Transparent and Mysterious: On Collecting, the Photograph and Tomio Seike

Abstract

In this article, the author puts theories about aesthetics, vision and looking into practice when considering Tomio Seike’s Untitled #3 (1995). The photograph’s subject (a bare arm, languidly stretched over a piece of furniture) draws the viewer to an initial assumption: that the photograph is of a nude woman. However, other visual clues in the photograph complicate that assumption, and help explain why, as a collector, the author was drawn to it and remains captivated by the image. Untitled #3 is part of an artistic conversation not only with other photographs in Seike’s oeuvre, but also with other artists (Japanese and non‐Japanese) who focus on the body. Seike’s work is both a part of the tradition which produced masters such as Imogen Cunningham in the West and Nobuyoshi Araki in the East, and a quiet rebellion against that same tradition. The intimate, lushly toned, contemplative work invites the viewer into a way of seeing influenced by the Japanese concept of matsuri, the balance between noise and stillness. By considering these seemingly disparate elements, the author untangles at least part of the mystery which makes up the meaning of Tomio Seike’s Untitled #3, and illustrates why, in the words of Susan Sontag, photographic messages are both “transparent and mysterious”. If photographs are messages, the message is both transparent and mysterious. (Sontag 1999, p. 111)