The Light of What Cannot Last

One species of animal is born to love the sunshine for less than a day. It comes from the order called, Ephemeroptera, but we know it better as the mayfly. If we could imagine, for a moment, what such an existence might feel like, what it might look like, we might come close to understanding the photography of Shidomoto Youichi. In the poem, “Mayflies”, Richard Wilbur sketches his own sense of what such a brief dance with daylight means. He writes:

Watching those lifelong dancers of a day

As night closed in, I felt myself alone

In a life too much my own,

More mortal in my separateness than they—

Unless, I thought, I had been called to be

Not fly or star

But one whose task is joyfully to see

How fair the fiats of the caller are.

Likewise, Shidomoto captures that separateness between one’s own mortality and the light that will survive it. To look at these photographic mayflies is to share in Shidomoto’s effort. We are “joyfully to see” as much as we possibly can—to embrace, if only for a moment, all those things which cannot last.

Japanese photography in general shares a unique relationship with the ephemeral. As John Szarkowski and Yamagishi Shōji remind us, “All countries have changed greatly in the past quarter century, but perhaps none has changed so radically or with such dizzying speed as Japan.”1 Shidomoto, a photographer whose native Tokyo embodies the very meaning of radical change, employs this tradition beyond its historical momentum. One sees right away how change not only characterises the atmosphere in which Shidomoto works, but it defines the atmosphere of his own inward vision. Change is the muse—a way of seeing and understanding anew, at every moment, the fragile nature of all life’s lovely idiosyncrasies: the splash of a wave, the dead skin at the tips of our toes, even the cityscape which can disappear entirely in the light of the horizon.

It might sound odd to associate the phrase, “joyfully to see,” with Shidomoto whose darker images of fear and isolation feel more like the “night closed in.” But Shidomoto celebrates the discovery, the unearthing of the vision, the joy of finally seeing that which has been hidden, no matter the torment of the subject itself. Mined from the lightless strata of his own memory, the images collected here are less often a matter of creation than laborious excavation. Shidomoto describes his process as a kind of “archaeological digging.” Memories, long-buried beneath “fear, disgust, rancour, hate, stress, bondage and powerlessness,” begin to surface as he peels back the layers of his mind, photograph by photograph. Each picture, therefore, is a witness to Shidomoto’s amazement, as the dead resurrects itself over and over as if from nowhere.2

Shidomoto’s affair with light is unusual. Literally translated, the Japanese word for photograph, kōga, means “light picture.” Perhaps a bit too simplified, the Japanese opted for a more philosophical word, shashin, or “copy of truth.” Both words apply. But Shidomoto approaches light in such a way that renders truth indistinguishable from its illuminations. Light, in this work, has a life of its own. It breathes. It bends. It dances. It is a body unto itself. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Japanese photography, as the historian Anne Tucker tells us, is the way it shows a kind of confidence in itself—a “self-realisation.” Shidomoto carries this tradition a step further. His striking contrasts, his excavations of light from the rockbed of lost memory, invoke a realization of the kōga’s mayflies.3

When I came to this understanding of kōga, the way I looked at Shidomoto’s photography transformed completely. Brainchild of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, the performance art known as Butoh (“dance of darkness”) inspired the great photographer of darkness, Eikoh Hosoe. The power of Eikoh’s and Butoh’s art stems from the very fear, disgust, rancour, hate, stress, and powerlessness which lives in the shadows of repressed memory. Consequently, Butoh dancers move like marionettes, contorted and faltering beneath Death’s fingers. Butoh is the image of light’s cancer and bruise, its final death rattle. Shidomoto begins where Butoh ends. What slips away from us into the dance of darkness, a new dance with light revives.

Nothing slips away more easily than youth. One of the most difficult things to write about or photograph is children. Either the stony layers of adulthood’s hardships bury the child within us or we simply gush with sentimentality over a childhood that never really existed. But sentimentality simply does not apply to Shidomoto’s work. TV glorifies the interested child, the child who dives head first into the world of responsibility and maturity. But who was ever that child? Look at the boy tucked too snugly into the swimmer’s cap. He stands at the edge of the pool reluctantly, knowing full well what is about to happen. If we do not jump, we get pushed in. The beauty of childhood is oftentimes the beauty of sheer annoyance. We know this to be true, but so rarely do we see it expressed with such honesty in the visual arts. In perhaps one of the greatest close-ups of a child ever photographed, Shidomoto captures this quintessential mood. Peeking from behind a shadow, the boy glares into the camera’s lens as if to overpower the permanence of photography with the indignant fury of his own light. Or else he fights, as we see him elsewhere sparring with shadows. Fight as he may, however, his 24 hours tick by, as Shidomoto shows the boy, finally, sagged and weary on his grandmother’s shoulder—a powerful moment of beginnings and endings.

Between the faces of youth and the furrows of old age, Shidomoto captures the mayfly-life of the body—that “lamp” of form, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once called it, “suffused with brilliance from inside” which bursts forth like a star. Throughout this collection, the female torso turns nova. Sitting in a chair, relaxed with arms crossed, Shidomoto defines the sinuous contour of a woman’s body in shadowy negative. Without the vague silhouette of her breasts and the brushed suggestion of her forearms, her light would simply blind us. But she holds the sun back within herself. In another image of the sitter, the stark pubis strikes the eye with Dionysian force, borne from the “dark centre where procreation flared.”

Obsessed with angels, Rilke would have adored Shidomoto’s seraphic mayflies. In a photograph that possessed me the moment I saw it, the pronounced ribcage of a woman undulates from the bottom left corner toward the peak of the shoulder blade. Above the shoulder, a lock of black hair severs the body from the head. Already the daylight fails. Already the body falls apart, “thin on love and barley,” as Basho once put it. Her face looks up and leftward, almost behind her, where something that used to be attached to the shoulder is now gone. Or else she waits for its return. We can read in her face an instinctual knowing beyond the dance of darkness. Her gaze is pure flight.

Part of what distinguishes the faces of Shidomoto’s subjects is the intense subtlety of their expressions. We see it in our fighting boy. We see it in the face of the angel who has lost her wings. Such evocative countenance makes the smile of Mona Lisa look like a mime’s stupid grin. More suggestive than all the impassioned ladies of Nobuyoshi Araki’s Sentimental Journey, Shidomoto portrays a woman with eyes closed, her head against the wall, her lips slightly parted in the ecstasy of Bernini’s Teresa. The legacy of great Japanese photography belongs to its subtle ecstasies. Even in the 1850s when photography first reached the long-closed borders of Japan, it boasted the likes of Shima Kakoku and his wife, Shima Ryū, who captured understated moments radiant with love, anger, sadness, and joy. Mastery of this tradition continues in Shidomoto’s art.

Able to manipulate that subtlety in ways which animate even the inanimate, Shidomoto brings his kōga to still life and architecture. When selecting the images for this book, I found myself gripped by the most everyday visions. An ashtray, a straw, a plate, a saltshaker and napkin coalesce into the skyline of some future metropolis, elegant in its geometries and reflections. Whereas the actual cityscapes revert to something even more elemental: pure form, pure light. Ultimately, the many inspired forms of Shidomoto’s photography achieve a difficult balance. Without light, without darkness, no form exists. Shidomoto’s love for what cannot last depends on both, not matter how deeply buried, how painfully retrieved, how brief their flights of ecstasy.

TEXT BY STEVEN BROWN