“I-Photography” Threw Off Ideology and the Duty to Record Reality. What Is It, Exactly?

Its standard is no longer the precise description of an event, but the mood inside a lived experience.

On March 23, 2019, the Japanese photography critic Kotaro Iizawa gave a lecture in Shanghai, at the bookstore Hengshan Heji, titled “The Privateness of Photography.”

He took as his example Sentimental Journey, the photobook the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki published in 1971, and walked the audience through all 108 pictures in it, one by one, to show how Araki had built a “narrative I-photography” out of snapshots from his honeymoon.

In Sentimental Journey the scenes are real but the time is scrambled. Araki arranges his images in a sequence of life, death and rebirth, and tells a story that carries “a certain universal emotional resonance.” Araki, Iizawa argues, “wanted to shoot this book in the form of an I-novel” — and the point of the I-novel is that the reader can never be sure the “I” in the book is the “I” who wrote it.

This has roots in Japanese cultural tradition. In Notes on the History of Japanese Photography 2, Iizawa writes that “the birth of I-photography might also be read as a return to the tradition that binds Japanese photography tightly to haiku.”

Shoji Yamagishi, then editor-in-chief of Camera Mainichi, described the same shift in his March 1975 column as “a move from questions of public opinion to intensely personal expression,” one that “at the very least returns to the tradition of the I-novel in Japanese literature, which looks for trust and truth in the object called the ‘I.’”

“Tanka and haiku also celebrate and sigh over the things around you. That sensitivity may be deeply rooted in Japanese culture. The I-novel is the same, and out of it, inside photography, a branch grew,” Iizawa told QDaily.

This turn toward the private also came out of the Japan of its moment. After the Second World War the country’s political, social and cultural structures were badly shaken; campuses and streets filled with demonstrations, and antiwar feeling left the whole society restless. Against the social movements of the 1960s, a new private form of photography appeared.

It did not begin with a concept. From the 1970s on, photographers including Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira and Masahisa Fukase each worked their own way toward it, and only later did critics gather their work under a single name. In fact the term “I-photography” was not applied clearly until the late 1980s.

The photography magazine Provoke, launched in November 1968, was one starting point. In a style summed up as “grainy, blurry, out of focus,” it declared that photography could shake off ideology and stop being a device for hauling reality around. Takuma Nakahira, Koji Taki, Yutaka Takanashi and the magazine’s other founders called for capturing “fragments of the real world that language cannot grasp.” The standard was no longer the precise description of an event, but the mood inside a lived experience.

Nakahira, a photographer and image critic, published For a Language to Come in 1970. It shares Provoke’s revolt against the mainstream and against traditional aesthetics; the pictures catch the air of the moment through what Nakahira called his own “bodily touch,” which then meant “a violence buried deep in the night.”

Provoke printed 1,000 copies and sold 500. “Everyone now thinks it was a tremendous magazine, and it is well regarded around the world,” Iizawa said in the interview. “But at the time its reach was 500 copies. I would rather people did not turn it into a myth.”

Only three issues appeared. In March 1970, a single volume of photographs and essays, First, Abandon the World of Pseudo-Certainty, marked the real end of the magazine’s work. But people had begun to see that, alongside documentary and reportage photography, there was another, private tendency — one that “examines yourself and what surrounds you, the relationship between yourself and others.” Following it, photographers such as Araki and Fukase went off to make their own work.

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Kotaro Iizawa, born in 1954, is a Japanese photography critic. He graduated from the photography department of Nihon University’s College of Art and holds a doctorate from the graduate school of art at the University of Tsukuba. Having “found that he lacked both the talent and the appetite to make photographic art,” he turned to writing about it instead. His books include Welcome to the Museum of Photography, On I-Photography, The Era of “Women’s Photography” and Photographic Thinking.

His graduate years fell in the 1970s, exactly when I-photography was most alive — the main reason he has kept studying it since. From the 1980s he wrote about and championed well-known photographers, Araki above all, and in 2000 he published the Japanese original of On I-Photography, Shishashin-ron (shashin is the Japanese word for photography).

