Gazing at the Gaze - Family as Image -
Toshiharu Ito (Art Historian / Professor Emeritus, Tokyo University of the Arts)
Every home once had a family photo album with pictures pasted on thick paper. As photos accumulated year after year, albums multiplied and were relegated to closet corners, occasionally taken out and their dust-covered images exposed to light. Now that the meaning of "family" has changed dramatically, even their existence is nearly forgotten, but family albums are curious things when you think about it.
When individuals are placed in the context of family, unexpected scenes emerge beyond their representations. Within the family, individuals give rise to more nuanced shadows, and complex relationships, sometimes revealing a perspective of the era that transcends mere family portraits.
Amidst the fluctuations of places containing accumulated time, the meaning and phase of the family changed with each turn of the page. What makes family albums intriguing even to non-family members is the ability to directly sense the breathing of images woven from individual memories and history.
This photo book, "Family Album," begins with photographer Taisuke Sato looking at a family album. He sees himself pictured with his aunt and cousins at his grandmother's house. His grandfather was from a remote island in the Seto Inland Sea, and his great-grandfather was a contributor who made mandarin oranges and lemons, a major industry on the island in the early 1900s. However, his grandfather left the island and became a doctor, and shortly after his mother was born, he left his family and went to Manchuria as a military doctor. His mother respected her father and wished for her son to become like him. The son was plagued by inferiority complexes, weak and unstable. This gap tore him apart.
Due to his father's job transfers, he changed schools every few years. He entered a good university and joined a listed company, outwardly trying to meet his mother's expectations. He thought he had managed to get on track with the Japanese economic system of the time, with its simultaneous recruitment of new graduates, seniority-based wages, and lifetime employment. However, from around that time, Japan's economic growth entered a long-term period of stagnation. Employment difficulties widened income gaps among young people, and declining birthrates and marriage rates progressed.
He continued to work as a loyal, capable businessman from 1991 to 2020. He married, bought land, and built a house. He had two children, but his hard work meant he couldn't even attend sports days. He desperately swam through the rough waves of the times - the bubble collapse, the Great Hanshin Earthquake, the Lehman Shock, the Great East Japan Earthquake, and the COVID-19 pandemic. With major changes, companies were forced to alter their nature and roles, and his generation had to face the distortions and repercussions head-on. Something broke along the way. In his haste to make himself appear greater, he forgot his true self, and his personality split. When diagnosed with depression, he felt as if he had been moved to a place isolated from the world.
He felt inexplicably lonely even at home. He separated, his depression worsened, and try as he might to escape overwhelming anxiety, delusions and nightmares revealed an endless abyss. He considered suicide several times, divorced in 2018, and retired in 2020.
Family albums are composed of selected good photos and pictures from anniversaries and trips. When the photographer felt he was broken, he thought he had lost his family. When he sold the house, a symbol of family, this feeling intensified. In reality, home refers to daily life and seems to be a concept that exists to raise children. As children grow and become independent, the home naturally disappears. At that time, conversely, precious, unexpected memories seep into the family album.
As Taisuke, now a photographer, turned the pages of the family album, he found a photo of himself as a child taken by his mother in front of their home. He came up with the idea of taking that photo to the house where he lived as a child and taking a picture. He tried to adjust the angle to match while comparing the old photo with the actual scenery. He considered perspective, height differences, and upward and downward angles, but it didn't work out well. He drew lines on the photo, worked out the vanishing point, confirmed the horizontal and vertical, and went back to the place the next day to repeat his trial and error. When he finally felt he had a good grasp, he released the shutter as if tracing his mother's gaze from the past. When the viewfinder went dark, something seemed to possess him. It was a copy of his mother's distant gaze that he shouldn't have remembered.
Is the gaze fundamentally reproducible? What does it mean to layer gazes? The sign is repeatable, but the gaze is not. Therefore, the gaze is not a sign but something that generates meaning. The gaze produces meaning without the mediation of the sign.
Photographs are also not mere records. They have the power to work on deep memories and convey the sense of touch of living reality. Looking through the viewfinder, seeking a phantom gaze, confirming that sense of touch.
In the old photo taken in front of the former home, the mother's gaze was searching for her son. As if begging for her son's gaze, it moved lower and lower, as if crouching down. She had taken the shot from a position almost clinging to the ground, looking up slightly. As if trying to find a lost, invisible "umbilical cord."
Family scenes appear and disappear with each turn of the page. In the viewer's mind, the family album connects like a mosaic, revealing the changes in family life. "Family Album" contained a photo of the photographer's mother taken by the photographer. On the surface, that photo is a family photo, not showing the mother's inner self or her relationship with others. However, when standing in front of that person with a camera, the photo simultaneously captures that person's darkness.
"Family Album" reveals not only the mother's darkness but also the darkness of each individual that makes up the family photos, revealing that family photos are a collection of small darknesses. The fissures in the family emerge, and the essence of the family is hidden in the darkness peeking through those cracks. A photographer must be someone who enters those cracks and rises from there. By turning over the lining of the family fabric where invisible experiences that deviate from the linear time axis are intertwined, one confirms one's position. While grazing the mother's darkness, one exposes one's own darkness. The regeneration of gaze is to witness the reverse of that darkness. In this work, that gaze is imprinted with a dull pain that never fades.