Photographic Practice Research Articles

Reconfiguring materiality in contemporary Japanese photography after 3.11

In this essay, I analyse landscape photography produced in the aftermath of the tsunami and earthquake that hit Japan in March 2011. The aim of the essay is to unpack the profound impact the disaster has hct 3ad, and is having, and how this can be observed in the type of photographic practices that since emerged in Japan. As I will argue, one of the greatest transformations can be seen in the way artists and photographers subvert the material integrity of the image itself.

The writing, transformation, and rewriting of photo archives in Chinese photography from the 1940s to date

In recent years, photographers around the globe have begun to break the conventional linear sequence in the construction of photographic texts, opting for a new wave that allows multiple narrative strategies of the real or the fictional. They fuse documents, historical photos, texts, and carefully-constructed images, taking viewers to times and places in the past, to boundaries that can or cannot be told. This kind of practice not only reflects the artists’ interest and urgent desire to delve into history but also reveals the space that has been opened for photographic practices by the richness of social and cultural environments in history. In China, the research on archival art and its phenomena have appeared continuously in recent years, but it is mostly written based the theories of western scholars, such as T. R. Schellenberg, Jacques Derrida, Michael Shanks and others, and lacks discussion on archives in the political, social and cultural context of modern and contemporary China. Based on my ongoing research on the historical narrative of contemporary Chinese photography, this paper will focus on the relationship between archives and photographic art in a broader context, examining the following three interrelated archival issues: the production, dissemination, and storage of public photo archives in the 1940s; the development of the resource structure of photo archives in the recent past; and the different methods of transforming photo archives into works of art in contemporary Chinese photography.

The Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices under Chile's Dictatorship by Ángeles Donoso Macaya

Reviewed by: The Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices under Chile's Dictatorship by Ángeles Donoso Macaya Clayton Oppenhuizen The Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices under Chile's Dictatorship. By Ángeles Donoso Macaya. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2020, p. 250, $80.00 Ángeles Donoso Macaya's book The Insubordination of Photography examines the importance of photography as a documentary tool to denounce, protest, and defy the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). Macaya challenges the notion that photographs are indexical ephemera by examining their production, representation, and construction in public spheres in Chile. Developing from the concept of "field" in queer theories of Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed, the central concept of the book is "depth of field" which refers to "what is discernible, intelligible, or visible within the expanding field of photography" (4). Through meticulous examination of counter-archives of reproduced (photocopied) photos, amended IDs, forensic photography, precarious photographic publications, and censored media, each chapter provides a glimpse and reframing of the importance of various photography practices to oppositional movements and their media during the dictatorship. The first two chapters, "Persistence of the Portrait" and "Forensic Matter," examine the multifarious ways photographs, as documents, shaped the public sphere. "Persistence of the Portrait" examines the use of amended state IDs in various campaigns – on TV displays, as posters, in print media, and on protesters – during some of the earliest opposition demonstrations and performances that emerged starting in the late 1970s and flourished in the 1980s. Chilean photographers and activists used photographs of the detained and disappeared to draw attention to violations of human rights. These demonstrations also made icons of the photographs. The most emblematic example from the chapter is that of Hernán Parada's "Obrabierta A," a project wherein Parada commemorated his disappeared brother's life by wearing an enlarged portrait of his brother over his face while demonstrating on the streets of Santiago and visiting the veterinary school where his brother studied. The practice of wearing his brother's portrait as a sort of skin in public was, according to the author, a "loving/photographic act" that transformed both subject (Hernán) and beholder (77) by repurposing family portraits and state IDs from documents to signifiers of missing persons and emblematic materials in protests. Historians of media, particularly print media, in Chile will find the third and fourth chapters of most interest. Chapter three, "Emergence of a Field," traces the discursive emergence of a photographic field through the creation of the Asociación de Fotógrafos Independientes (AFI) and the creation of inexpensive books like Presencia del Hombre and Ediciones económicas de fotografia Chilena. Due to the nature of censorship and the overhaul of the Chilean economy, the photographic field as constituted [End Page 579] in the halcyon days of the 1950s and 1960s did not exist. However, the field was created "anew" through the practices of photographers like Paz Errázuriz and Luis Navarro (142) who documented the quotidian lives of average Chileans, depicting life in Chile outside of explicit repression but still within the precarity of the regime. Ediciones económicas also depicted daily lives of Chileans but also transformed the medium but using a Ricoh copying machine – a more affordable and often better version than a Xerox (145-6) – to reproduce images and composed entirely new images from the amalgamation and repeated copying of photos. Chapter four, "Photography Off Limits," charts the efforts of Chilean independent press to chronical the national protests in 1984 despite the censoring of all images within their pages. In response to anti-regime protests in the years before, the military regime announced Edict Number 19 in September 1984, banning independent media from using any images in their publications. This ban on images led independent publications Cauce and Análisis to emphasize reference to the censored images. Two such examples include Cauce claiming that a blank image contained all the rights afforded to Chileans, while Análisis filled their photographic space with a printed question mark made up of the words "cuantos son, quienes son, donde estan". The censorship backfired as activists and journalists used the banned images as a means of debating freedom of press and freedom of...

