The Face in the Shadow of the Camera: Corporeality of the Photographer in Kanai Mieko’s Narratives

Abstract

The Face in the Shadow of the Camera: Corporeality of the Photographer in Kanai Mieko’s Narratives Atsuko Sakaki (bio) The photographer realizes that she is confined to her limited “vision,” or to a part, and yet, precisely because of it, she aspires to encapsulate the whole. It is also an attempt at overcoming vision itself. —Taki Kōji, “Me to me narazaru mono” (1970, The eye and that which is not), in Shashinron shūsei(Compendium of essays on photography) We stand between the two impulses: to entirely become an “eye,” and to become “that which is not an eye.” —Taki Kōji, “Me to me narazaru mono” In the opening scene of Edward Sedgwick’s silent film The Cameraman (1928), the protagonist, played by Buster Keaton, then a tintype photographer who takes portraits for passersby, proves to be physically susceptible to the dynamic flux of masses of people as they participate in and witness ongoing events on the street (Figure 1). As a means of approaching the woman of his dreams, Keaton’s character replaces his tintype camera, capable only of representing static images of posing models, with a more up-to-date newsreel camera. With this new equipment he ends up capturing two events of documentary [End Page 57] value—street fighting and a boating accident—in long and dramatic sequences, fully encapsulating the actions of entire bodies engaged in a struggle for survival. In the process he garners both professional success and personal happiness (the latter because his film inadvertently proves he has saved his sweetheart’s life). The subtext is a celebration of motion pictures, as opposed to comparably inert and lifeless photographs. Susan Sontag cites this film in her book On Photography in the context of discussing the myth that the camera never misses the mark: Unlike the fine-art objects of pre-democratic eras, photographs don’t seem deeply beholden to the intentions of an artist. Rather, they owe their existence to loose cooperation (quasi-magical, quasi-accidental) between photographer and subject—mediated by an ever simpler and more automated machine, which is tireless, and which even when capricious can produce a result that is interesting and never entirely wrong. (The sales pitch for the first Kodak, in 1888, was: “You press the button, we do the rest.” The purchaser was guaranteed that the picture would be “without any mistake.”) In the fairy tale of photography the magic box insures veracity and banishes error, compensates for inexperience and rewards innocence. The myth is tenderly parodied in a 1928 silent film, The Cameraman, which has an inept dreamy Buster Keaton vainly struggling with his dilapidated apparatus, knocking out windows and doors whenever he picks up his tripod, never managing to take one decent picture, yet finally getting some great footage (a photojournalist scoop of a tong war in New York’s Chinatown)—by inadvertence. It is the hero’s pet monkey who loads the camera with film and operates it in part of the time.1 Though the camera that Keaton struggles with, “knocking out windows and doors,” is not one for photographing but rather for filming, The Cameraman—the way Sontag frames it—still confirms the prominence of the photographer’s own physical presence. The awkwardness and out-of-place-ness of being there with the object—of photographing “here and now”—is acutely felt as the photographer’s body, too, is made into a spectacle. As Roland Barthes puts it: “The Photographer’s ‘second sight’ does not consist in ‘seeing’ but in being there.” 2 Photographers can be highly visible in public in the act of taking [End Page 58] pictures, which does not necessarily conform to normal everyday behavior; with their conspicuous equipment, they become spectacles themselves. Some of the points Sontag makes in this passage resonate with the concerns of Kanai Mieko (b. 1947), a poet turned novelist and visual arts critic, with regard to the contrast between the intentionality and contingency of the act of photographing, and the coordination (or lack thereof) between the body and the machine during this act. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Keaton struggles with a camera in The Cameraman. In...