A brief history of time travel

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Japanese Dream

By Monica Maffioli

You are going to have to clear some space on the table, or, if you must travel in your armchair may I suggest a large cushion on your lap. The book is unwieldy, but get comfortable because this is going to be quite a journey. Japanese Dream opens with a short essay. It need not detain you long; this book is all about the photographs. Or perhaps it would be best to say that it is all about the photograph – it is an object lesson in what a strange thing they did in the mid 19th century when they found a way to grab a little piece of time and dispatch it towards the future. With Japanese Dream you are not just heading East, but you are heading back, back to the dawn of the modern world.

The world of these photographs does not appear modern. But look carefully. The first two images make the point well enough. In the first you are looking at a huge Buddha towering above a shrine tended by two young boys.  One of the boys is almost hidden and seems to be looking towards a man in a hat with his back to the camera. But the other is looking directly at you. Or rather he is looking directly at your mechanical eye, which has been set up with the precise intention of capturing and then distributing his image through time and space. The next photograph is a street scene. Someone has added some colours by hand and a beautiful pink fills the top half of the double page. In the street there are people going about their daily tasks, but something has disturbed them, and they look towards it as an alien presence. It is you again.

You are not just looking in on a vanished world, but it is looking back at you, trying to take the measure of this intrusion. In a few minutes the machine will have been packed away and moved off in search of new delights, and no doubt things will carry on in the street almost as though nothing has happened. But it has and it is monumental. The tempo has changed, imperceptibly at first, but the acceleration has begun.

These first huge images are extraordinary, and it would be pure pleasure to linger here. We could spend hours, for example, on the river bank, under the cherry blossom again. But we are only in the first section and this book contains whole universes.

Next, ‘The Feminine Universe’. Let’s look at Four Geishas Seen from Behind. Or more precisely let’s look at their hair. Like the Japanese Zen garden, these intricate styles seem to represent the landscape in miniature, and then, by extension, the cosmos. The Geisha’s hair is the perfect subject for the new art form. It was made for contemplation and, as with a landscape, in this photograph you are at liberty to take your time.

But skip forward two pages. Something altogether more complex is happening in this tableau. You are looking in on the creation of one of these microcosms; one lady stands behind, fixing the hair of the other who kneels on a tatami. Everything is peace and tranquillity. But look at the mirror. You’ve been caught. She is looking at you looking at her. She is not, however, alarmed by an alien presence as in the street scene, but her serene regard adds a new tension which will be exploited massively by the film industry in the coming century. ‘Carry on looking, and enjoy yourself, but don’t think I don’t know what is going on.’ This is the new message, and it marks a new degree of sophistication. It suggests a society becoming comfortable with a visual technology that is in the process of being absorbed into the culture.

In the 20th century Japanese companies will drive developments in this field, and a new stereotype will emerge of the Japanese tourist, obsessively viewing the world via the images he is able to make of it. These days they are not alone, and other than its sumptuous qualities as an object in its own right, this is perhaps the great interest of Japanese Dream. It is not simply what is on the page that is fascinating. The photographs are also a record of the arrival of the photograph itself as a means of interacting with the world, and as we know, this will change everything.

We didn’t get very far into the book, and I never got to tell you about the tattoos, the vendors, the bathroom scene... in fact we barely scratched the surface.

Japanese Dream by Monica Maffioli is published by Hatje Cantz, 2012. 132 pp., 56 colour illus. ISBN 978-3-7757-3437-0