Los Coloquios Latinoamericanos de Fotografía: hacia una definición de la fotografía hecha en Latinoamérica

En el presente artículo nos proponemos reflexionar sobre los Coloquios Latinoamericanos de Fotografía que tuvieron lugar entre los años 1978 y 1996, en los que se buscó definir y categorizar a la fotografía latinoamericana. Dichos Coloquios se propusieron situar a la fotografía latinoamericana en el contexto de las actividades de la fotografía internacional, y propiciar una reflexión crítica sobre la identidad visual de las prácticas fotográficas de la región. En este sentido, buscamos indagar los documentos y actas de los coloquios a fin de proporcionar una lectura sobre el pensamiento sobre la fotografía latinoamericana en aquel contexto, partiendo del Primer Coloquio Latinoamericano de Fotografía realizado en México en 1978 y su evolución entre los encuentros posteriores: Segundo Coloquio Latinoamericano de Fotografía (México, 1981); Tercer Coloquio Latinoamericano de Fotografía (Cuba, 1984); Encuentro de Fotografía Latinoamericana (Venezuela, 1993); y Quinto coloquio Latinoamericano de Fotografía (México, 1996), intentando identificar los conceptos teóricos y visuales centrales.

Documentación escrita y fotográfica parametrizada del Monumento a Francisco de Paula Valladar (Granada) como útil para su valoración, difusión y conservación

Esta investigación define las características del Monumento a Francisco de Paula Valladar y Serrano (Granada). Su objetivo es documentar la escultura y para ello es preciso datar su ubicación geográfica, obtener su descripción, medidas y materiales de construcción, analizar su contexto histórico-cultural, concretar su lectura, considerar su valor patrimonial y exponer su estado de conservación. La metodología utilizada es teórica documental y de práctica fotográfica parametrizada, geolocalizadora y de orientación espacial. Las conclusiones obtenidas determinan que esta escultura monumental está ubicada en los Jardines del Genil (Granada), su acceso es por el paseo de la Bomba, su localización presenta una Latitud de 37º16´78.31´´ N y una Longitud de 3º59´98.45´´ E, su orientación frontal es NE-SO, sus medidas totales son de 232 x 76 x 76 cm. Se trata de una obra formada por peana pétrea -con alegorías femeninas y textos- y busto masculino de bronce patinado, su estilo es figurativo, su valor histórico es considerable, su lectura es conmemorativa y de homenaje, su contexto histórico de creación es culturalmente importante, su estado de conservación es medio y necesita restauración. La difusión de esta información contribuye a actualizar la memoria del patrimonio artístico de la ciudad. This research defines the characteristics of the Monument to Francisco de Paula Valladar y Serrano (Granada). Its objective is to document the sculpture and for this it is necessary to date its geographical location, obtain its description, measurements and construction materials, analyze its historical-cultural context, specify its reading, consider its heritage value and expose its state of conservation. The methodology used is documentary theory and parametric photographic practice, geolocation and spatial orientation. The conclusions obtained determine that this monumental sculpture is located in the Jardines del Genil (Granada), its access is through the Paseo de la Bomba, its location has a Latitude of 37º16´78.31´´ N and a Longitude of 3º59´98.45´´ E, its frontal orientation is NE-SO, its total measurements are 232 x 76 x 76 cm. It is a work formed by a stone base - with feminine allegories and texts - and a patinated bronze male bust, its style is figurative, its historical value is considerable, its reading is commemorative and tribute, its historical context of creation is culturally important, its state of conservation is medium and needs restoration. The dissemination of this information contributes to updating the memory of the city’s artistic heritage.

