Shutter & Love:
Girls are Dancin' on in Tokyo
Conceived and Edited by Kohtaro Iizawa
INFAS: Tokyo
Rainbow-coloured jelly beans and condoms; a smiling Mickey Mouse emerging from between the splayed legs of a squatting girl; a worn-out toy bunny thrown down onto the floor of a messy room: these are some of the images to be encountered in this compilation of works by 16 young Japanese female photographers. As the title suggests, the book is about girls' vision of their own queendom, built upon the fragile, ephemeral peak of their own fantasies or boringly normal everyday routines. Girls are arrested in moments of intimacy - lying naked in bed with another girl, or taking a bath in a tiny unit bathroom' that symbolises the life of young singles living alone in Tokyo.
The publication is timely considering two fashions that have emerged in Tokyo in the gos - diaristic, snapshot photography and girly culture. Araki emerged as artist of the moment with his 'private novel' works, and arty Tokyoites - who haven't even heard of Jeff Koons - are comfortably familiar with the names of Nan Goldin, Jack Pierson and Wolfgang Tillmans. Now that Yurie Nagashima, harbinger of the 20-some- thing generation, has published two books following her sensational 1993 debut, and the ex-Araki- model-now-cult-idol/photographer Hiromix's photos of herself and her friends have featured in the 1995-96 J-Wave FM campaign posters, young girls are flooding out onto the streets with every conceivable type of camera from 'professional' SLRs to compacts and disposables.
Two questions arise: why have so many girls started to take pictures of themselves, their world, their (mainly female) friends and objects so stereotypically attributed
to female adolescence? And why has their work obtained the amount of media coverage that it currently receives?
It is only since the late 80s that the media have used images of 'unseemly' Japanese girls rather than TV idols, foreign models or exceptionally un-Japanese-looking Japanese models. Previously, the appearance of ordinary Japanese girls had been largely limited to more private realms - family photo albums or subculture magazines. Even after this recent phenomenon, girls were mainly the objects of photography, rather than its subjects. But now that female photographers are openly welcomed as artists or commercial photographers (can a line still be drawn clearly between the two?), perhaps they can finally switch their assumed role and leave their long- reserved seats in front of the viewfinder.
Girlishness is a quality that has been applauded in Japanese culture, high and low alike, at least since the age of Meiji-Taisho Modernism of the 1910s and 20s. Yet, in its recent reappraisal, girlishness no longer dwells in its old, secret space, but has gradually emerged into a sunnier, public sphere. Banana Yoshimoto, for example, sold millions of copies of her 1988 debut novel Kitchen (a story about a girl who gets over her grandmother's death through the experience of communal life with her flatmate and his transsexual mother), while girls' comic writers, such as Kyoko Okazaki, have received appreciation from a far wider audience than they originally envisaged. In retrospect, it was no mere coincidence that the rise to prominence of girly culture corresponded with the feminisation of boys, or more precisely, the rise of a Japanese version of Loser Culture. The gorgeous tough guy is out; the laid-back sissy is in.
This shift of mentality can't really be grasped without considering the social environment of Tokyo during the 80s, which Kohtaro Iizawa, the compiler of Shutter and Love, describes thus:
'Suddenly a corner block disappeared as if it had been uprooted, construction work began and shiny new buildings rose high. [...] The scenery of a familiar town would become completely alien in just a few months. [...] As neighbourhoods cloned themselves, individual blocks became standardised and indistinguishable. Thus, one's innate sense of space - of knowing where one is - becomes weakened. Volumes of information zip to and fro, products are everywhere. In such an environment, the tangibility of a city and one's sense of place is gradually lost'.
Now this orgy of superficiality, which dominated everything until the bubble economy finally burst at the turn of the decade, has evaporated like a mirage - even mainstream Japanese patriarchal values have become exhausted.
