Conclusion: Questioning Indexicality and Mediating Reality
The eight works by the three VIVO photographers––Tōmatsu Shōmei, Hosoe Eikoh, and Kawada Kikuji––in this exhibition reflect three individualistic visions of the social and cultural reality in Japan in the early 1960s. Moving beyond the kind of photography characterized by objective documentation in the Photo-Realist movement, the three photographers recounted collective social realities in idiosyncratic ways.
Through tactful compositional strategies and technical manipulation, Tōmatsu Shōmei probed into the intimate facets of his subjects and transformed these highly personal fragments of everyday scenes into provocative emblems of critical moments in the recent history of Japan, thus blurring the boundaries between personal and collective memories, as well as contemporary and historical moments. Hosoe Eikoh experimented with the performative quality of photography. Via means of juxtaposition and superimposition, Hosoe repurposed different cultural traditions and reimagined human bodily forms and individual identities to create a Surrealist theatre that both disguises reality and unveils hidden meanings from it. Finally, Kawada Kikuji’s photobook The Map constructs intriguing temporal and spatial experiences and multiple narratives through the provoking resonances among the photographs presented in the special kannon-biraki format. From a subject matter to a photographic image, and from a photograph to a photobook, the eight works on display demonstrate a diverse range of ways that the VIVO photographers mediated reality.
Contrary to the assumption about photography that by snapping the shutter one forever perpetuates a specific moment at a particular location into a fixed entity, the works featured in this exhibition call into question photography’s relationship to time, to index, and to any stable narrative. Not only do these works divert from the Photojournalist goal of faithfully documenting and preserving reality, but they also actively challenge common perceptions about the stability of reality and the credibility of the medium of photography. Nevertheless, it is also in the action of deconstructing reality that these photographs restore and reinvent new dimensions of reality––just like the medium of photography, reality is but an unstable, multi-dimensional construct.