Fotografia i film w praktyce artystycznej oraz propozycjach teoretycznych Davida Hockneya

In his diverse works, David Hockney has used, and still uses, various media, which in some periods of his activity gained leading significance, while in the following they were abandoned or temporarily abandoned. But no matter what medium in the given period was the main form of creativity, the focus of his interest has always been the issue of image and imaging. The article is devoted to the practice and theoretical recognition of photography, which was a kind of introduction to experiments with a moving image. The author refers to the artist's numerous publications on the theory and history of image and imaging (including Secret Knowledge, History of Images, On Photography). Photography led to Hockney's audiovisual realizations. This is a kind of repetition of the natural evolution and developmental progression of the media, also, and perhaps above all, in the technological dimension. The article is divided into three parts. In the first part, the author presents Hockney as a practitioner and theoretician, in whose activities both these activities are closely intertwined. This is a sign of the times: practice and theory are equally important, awareness of the medium, or artistic and aesthetic self-awareness of artists, is an expression of the spirit of the era in which an intuitive approach to art today seems inefficient, not to say impossible. Hockney appears to be an exemplary artist, who is extremely conceptual in his artistic practice as a consequence of his research on the history of art and a constantly developed set of his own theoretical findings. He is an artist discursively commenting not only on his work as an artist in many media (painting, drawing, graphics, set design, photography, film, computer graphics), but also an art and media theoretician reflecting on the fate of images in a changing media landscape. The second part of the article is devoted to the reconstruction of Hockney's theoretical reflections on photography and the analysis of his photographic projects. First of all, experimental Polaroid compositions created in the early eighties, named by the artist joiners, as well as photographic collages and photographic images realized in the later periods of the British artist's work. The third part considers digital movies, as Hockney calls them, audiovisual realizations referring to both his previous photographic works and experimental video films in which multi-camera systems are used.

The Politics of Invisibility: Visualizing Legacies of Nuclear Imperialisms

Questions of visibility, witnessing, and agency are particularly pertinent to post-1945 US and French nuclear testing across Oceania. Images of enormous hovering atomic mushroom clouds have become familiar icons of this testing, while images of the effects of colonial–imperial occupation and ideology in the Pacific are rendered invisible within government-controlled imagery. Alternative forms of visualization are required to be able to (re)see the human experiences that remain central to contemporary Pacific militarization and the legacies of nuclear weapons testing. Images, be they from social media and online platforms, archives, or public exhibitions, have the political potential to make visible Indigenous experiences of nuclear testing and ongoing militarization. Here, our work expands the concept of transnational studies by centering Oceanic, archipelagic, and island thinking. This article explores how contemporary photographic imagery politicizes what has been rendered (in)visible through state-produced imagery, archiving practices, and US national park recognition.  Focusing on American-born Chinese visual artist Jane Chang Mi’s series (See Reverse Side.) (2017) and Marshallese photojournalist and filmmaker Leonard Leon’s (@pacific_aesthetics) series of Instagram posts (2019), we argue that their methods of image-making can enable alternative forms of socioethical witnessing and visibility of not only state-produced archival images but also of the Indigenous Pacific communities who are deeply affected by nuclear testing and ongoing militarization. Through close readings of their works, we question how photographic practices communicate the humanity of nuclear military conduct while bringing their viewers closer to the human experience of living in a highly militarized and nuclear context.

Post-photography: Lens-based methodology and practice-led ways of critical thinking