These pictures testify to the fact that female photographers of this generation (nearly all born in the 1970s) have not remained detached from these social circumstances. Having spent their childhood immersed in a flood of visual information and incessant trend shifts, disseminated through TV, magazines and advertisements, they know very well the vocabulary and strength of the photographic medium. You just have to press the shutter quickly - anywhere, anytime - to capture the sheer velocity of a fleeting reality before it melts into a hazy daydream. The images themselves may be equally fleeting, escaping from memory in a second, but isn't this a similar sort of transient charm to that which has long been treasured as a quality of girlishness? And if the girls are now dreaming of freeze-drying their evanescent world, that dream seems to contain a subtle but insatiable lust. In so many of the images gathered here, the photographers come so close to their subjects that both sides almost lose sight of each other in a blurry resonance, as if anticipating being fused together. Moments of amorous captivation are recorded looming up in an internalised relationship, which is spurred on, as Nagashima suggests, by ‘a desire to become the girl, the one I'm holding my camera for [...] a desire to know her, to possess her, to “monopolise” her'. Is this love or narcissism seeping out from behind the camera? Perhaps girls are always aware of being looked at, even when they are the ones doing the looking.
🌟以下、解題とラスト部分の日本語訳
このレヴューはふたつの設問を巡って展開されています。 ひとつは、なぜ今、女の子が身のまわりの日常をスナップショット的に撮った写真の類が、一種のブームとして、メディアに取り上げられているのかということ。1980年代後半以降、「公的なもの」「強さ」「男性的なもの」 といったコンセプトが疲弊し、一種の「負け犬気質」「ルーザー・カルチャー」が台頭してくるなかで、 従来、周辺的な位置にあった「私的なもの」や 「少女文化」 が、いかにメインストリームの言説の中に取り上げられ、 または取り込まれていくようになったかが説明されています。
第二には、 実際、今回取り上げた写真集の中には10代後半から20代半ばまでの16人の女性による作品が収められているわけですが、それらの作品はどんなものなのか、ナルシシズムの問題を中心に論じています。
「テレビ、雑誌、 公告から溢れ出ては消えてゆくヴィジュアルな情報の流れに身を浸しつつ成長してきたこの世代の彼女たちは、写真という媒体の持つある種の語彙と強みをあたかも「あらかじめ肌で了解していること」のように使いこなす。——いつでも、どこでも、ただ、素早くシャッターボタンを押せばいい、疾走する現実が虚しく広げた両手の隙間からこぼれ落ちて、靄（かすみ）がかった白昼夢の中に溶け消えていってしまう前に——。 写し撮られたイメージもまた同様に、瞬間的なものとして、またたく間に記憶から消え去っていくかもしれないが、そもそもそんな「一過性の魅力」こそ「少女性」の特質として、 つねに、ある特異な愛着をもって、思慕されてきたものではなかったか。そして、もし今、少女たちが自らの消滅を前提とした、期限付きの世界を凍結保存する夢に駆り立てられているとするならば、その夢の中には、微かな、けれども飽くことを知らない貪欲な欲望が潜んでいるように思われる。本書に収録された作品の多くが、驚くほど率直に突きつけてくるものとは、撮る側と撮られる側、本来、ファインダーを挟んで隔てられているはずのふたつの存在が、ある種、過剰なまでの親密さで結ばれてゆこうとする、そんな衝動の強度だ。被写体に接近するあまり、カメラを構える彼女たちの視界は極度にぼやけてゆき、ふたつの側は、瞬間的に成立するプライベートな「共鳴関係」の中で、あたかもともに融け入ってゆくことを望んでいるかのように、互いの姿を見失ってゆく。そんな内面化され、閉ざされた関係性の中にぼんやりと浮かび上がってくるものとは、ある種の「惚れっぽさ」——疑似恋愛的な親密さに包み込まれた「魅了の瞬間」——であり、その関係性を衝き動かしているものとは、「カメラを向けてる女の子に［…］なりたい願望」「その子を知りたいとか思う気持ち［…］所有欲とか、独占欲」（長島有里枝）であるように映る。ファインダーの背後から漏れ出てくるものは、愛なのかナルシシズムなのか？ とどの詰まりは、彼女たちは、見る側に立っている時でさえ「見られている」という意識を手放すことはない、というだけのことなのかもしれないが。」
First published in frieze, Sept-Oct 1996 (issue 30), frieze / Durian Publications: London, New York, Berlin.