike, say, Rome, where almost everyone in the Sistine Chapel decides to flout the rules of the Vatican, Japanese people take these prohibitions seriously, and so did I.
Two things. First, having to keep my camera in my messenger bag was a relief. If I saw something gorgeous or haunting I didn't even have the option of trying/possibly failing to capture it. I didn't have to wonder whether I'd regret not trying. It wasn't on the table, and I was free to simply be in the moment. And secondly, the temples and galleries retained their power in a way that they would not have if I had seen a dozen blog/Instagram posts or Youtube videos detailing their every corner; or if in the moment of being there I had been looking at ways to respond to them, to document or capture them. (Again: the verbiage is telling, if we're looking at capture as a kind of ownership.)
In the Chichu Art Museum on Naoshima island, about five galleries all play with light and space in ways that feel totally unique to me. They're spaces of contemplation: sit on this concrete slab and notice how that square carved into the roof lets in the light that plays down the walls. Stare directly at the blue, wonder if it's a digital effect (didn't the guide say the exhibit used LEDs?) or if it's really the sky above the museum. Notice how the concrete is warmer here than in the shadow. After five minutes, notice how the quality of light has changed. The muddying of the room as clouds creep in overhead. Watch the other patrons in the room; best right when they walk in, about half of them immediately grinning ear to ear and bursting out laughing with some inarticulate delight. (The room is baffling and delightful.) Others walk in, impatient and skeptical, and are immediately confirmed in their dissatisfaction. It's great people watching.
In another gallery, a giant black marble sphere, polished to a radiant gloss, stands halfway up a pyramidal series of steps and plateaus. The whole room is ringed with threefold collections of gold-leaf planks, and again a gouge in the ceiling lets the sunlight pour in, reflecting off the sphere at an angle that evolves over the course of the day. If you're lucky, you have the room to yourself and the docent for five, almost ten minutes, giving you all the time in the world to stand and contemplate, to move closer, off to the side, down some steps, up to where you can see the actual shaft through which the light tumbles. You take time with it. It's just you and the space and the object, with nothing to intermediate: you're part of the artist's work.
(Go to Naoshima, by the way. Go to the Chichu Art Museum. Do these things!)
Or in a subtemple in central Kyoto: you walk around an elaborate rock garden, noticing the personality of the deliberately scattered stones and the difference between the raked gravel here and the unmanicured gravel there. You move slowly, seeing how the ink-paintings on the paper screens behind you mirror the shapes emerging from the rock below your viewing perch. Again, you take time, you commune with the objects.
In all these instances, immersed in a context that instructs you to look but deprives you of any tool to respond in kind, to make your own art or to frame the experience in some aesthetic or quasi-aesthetic expression (some, though not all, of these spaces also request that visitors not sketch), everything around you is made a bit more powerful and present.
The Japanese beliefs behind Shinto and Buddhism would suggest another reason for this power, as they both believe that scarcity, absence, invisibility all confer power to hidden objects. Alex Kerr writes about this in Another Kyoto: totems and relics held at the center of temples and shrines are sometimes not taken out for years, decades, centuries, millennia, accruing more power the longer they are hidden. (When I visited Kinosakionsen, the temple's Buddha was on display for the first time in thirty-three years; Kerr writes about unknowingly turning down a chance to see a statue of Kannon that was about to go back into its zushi for another three hundred years.) The mirror at the heart of Ise shrine has supposedly not been seen in at least a thousand years.
This is actually quite close to how Benjamin writes about image; he discusses works of art as having an "aura" that dissipates as the image proliferates. Think of how blasé the Mona Lisa seems after spending your entire life seeing her turned into comics, advertisements, and on postcards/posters/reproductions. Much of what Berger critiques in traditional art history is what he sees as a frantic attempt to insist on the aura of the original in denial of how photography and mass reproduction has changed what these works of art mean. In prohibiting photography in certain temples, in keeping certain objects hidden for years on end, Buddhism and Shinto keep the aura alive and powerful.
But of course it's more than that. As I say, being without your camera means you do not work on the world around you; instead, you are left for it to work on you. This isn't impossible with a camera, obviously, but it helps quite a lot. You're left to bring yourself to the experience, to know that when your memory goes, so will the record of this encounter, and so perhaps you lap it up a little more hungrily, a bit more seriously. It cannot, in this moment, be about you, unless it is about you in this moment right now in this physical space; it is about your meeting with these objects that someone has very deliberately given to you to witness. It is about seeing, and being, and nothing more. And it is just about the best thing that will happen in your three weeks of Japan.