Contemporary photographic practice has evolved into a broad field of possibilities, a ‘post- photography’ moment that comprises fluxes of representational modes to represent experiences, feelings and emotions. In parallel the depth and layering of places offers an exciting challenge to researchers and artists whom are willing to creatively explore the multi- sensorial and spatial ‘reality’ of places. These thoughts underpin my recently completed practice- led PhD research at Te Awa River Ride, a shared pathway that edges the banks of the Waikato River from Ngāruawāhia to Cambridge, in the central North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. I explore notions of place and place- making by presenting an installation of photographs titled South of the Rising Sun. I offer this photography installation as a creative milestone which resulted from a methodology of iteration and artistic expression.
 The lens- based component of my PhD research covered the construction of a body of photographic work aiming to represent the ways photographic practices and technologies are embedded within the ways we perceive place and create place-making. My lens- based practice is primarily informed by post- photography methods underpinned by the idea that photographs do not function as pure depictions of reality or single objective representations. On the contrary, I understand photographic practices and images as sources for the construction of multiple meanings. Within this context, I explore the possibilities of a range of camera apparatuses and modes of photographic representation such as documentary, portraiture, landscape and fine art photography.
 Lens- based practice therefore is located at the core of my critical thinking processes; a space, which feeds both theoretical and practice- led research approaches. This is the crucial moment when I try to align theoretical frameworks with photographic image construction processes and subsequent curation, sequencing, compilation, design and presentation of images. Processes such as curation, sequencing, compilation and photo narrative construction are key to my lens-based practice. These processes are integral to an iterative methodology of place-making inquiry connected to four different creative milestones. The stepping through of the creative milestones is intended to allow an understanding of my theoretical framework and research methods and how these work together as part of a complex practice- led research system. 
 Creative milestones are curatorial research products. They mark points within the overall research time frame. Each creative milestone involved the construction of a photo narrative. The first creative milestone covered the outputting of a photobook while the second involved explorations of digitally based platforms. The third and fourth creative milestones marked further explorations around sequencing, photo montage and photo narrative within photography installation platforms. 
 My presentation at the 2020 Link Symposium will unpack my lens- based methodology, arguing the ways post- photography practice informs methodological research approaches en route to critical ways of thinking and outputting of artistically based research products. This research model can also be argued as an artistically informed practice- led methodology of place-making.

After the Tourists Depart

This essay explores multiple aspects of a domestic tourism boom that has occurred in Ladakh, India, over the past two decades. It considers the nature of tourism itself within the context of leisure as a commodity and how visual interventions and photographic practices brand a tourist destination as a consumable idea, making a case for the inseparability of image and destination and arguing that the constructed image of a destination attracts a collective gaze. This perspective is then applied to the consumerist trajectory/ tragedy of Ladakh, which since the economic liberalization of India has been visually negotiated through imageries of the area as a destination for adventure and exotica. This experience is enacted through the consumerist practices of packaged tourism, and through a visual exploration of material remains—the paper documents material leftovers discarded by tourists.

Researching early photography of the Pacific Islands: An overview

Historical research on the early years of photography in the Pacific Islands has revealed changes in the practice of photography, the development of Pacific imagery, tropes and stereotypes and changes in the ways images were distributed, archived and used in modern contexts. Research in the field was initially focused on photography’s indexical nature and the role of professional and amateur photographers, travellers, colonial officials and missionaries. The research highlighted here, only in the English language and excluding Aotearoa/New Zealand, reveals how later analyses have begun to grow more theoretical, in keeping with postcolonial approaches to reading cross-cultural representation, and how new directions in research point towards the nature of Indigenous engagement with early photography.

Making Space

In this interview, artist and scholar Deborah Willis describes the work of excavating and organizing the history of Black photography. Willis’s groundbreaking scholarship helped to formally establish an archive of Black visual practice before libraries and cultural institutions began to purposely catalogue such materials. Across projects, she has engaged questions of beauty, citizenship, Black culture, and family history from the nineteenth century to the present by closely examining the camera practices of legendary photographers and the cultural contexts surrounding iconic images. In this interview, Willis describes her research as a student relying on periodical records as well as on the support of Black artists such as Roy DeCarava, Carrie Mae Weems, Gordon Parks, and James VanDerZee. This conversation with the author intertwines Willis’s personal history and the history of creating a visual archive to offer a look back and a look forward at the practice of Black photography.

“It’s classy because you can’t see things”: data from a project co-creating sexy images of young women

ABSTRACT Public and academic debates about sexualisation suggest that selfies taken by women of their own bodies, for display on Instagram, are sexualising and harming them. This paper reports on a “compare and contrast” project where a professional photographer (myself) took photographs of women who are sexy self-representers on Instagram. It is an examination of the aesthetics and practices of amateur and professional photography in this context, and draws attention to the role of class in making aesthetic judgements about women’s sexy selfies. I argue that these respective photographic regimes produce and affirm their own sets of values which reveal the hierarchical and prejudiced nature of visual (and wider) culture as it relates to representations of women’s bodies. I report on the verbal and visual languages used by participants and myself to make visible differing classed standards, through the concepts of what is “tasteful” and what is “vulgar”. Dominant discourses about sexualised self-representations of women that focus on risks to the selfie-taker mask prejudices regarding class. The privileging of professional or “high art” aesthetics over amateur, “everyday aesthetics” perpetuates a policing and marginalising of women’s bodies and sexualities and helps maintain long-standing ideals of female respectability and sexual decorum.

