Transcriber: Mika Fukasawa Reviewer: Denise RQ
Let me share with you a bit about a fascinating talk
that I had with the late South African scientist and writer, Lyall Watson.
Watson tried and has worked to view
supernatural phenomena in a natural biological way,
and we talked that day about how the landscapes that we all live in
and also the ones we journey through,
are pregnant with memories of human activity
and memories of natural events, too.
Memories that radiate from the buildings,
from the rocks, and trees, and bridges, and mountains.
These memories, we agreed, actually flow through our lives.
They connect our present with the past and with the future,
even the future that we may never known.
I think many of you may know what I'm talking about.
Have you ever visited a historical place?
Here in Japan, perhaps a temple, or a dense shrine forest,
or maybe an old neighborhood of wooden houses?
And if you felt there a mood that inspires historical reflection,
this mood can, in turn, stir a sense of wonder
about where life is taking us.
That very sense of contact with the past and the future
makes each of us more fully human.
As a photographer, I've always tried to capture such moods on film.
This may seem impossible, but I'll explain later
how I think I've managed to do it.
As a child in the American South,
history was alive in the old houses that I grew up in,
and also on the old Civil War battle fields,
where my friends and I could still find metal buttons from the uniforms
of fallen soldiers.
Finding these, our imaginations would leap back a century,
as if we ourselves were there, in the midst of gunfire.
And afterwards, we had the feeling of inhabiting the future too,
at least, the unseen future for the men who had actually fought
on those blood-soaked fields.
No wonder the Southern writer and Nobel laureate,
William Faulkner, wrote,
"The past is never dead, it's not even past."
We are surrounded by memories,
we are steeped in memories that are not all even our own.
And these are important.
Personal memories certainly,
but also cultural memories and echoes of natural events in the landscape.
These memories can quietly enter our lives,
and they can influence us in ways that most of us may not understand.
Words can break out because of these submerged memories
that have not been dealt with.
Speaking of conflicts, Lyall Watson grew up in Africa,
and he told me that when he walked on the plateaus of the East Africa,
he encountered in the rocks, the memories of some of the first modern humans
who walked the earth 115,000 years ago.
All those memories are still there in the landscape, he told me,
and it is musicians, the poets, artists, and shamans.
Sensitive to these ancestral memories, who have re-visited, recited,
and rendered images of them for thousands of generations.
Since that talk with Lyall Watson, I've been fascinated with the idea
of how memories are stored in the landscape.
Having grown up in an old Southern family,
perhaps I placed a special value on memory.
When I get together with my sisters, we talk of family history,
and these stories shape our identity.
They gave us strength and directions.
One of the things that distresses me about living in Japan is
the historical amnesia that I find in a large number of Japanese people.
So many important memories, many beautiful, others horrifying
are being forgotten.
Old buildings storing rich memories are being destroyed.
And elderly men and women are dying with their stories untold.
Fortunately, it's not that way everywhere in Japan.
Let me show you a photograph.
This festival photo could date back to the Meiji era that began in 1868.
I say this because we can see here by the blurry far off of the image
that this photo was taken with an antique lens.
Alongside of the picture, we can also see chemical stains
that show that this was probably printed
from a wet plate collodion negative.
The wet plate process was in wide use from the 1850s to the 1870s,
when the dry plate was invented.
Can you feel the mood in this photo?
Well, I'd like to show this photo to Japanese people and ask them,
when they imagine it was taken.
Most folks say it looks like it was taken, well, before the war;
the Second World War.
A cultural trauma occurred, after which, Japan's past was,
in one sense, left behind, forgotten, in the race to rebuild and modernize.
Many people lost interest in the past.
But what happens to a society that loses its cultural memory?
This is a question not only for Japan but for communities world wide.
Well, before the War; that's usually as far as people can go.
There's post-war Japan and pre-war Japan.
And most people have lost their imaginative and emotional connection
with pre-war Japan.
But look at this white shirt.
Shirts like this didn't exit in Japan
before the early Showa period that began in 1926.
So this collodion photo cannot be from the much earlier Meiji era.
Most people have lost these kinds of knowledge.
But by showing images like this,
where we don't know when this photograph was taken,
it opens a dialogue.
At my exhibitions in the countryside,
elderly people come to the shows and start talking, start remembering.
A new vitality comes into their eyes and their voices,
and into their ideas.
These photographic images give them a reason to talk,
to reminisce, and to imagine themselves back in time.
Let me tell you now that I myself took this photograph
just 5 years ago, at a festival near my farmhouse outside of Tokyo.
As a photographer, my work in Japan is to address the issue of memory.
I attempt to discover the old memories embedded in the landscape
and bring them forth, into the present, and the future, to honor them.
I use a 1860s camera and lens and collodion wet plate negatives.
I set up my camera on a wooden tripod and use this dark black room tent.
I make a glass negative on site, using a syrupy, flammable, liquid gel.
The exposures are long.
In other words, the camera's lens stays open
for much more than just an instant.
