Hello again,
I’m Joel Pulliam and I’m sending this because you signed up for my monthly newsletter about photography. I hope you enjoy. If you’d like to unsubscribe, though, just click the link on the bottom.
Here in Tokyo, where a covid vaccine is not yet widely available, the government has declared a state of emergency for the third time. Not a lockdown, but a reminder to avoid nonessential outings and to continue taking the precautions we already know how to take, as well as a request for restaurants to close early and for other high risk businesses to close entirely.
You might recall that last month, I wrote about street photography. (If you’re just joining the newsletter or otherwise missed it, an archive of all my past newsletters is here.) With the state of emergency, though, I’ve felt it best to step back from that. So instead, I’ve been taking some time to look slowly and carefully around my local park. And to slow down, what better subject is there to watch than turtles?
Well, observing the turtles, but also observing the light: how it shifts and changes and moves as time passes. Regardless of whether a photographer’s subject is wildlife or portraits or landscapes, light is critical. So I sat on a rock as morning turned to afternoon, watching the shifting light reflected on the water and the backs of the turtles as they came to a favorite spot, warmed in the sun, and returned to the water.
I have just finished reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, a novel in the form of a letter written by an elderly protestant minister to his young son. It is a book about aging and families and spiritual learning; one to be read slowly for its fine, incandescent details, such as those in which the narrator comments on light itself:
I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word “good” so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing.
Not unrelatedly, in her poem Sojourns in the Parallel World, Denise Levertov writes how we can be changed by the experience of simply forgetting our internal obsessions and observing, “cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing / pilgrimage of water, vast stillness / of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane.”
Levertov’s poem forms the introduction to Robert Adams’s most recent book, A Parallel World, containing his photographs of the ecological fragility of the Oregon coast. I love this book, its quiet pacing and the way Adams uses light to create meaning, to suggest redemption even among all that has been lost. And all in just 32 images. Adams’s slim, meditative books are a rarity among American photobooks, for which big coffee table books are the norm.
In Japan, by contrast, it is quite normal for photographers to publish books containing series of just 10-40 photographs. Small, self-contained projects that don't necessarily fit into larger books, often softbound and saddle stitched, yet they are not "zines"; many are produced by the best printing houses on the finest paper, in collaboration with well known editors and designers. Daido Moriyama, Rinko Kawauchi, Kikuji Kawada, Miyako Ishiuchi, Issei Suda. . . . These books are where I think some of the best, most interesting work is, in that they are more personal and often take risks a larger book cannot. If I were advising someone on developing a Japanese photography collection, this is where I would suggest they look.
I’ve recently put together a short photo essay, just ten photos, that ties together a number of threads of my photography. It will be out this summer in a publication together with work by several other photographers I admire. Because of this, I’ve shifted the timing on some of my other projects. I’m excited about it, and look forward to telling you more in my next newsletter.
In the meantime, have a good month. I’m heartened by the progress that America and other countries are making as a result of their vaccination programs. While light is shining at the end of the tunnel, let’s continue to follow all recommended precautions so that we can make it safely there.
Best regards,
Joel