On machine vision and photographic imagination

In this article we introduce the concept of implied optical perspective in deep learning computer vision systems. Taking the BBC's experimental television programme “Made by Machine: When AI met the Archive” (2018) as a case study, we trace a conceptual and material link between the system used to automatically “watch” the television archive and a specific type of photographic practice. From a computational aesthetics perspective, we show how deep learning machine vision relies on photography, its technical regimes and epistemic advantages, and we propose a novel way to identify the latent camera through which the BBC archive was seen by machine.

TÜRKİYE’DE FOTOĞRAF ELEŞTİRİSİ VE FOTOĞRAFIN TEMSİL KRİZİ ÜZERİNE BİR İNCELEME

Bu çalışma Türkiye’de entelektüel ve sürekli bir geleneğe sahip olmayan fotoğraf eleştirisi ve buna bağlı olarak temsil krizi ve güncel fotoğraf üretiminin pratik ve kuramsal bağlamda incelenmesine odaklanmıştır. Çalışmanın amacı, Türkiye’de fotoğraf eleştirisi bağlamında ele alınan yazıları değerlendirerek özellikle güncel fotoğrafa karşı oluşan önyargı ve eksik eleştirilerin sebepleri üzerinde durmaktır. Türkiye’de 2000’li yılların başından itibaren ivmelenen güncel öznel yaklaşımlar ve buna karşı oluşan eleştiriler bu çalışmanın ana konusunu oluşturmaktadır. Geniş Açı ve Kontrast fotoğraf kültürü dergilerinin incelendiği çalışma, fotoğraf eleştirisi ve güncel fotoğraf pratiğinin tarihsel ve güncel analizini ortaya koymaya çalışmaktadır. Bu açıdan dergilerde yer alan makaleler, güncel fotoğraf pratiğinin hangi bağlamda eleştirildiğini ve bu bağlamın kuramsal olarak nasıl bir argümanla ortaya çıktığını göstermektedir. Çalışma, modernist eleştirilerin karşısında pratikleşen güncel yaklaşımların daha çok postmodern bağlamda ele alınması gereken sinik bir tavır ile değerlendirilmesini önermektedir. Buradan hareketle çalışma bazı sorulara odaklanmaktadır. Türkiye’de fotoğraf üzerine yapılan eleştirilerin bağlamı nedir; eleştiriler güncel fotoğraf pratiği ve yeni ivmelenmeyi nasıl değerlendiriyor; öznel yaklaşımlar fotografik olarak nasıl bir yöntem bilim ile karşımıza çıkıyor ve bu yeni ivmelenme neden geç avangart olarak adlandırılıyor?

Clean eating and Instagram: purity, defilement, and the idealization of food

ABSTRACT Food cultures are shaped by the ubiquity of digital photography. Embedded in social media sites, such as Instagram, images of food are used in photographic exchanges to perform identity and interact with community. In a context of proliferating food media, an ethics of “clean eating” – a dietary practice adhering to consuming “healthy” foods deemed to be “pure” – is presented as a form of moral food consumption that embraces particular foods while eschewing others. In this article we explore the symbolic dimensions of top post clean eating food images associated with the hashtags #eatclean and #cleaneating and consider how they mobilize photographic practices to present and encourage this lifestyle. Drawing on Mary Douglas and Erving Goffman as our theoretical foundation, we argue that the photographic capturing of food plays a symbolic role in extolling purity through the presentation of idealized images of “clean” foods that are contrasted with foods perceived as defiled. Clean eating posts draw on forms of idealization that aims to garner esteem and attention, while also generating a sense of community through food media. These practices are also configured around an ethics of food that encourage responsible consumption for the individual as a healthy subject.