In the broad sense, Iizawa says, any photograph that has a photographing subject behind it — a person taking the picture — counts as I-photography. The narrow sense, the one his book is really after, is what happens when that person deliberately uses the camera to search out the self, and the relations between “I” and the surroundings, and “I” and other people.

So an ordinary family album is I-photography in the broad sense. The Japanese photographer Shoji Ueda, who “consciously and of his own accord wanted to photograph the people at home” and used the camera to “dig into his ties with his family,” is I-photography in the narrow sense.

Turn the question around — is there any photography in the world that is not I-photography? A bank’s surveillance camera might not be, Iizawa says, because there is no one behind it, no subject. Almost everything else is I-photography in the broad sense. He points to Dragonfly Eyes, by the artist Xu Bing, a feature-length narrative film assembled entirely from surveillance footage found online, recut and redubbed into a story. Iizawa finds it fascinating: “As a piece of ‘anti-photography’ apparatus… nobody is operating it, and yet it has a will of its own.”

He is not offering “the one correct answer.” What he wants is to “take hold, positively, of everything that word can mean and how far its meaning reaches.” To define I-photography and map what it can do, “the first thing to do is examine and study the working practice of a few photographers.” On I-Photography takes four — Takuma Nakahira, Masahisa Fukase, Nobuyoshi Araki and Shigeo Gocho — and works through their lives, the circumstances they made pictures in, the criticism written about them at the time, their own accounts of themselves and the attitudes of the people around them.

Iizawa has followed and written about all four for years. Each holds a firm place in the history of Japanese photography, “sometimes to the point of swinging the direction of that history sharply.”

Fukase, born in 1934, changed style unmistakably over his career. Iizawa sees a man possessed by “an impulse he could not explain”: “No other photographer has stayed fixated on photography as a means of expression with such drunken, dreamlike persistence.”

From the solo show Kill the Pigs through the photobooks Game, Ravens, Family and Memories of My Father, Iizawa reads Fukase’s career as a process in which “something was disappearing from his photographic world, little by little.” Concretely, what disappeared was his wife Yoko, the deep loneliness inside him, and his hometown and family. Photography, for Fukase, “was the lamp that lights the dark, the weight at the end of the rope you drop to measure how deep the well is” — and the weight he was lowering was himself. In Private Scenes 1992, the series he made before falling down a flight of stairs drunk that year and losing consciousness, he put his own face or parts of his body in the frame, saying that “everything I photographed is, you could say, a reflection of myself. It is a private scene.”

These pictures strike Iizawa as “a singular attempt to explore I-photography all the way to the end.” As he puts it: “Without running that kind of risk, you probably could not make out the true face of that tiresome, bewitching monster.”

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Of all the I-photographers, Araki is probably the one the public knows best. His work in the form has “an unusual range,” and he is the only one of the book’s four still shooting steadily. He has made so much that his photobooks and published conversations already came to nearly 200 volumes before 2000. Even reading him only through the lens of I-photography is no small job. Iizawa picks two threads: Araki photographing his wife, and Araki putting his own image into the pictures.

Born in 1940 in a working-class district of Tokyo, Araki joined the photography department of the advertising agency Dentsu after graduating. He met his wife, Yoko, there; they married in 1971. Sentimental Journey, the book that announced the birth of Japanese I-photography, was shot on their honeymoon.

It is not simply a record of what the newlyweds saw. At the front of the book, in a letter-form “I-Novel Manifesto” written out in his left hand, Araki says: “I am not claiming that because I photographed my own honeymoon, these are true photographs… I have always felt the I-novel is the closest description of my photography. And I believe the I-novel is what comes closest to photography. All I did was arrange the pictures in the order of the honeymoon itinerary.”

That is the defining quality of Araki’s I-photography: private life and story mixed together until you cannot tell them apart. Later he went further, resetting the date dial on his camera so that real dates and false ones ran side by side. In Nobuyoshi Araki’s Fake Diary, published in 1980, an improbable number of pictures fall on dates like “4.1, April Fool’s Day” and “8.15, the day Japan lost the war.”