These festival participants, for instance, stood still as stones for 30 seconds.
Well, most of them did.
Traditional festivals in Japan are special events.
Many local people still experience the feeling
that their ancestors actually return from the past during the festivals.
It is a time when the past, present, and future marge.
We can feel it in the atmosphere,
even non-Japanese people like myself.
We can feel it.
The images that I make connect me, connect us to the submerged memories.
Japanese people get a chance to consider that.
Though these images look historical, they are actually contemporary.
This is a reminder of a concept that so many of us are forgetting.
The people in these photographs are participating in history.
History is not merely the past.
It is an on-going series of events, of stories in the making,
and each of us makes history with our lives.
I want people to be more aware of this.
One of my most important photographic tools is this conch shell.
By blowing through it, I empty myself of distractions
in order to embrace the landscape.
I know it sounds nutty, but haven't music traditionally been used
to attune us with each other and our environment?
That's what a good concert still does today.
Don't ask me why, but my intuition tells me,
that the sound of the conch shell
is also a way to awaken memories from the landscape.
In a spirit of prayer, I play the shell
to ask the landscape to reveal its memories.
For me, this is a very important play of imagination.
For again and again, when I play the conch shell,
and deeply into myself, moments of serendipity happen.
When I photographed this island, just off the coast, near my farmhouse,
I was imagining the ancient Japanese mariners
who first explored this coastline.
All documents speak
of how the mariners were able to see stars even in daylight.
This fascinated me.
When making this image, I set up my dark black room tent on site,
and as I took a glass plate out of its holder to make a negative,
a cloud burst, spattered raindrops onto it.
My intuition told me to go ahead and make the negative anyway,
even though the raindrops might ruin it.
And sure enough, when I looked at the finished print,
I discovered that the raindrops were literally gifts of heaven,
or of ancient memory.
For they looked like stars seen in broad daylight.
Call it luck, but the conch shell and the spirit of humbleness
seem to increase the chances for such beautiful accidents.
My work focuses on two fundamental currents of cultural energy
that flow through time.
One is the current of tradition that continues for centuries
with a timeless quality, like this image of these two net fishermen.
This scene, relatively unchanged for 300 years,
reminds us of how the past flows forward through the present
and into the future.
There's another type of cultural energy tough
that really needs to be given deeper attention.
When I was in India,
photographing an 18th generation master of Kathakali dance,
I lamented him about the demised of so much traditional culture in Japan.
But in response, he told me something that shifted my view of time and history.
"Culture," he said, "is like an eternally flowing river.
For generations, it may go underground, unseen to the naked eye,
but in the latter time, it may well rise back up
to influence people's lives."
This is what I'm seeing, more and more often,
in Japan these days.
Young Japanese people who are returning to the so-called old Japanese ways.
We can find examples of this
in almost every aspect of Japanese culture.
This is especially clear in the tsunami-devastated region,
where so much culture was washed away in just minutes.
Take for example, this picture, taken in Fukushima,
just 40 kilometers from the destroyed nuclear power plants.
This is Michitane Sōma
the 34th generation lord of the Sōma domain,
the area that includes those nuclear plants.
For 800 years, Mr. Sōma's family members
have been the patriarchal leaders of the Sōma area.
I took this photo during the local samurai festival,
a tradition that had been held annually for 1,100 years.
Owing to cultural memory, Michitane Sōma,
inheritor of this long tradition of leaders,
takes a personal responsibility for the nuclear accident.
His ancestors chose to promote economic development
in the northern domain, and neglected the southern area.
And so eventually, the people of the south,
eager for better economic conditions,
accepted the incentives for building the nuclear plants in their region.
Mr. Souma argues that had they been better taken care of economically,
there would have been no nuclear disaster in Fukushima.
It will take many years, centuries,
to make the land habitable to humans again.
According to Michitane Sōma,
in the 800-year history of the Sōma domain,
the people have faced even harder adversity, wars, and famine.
Yes, it will take centuries to recover,
but the samurai spirit of the local people is welling upwards,
as if from out the earth
with a new power and vigilance.
This old spirit is surging into the hearts of the young,
and giving them a new resilience to rebuild their lives.
They are embodying their samurai heritage
and fortifying their nerves with cultural meaning.
We tend to think of proverbs like heritages
as coming to us from the distant past,
but a friend of mine has actually written a new proverb.
Like the photos I take, it is new, but it speaks from deep memory.
Here it is.
"Honor the past, remember the future, and savor the present."
Each of us, we can see, has a place in history.
Each of us is living and shaping history,
but to live our lives with meaning,
we must ask or learn where we have come from.
We must imagine or learn where we are going,
and meanwhile, we must be fully alive, here and now.
I am using collodion photography in the words of this proverb,
to honor, remember, and savor my place, my meaning, and my purpose
in this larger historical context.
Your path is your own for you to find and create.
I hope I've helped you to appreciate that.
Thank you for listening.
(Applause)