Tokyo, the 50's - Ikko Narahara

Tokyo 2012 - Sumida / Tokyo (Sat 22 Sep 2012)
Ikko Narahara (*) writes in the preface to Tokyo, the 50's (*):

Tokyo, the 50's
When I First Roamed the Streets
by Ikko Narahara (*)

Photographs arrive suddenly from out of the future. For it me it was always like that. Suddenly I would reach out and grab it in midair - the photographs had appeared by itself in my hand. Whenever I pushed the shutter button, my body seemed to become transparent, as if it were out int the middle of the photograph. And as I continuted to take photographs over the years, I came to feel that the images I took had already buried in matrixes of some sort in the space of the future, where they remainded waiting for the moment when I would one day dig them up. That must surely have been how it was. From that time of the big bang with which the universe started and began its evolution, perhaps even though the will of the universe latent in the fluctuations in the "nothing" preceding the big bang, these experiences had surely been prepared for. I am simply a messenger sent to meet up with the images and rescue them. This is the only way I can reconcile myself to the strangeness and mystery of having brought so many photographs into the world.

Possessed by thoughts like these day after day, I suddenly remembered I'd forgotten something - the photographs I had taken when I first began roaming the streets.

I bought my first camera in 1954. I got it to use for my planned work., "Human Life". At the time I couldn't have imagined that after exhibiting that work my whole life would change course toward photography and toward the person I am today. In the intervals between photographing "Human Land" I used to walk the Tokyo streets with my camera. I didn't have any special or clear purpose in mind. My family had often moved to different locations in western Japan, and since I was a child I'd had the habit of thoroughly exploring each new location. I felt the same interest in my exploring Tokyo, whereI'd lived since I came there as a college student. The only difference was that now I carried a camera with me. I breathed photographs on Tokyo street corners the way I breathed air. In my viewfinder those street corners changed into "streets in my photographs." Whenever I released the shutter, I seemed to hear the beat of modern jazz, which I loved so much. I remember I kept on rambling the streets in this way until I became involved in taking my next work, "Domain" in 1958. I was so lazy that I only printed a few of these photographs. The negatives lay buried their negative case, where I forgot about them. By chance, however, I remembered these negatives from forty years earlier. For the past three years I have again been photographing in the streets of Tokyo, and this brought back the memory of my earlier roamings.

"I'd really to see them .. I wonder what photos I took back then?" I couldn't even remember most of the images, and very few of the contact prints remained. But the moment I realized I wanted to see them, I was overcome with the strange feeling of being faced with the all too obvious and simple fact that photographs have to be printed in order to be viewed. After all these years I'd become thoroughly accustomed to the life of taking photographs, and yet here I was suddenly realizing that all too easily I'd vaguely assumed that once I'd pushed the shutter the things I'd taken simply continued to exist by themselves. But even for me, they were actually nothing more than events lying latent in my mind. As mere negatives there were like inverted ghosts; they had to no reality as photographs. I was shocked to realize that those negatives still lacked real existence, and then I had to laugh at my own blindness.

Before long, from what seemed to be the negatives, I made new contact prints and began to look through them.

As I put them into the enlarge, I could hardly wait to see how they would turn out. Unrecognizable images of which I had almost no memory began to appear before my eyes. Were these really my photographs? The photographs came into being like starlight arriving from forty light years away.

Past time buried in the time of the future - a sleeping time with with its eyes suddenly wide open. Through this small astonishment I was also tasting the strangeness and wonder of photographs. As that time my darkroom was filled with the paradoxes of time travel.

I've come to see that these photographs, which excavated the light and wind of the 1950's, were unmistakably the first steps in my travels through cities which would turn into the rest of my life. [..]

I bought this book following this Review (*) by Jesse Freeman (*). The preface is one of the most amazing pieces of writing on photography I have read, and I have read a lot. A beautiful book, both in words and photos, and I am so glad I took the risk to buy it on a whim.