In Sentimental Journey, Araki drained the honeymoon of its happiness, choosing instead faces “sunk in melancholy.” In the middle of the book he built a passage about death, using a half-eaten apple that looks like a skull, a bench that looks like a stone coffin, a boat drifting downstream — signs of death, of the other world.

Explicit sexual pictures also appear repeatedly, which is why some people flatten I-photography into nothing but nudity and sex. In I-photography, “whether a sexual image belongs is decided on one ground only: whether the story needs it.”

Iizawa reads the sex in Sentimental Journey as “a rite that pulls Yoko back from the world of the dead into the world of the living.” The famous picture of Yoko curled up in a boat is read as “Yoko as the dead.” So “the sex in Araki’s pictures is not there to depict sex; it is there because the story requires it.”

Yoko was the first and the best critic of what Araki did with a camera. She did not shrink from appearing so often in his pictures; she “looked at the self the photographs showed, and at her relationship with Araki, and thought it over again and again.” Of the photograph of her hand holding a summer orange, she said what she felt was “the scene of him across from me eating a summer orange too, pressing the shutter with a hand that smelled of it… What he photographed was not me, but the thick feeling hanging in the air between us.”

In that relationship of photographing and being photographed, Iizawa argues, neither side has the upper hand; nor is it the lopsided arrangement of one person giving and the other receiving.

Even so, Yoko was pulled between “I don’t want to be photographed anymore” and “I would feel lonely if he stopped.” In My Love Life she wrote: “The second feeling always has something cruel about it, as though I were being toyed with. The relationship between a man and a woman lies on top of the relationship between the one photographing and the one photographed, and living that doubled bond so intensely has started to worry me — whether I can still be satisfied by the plain kind of relationship I once had.”

Fukase’s wife, also named Yoko, made a similar complaint — closer to an accusation: “For ten years he lived with me and only ever looked at me through a lens. What he photographed was, beyond any doubt, nothing but himself.”

Both wives raised the same question: is I-photography a creative urge built on selfishness? Iizawa thinks it is indeed selfish, and that the selfishness has to be read two ways.

“Negatively, an artist making art really is a nuisance and an intrusion for the people nearby,” he told QDaily. “But positively, it is precisely the artist’s selfishness that produces a breakthrough in art, and that is a good thing… You cannot use the first point to dismiss the work. If you set out to condemn selfish art-making, there would be no art left.”

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The other thing that sets Araki’s I-photography apart is that he keeps turning up inside his own pictures. Sentimental Journey: Winter Journey includes Araki in the wedding portrait, Araki in a paper mask in a hospital room, Araki holding Yoko’s funeral portrait, Araki riding the Odakyu Line home with her ashes in his arms. He puts such photographs into his books without a second thought, and we, looking at them, accept it without hesitation.

If you insist that the photographer is whoever presses the shutter, calling those pictures Araki’s work makes no sense. So why do we accept them? Because the “Arakis” in the frame, Iizawa says, are a sign standing for Araki. Even the trademark black-rimmed glasses and mustache were “probably a way of turning himself completely into a sign.”

Nobuyoshi Araki’s Fake Diary pushes this further: Araki himself appears in 19 of the album’s 187 photographs. By the 1990s he had picked other stand-ins — plastic dinosaurs, lizards and crocodiles he called Komodo. Komodo looks down on the street from a hotel balcony, sits beside Beethoven’s grave, gets wedged between the legs of a full-figured woman. In the series A’s Paradise, Komodo is promoted to leading role. “Photograph them and the place turns straight into ‘A’s Paradise,’ because what I am photographing is me.” Araki split himself apart and, like an invisible man, slipped easily into “the world, the age, the subject” until he had merged with them.

“The thing and the sign, Nobuyoshi Araki and ‘Araki’ — inside the photograph he swaps their places on purpose, and blurs the line between them. Through that act he keeps asking one question: does a true, single ‘I’ really exist? There is no ‘real face’ behind the mask. Try to rip the mask off and the flesh set deep inside it comes away with it. On the contrary, whatever mask you put on becomes, while you wear it, living skin with blood in it, and gradually fuses with the ‘I.’”