Point and Shoot: Originality, Authorship, and the Identification of the Copyright Work in Modern Photography

This article explores how profound technological developments in photography have problematised concepts of the photograph, authorship, and originality in Australian copyright law. Radical technological change has resulted in highly automated and ubiquitous photographs, inviting questions about what constitutes a ‘photograph’ as defined in the Australian Copyright Act, when a photograph is sufficiently original, and how the definition of an ‘author’ of a photograph as the person who ‘took’ it should be interpreted. The paper is the first to analyse these issues, ameliorating the relative dearth of serious scholarly investigation of the contemporary photograph under Australian copyright law and a paucity of judicial attention. The article considers the meaning of ‘photograph’ and ‘photography’ under the Australian Copyright Act and how software and explains how new practices in a ‘post-photography’ world challenge those concepts. It then explores photographic originality and investigates how increasingly automated modes of photography diminish if not eviscerate originality in contemporary photography. The article then focuses on photographic authorship, interrogating the statutory definition of the author of a photograph as ‘the person who took it’. The article proposes a number of copyright law reform suggestions to better align copyright law with contemporary photographic technological developments and artistic practice.

The things they carried: a gendered rereading of photographs of displacement during the Spanish Civil War

ABSTRACT During the Spanish Civil War, photojournalism established itself as a modern practice. Photographers situated themselves as autonomous agents, offering passionate, implicated coverage of a war that engaged collective emotions. Their photographic practices were staunchly rooted in the tenets of observation without eschewing political commitment. In this paper, we argue that Spanish Civil War photographers, specifically Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, Kati Horna and David “Chim” Seymour, developed a range of visual practices that were entangled with questions regarding gender and politics. Both in the production of images and in their circulation and reception, photographers were acutely attuned to the politics of visually representing human suffering. Although ideals linked to the male soldier were essential to establishing the figure of the modern photo-reporter, we argue that war photographers produced something far more complex than a simple “masculine” gaze. By considering photographs that captured experiences of wartime displacement, we analyze the figure of the mother as a key visual trope in the Spanish Civil War archive. We argue that photographs of mothers on the move provide a window into understanding how, despite humanitarian claims to political neutrality, humanitarian photographic practice is deeply political in its ability to situate practices of care at the center of visual strategies deployed to narrate and represent the horrors of war.

The Negative Image before the Photographic Negative

ABSTRACT In photography, a negative is an image that presents a reversed grading of tonalities with respect to the subject. This tone inversion is the direct consequence of the light-sensitive silver halide compound used to capture an image in a camera: it darkens in areas that are exposed to the brightest parts of the subject. These inverted images intrigued early practitioners of photography, who learned to use them as an intermediary in the process of producing multiple photographic prints. Thus, the practice of photography popularized the negative to a wide audience. Today, the history of the negative image is intimately linked to that of photography to such an extent that the negative image is sometimes considered a purely photographic object. However, both black-and-white and color negative images were observed and described long before the era of photography. This paper explores the earliest manifestations of negative images, the relevant terminology introduced by the first photographers, and the relationship of the negative to the production of multiple photographic prints.

Carlos Relvas’s Stereoscopic Photography: The Digital Reunion of Negatives and Prints

European stereoscopic photography owes a significant part of its cultural specificity to amateur photographers who resorted to the wet collodion process to document nature with reduced exposure times and to perfect their photographic art with crisper and more detailed images. The Portuguese Carlos Relvas (1838–94) was one of these renowned collodion practitioners. Until recently, most of his stereoscopic collections remained undigitised and unstudied, and the contribution of stereoscopy to the launch of his international career was little known. The building of an online catalogue raisonné dedicated to Relvas’s stereoscopic photography has been an opportunity to undertake a combined study of his stereoscopic negatives and prints, making it possible to retrieve new information about the extent, importance and evolution of his stereoscopic work. While designed to make these collections digitally available, the catalogue offers a new perspective on the specific value of stereoscopic negatives and cross-referenced ‘image families’ for a new understanding of photographic practice. By re-examining the opportunities offered by digital collections, this article sheds light on their potential to remodel the memory and historic value of a nineteenth-century photographer and, in particular, to properly showcase stereoscopic photography.

Secret Eroticism and Lived Religion

Abstract Through interviews and personal observation, this essay introduces the photographer Ogano Minoru, exploring his particular take on the practice of matsuri photography. In his photos, Ogano tries to visually capture the affective aspects of matsuri as experienced by participants. He suggests that even when matsuri are not organized through religious institutions, they emerge from deeply held beliefs and everyday life concerns in the local community. The concluding part of the article is a brief photo essay about mushi-okuri and related matsuri in the Tsugaru region (Aomori Prefecture).