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Japan is a photogenic country, and like a cute kid, provokes the professional and amateur alike to just snap away. After all, Japanese culture emphasizes the aesthetic nature of its products, almost to a fault, and images are packed into the visual landscape in dense, unpredictable ways. The resulting photography collections, however, are all too often a predictable set of recycled images. They please with a surprising immediacy about the surface of things, but fail to offer much more.
Kenneth Straiton's newest book, however, offers a coherent, sustained vision that reveals a more attentive eye and more artistic mind at work. He organizes his crisp, elegant photographs of patterns, shapes and forms into what he aptly calls a collection. Organized by abstract concepts would seem to remove photographs too far from their original context. However, that is part of the point of the collection, to remove the forms from different places and arrange them carefully according to what Straiton notes are essential kanji words for pattern concepts: flowing, circle, sign, sanctity, nature, pattern, and collection.
What makes this collection fascinating is the way it allows the reader to visually compare and contrast the repetition of shapes with so many variations. In the first section, "flowing" (nagare), the patterns from raked sand, an algae-filled pool, carved lacquered wood, dyed cloth and gold-leafed "shoji" are brought together. This allows the viewer to see how the feeling of flow is developed in different mediums and materials, but with a surprising similarity. The conclusion a viewer draws has deep cultural implications. The patterns reveal intimately how Japanese culture expresses its sense of form.
Another section of the book reveals how sei, sanctity, is marked in various contexts. This section is especially interesting for its diversity of forms. Sanctity is marked by sheaves of rice stalks, white folded paper lightning, strings of color and many other "things" that long-time residents often take for granted or simply have ceased to see when stepping into a sacred area. These are subtleties that first-time visitors to Japan might well miss. The positioning of these perfectly cropped photographs has the effect of educating the eye more than presenting an intellectual anthropological argument.
The last section on atsumaru, or collection, is especially intriguing. One after another, repeated rows of torii, masks, sembei, dried fish, paper cranes, daruma, fishnets, lanterns, bottles, and rain-worn jizo statues tantalize the eye with several pages of photographs that become a collection of collections. The focus on this conceptual pattern reveals part of the motivation for this book in the interplay between form and content. A little irony is revealed in the final photo of seven silver discs on the side of a mikoshi which reflect, albeit distortedly, the only humans in the collection, festival goers and hidden among them the photographer himself.
The collection works well overall for many reasons, but first of all, the completeness within the limitations set by Straiton. It doesn't try to do too much, only seven sections, but within those sections, it would be hard to imagine any other photos to include. The extent of choices is not exhaustive either, just right and continually surprising. The photos are also well-documented with an easy-to-use set of explanations at the end of where every shot was taken. At first, the detail about these shots feels overdone: What difference would it make if the shot was at this temple or that temple? But after repeated looking, it does start to matter. The documentation provides an important comment about the range and kind of places throughout Japan where these forms appear. Some shots could be anywhere, but most have important locations that matter.
Also important to the overall impact of the book is the superb quality of the photographs themselves. The color is well-reproduced in the printing. The sharpness of detail becomes important when two, much less four or six, photographs rest side by side. The angles, even on seemingly "simple" shots, always feel right, and shadows fall in all the right places, for example, when a wooden grate casts its shadows into a gray cross pattern on the paper behind. The cropping of the photos, most of them close-ups, is especially important for the effect of focusing attention onto the pattern while still allowing contrast. Too much cropping would end up with decontextualized form, but not enough would be distracting and make comparison difficult. Straiton carefully enlarges and reduces his photos so that, for example, a series of different-sized birds from a fence, a tansu lock, a noren, and a dyed cloth can be seen together on the same page. The attention to these details makes his book an artistic work in itself, far different from the usual coffee-table souvenir.
This is a thoughtful and thought-inspiring collection. Part of the measure of a photography book is not only that it can show what's hidden, too-familiar, or unexpected, but the degree to which it educates in a new way of seeing. Straiton's collection succeeds in all those ways wonderfully.
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