Araki, then, walked a road that led from searching for the self to making the self vanish through signs and stand-ins. “The ideal state of I-photography is to search for yourself and make yourself disappear at the same time,” Iizawa says, explaining the disappearance through the idea of nothingness in Eastern philosophy. “Work like his — where you first chase the self and then try to erase it — is far more interesting than work that starts from nothing.”

But almost no one reaches that state. “Question yourself, search for yourself, and the more you ask, the less you know who you are.” None of the book’s four photographers got there. Late in their working lives, “Nakahira lost his memory, Fukase was doing things close to suicide, and Gocho died very young.”

And Araki, who has gone on “dreaming of erasing himself,” was publicly accused last year by KaoRi, a model he had photographed for 16 years. In a long piece titled “Is This Knowledge Really Correct?”, she described being “made to strip,” being pushed to shoot nudes in front of crowds of onlookers, and Araki using a title as explicit as “KaoRi’s Sex Diary” without ever discussing it with her. The strain told: she was followed, people broke into her home, her photobooks were stolen, her garbage was gone through, and unstamped, unnerving postcards were pushed into her mailbox. It took the American #MeToo movement for KaoRi to feel “there was no reason to go on sacrificing myself for the fiction he had built.”

Iizawa set out his view of the case in an article in 2018. Reading KaoRi’s piece, what struck him hardest was that the times had changed. In his QDaily interview he came back to that change and to what it did to the relationship between Araki and his models.

“Early on, Araki got along very well with the models around him, because they wanted to express themselves and he needed their expression. The relationship was in tune. In the 1990s young women went looking for him on their own, hoping he would photograph them, nudes included; he was hugely popular then. The core of the KaoRi problem is that after 2000 what the models wanted and what Araki wanted had shifted in different directions. They no longer fit. That is why this happened.”

KaoRi, who started working with Araki in 2001, was told to take part in the shoots. “When Araki was working in the 1990s, the relationship between him and his models was closer to joint labor, making a piece together… What he does now may not be a good approach — pressing models to do these things is not as good as working together. Two subjects are involved, the model and the photographer, and they are colliding. But between the early Araki, or Fukase, and their wives, the state was joint labor, and that state was closer to ideal.”

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The Chinese edition of On I-Photography appeared in October 2018. In the 18 years since the Japanese original, the medium and the machines have changed what photography means. It moved from silver halide, a physical substance, to the digital sensor, and over the past decade into the phone. The qualities Iizawa identified in I-photography — “uncontrollable, irreversible, open” — have not changed much. “But certain properties of the internet make it looser, and easier to spread.”

The internet has sped up how images travel. Iizawa raised this in his post on the KaoRi case as well. “Another thing that has become conspicuous in the digital age is that choosing to pose nude is riskier than before. Even a one-off venture can spread online and cause trouble no one anticipated.”

Photography was shown first in books, then in exhibitions; today everyone holds a small screen. In the current online environment anyone can circulate their own I-photography, in the broad sense, and anyone can build an image of themselves on social media. Iizawa sees this as close kin to the way Araki turned himself into a sign decades ago. “People shooting I-photography in the digital age are turning themselves into signs,” he said in the interview. “Take social media — the ‘I’ up there is not the real ‘I.’ It is an ‘I’ made into a sign.”

But the argument in On I-Photography stops at 2000, and Iizawa does not use social media much himself. He hopes a younger generation will take up I-photography in the age of the internet and the phone.

Because of that 18-year gap, Iizawa sees the book today as a classic — which is exactly what makes the timing of the Chinese edition significant. He has been invited to China repeatedly in recent years to lecture on I-photography, and last year the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing mounted a Shoji Ueda retrospective. Photography in China now, he thinks, “runs on a line parallel to where Japanese photography was then.”

As the society changes, people are exploring themselves more, and cheap, easy cameras let far more of them do that exploring with pictures. Gu Zheng, a professor at the School of Journalism at Fudan University, traced the social conditions for Chinese I-photography to “China’s shift into a mass consumer society after the mid-1990s” in “Photography Is Your Private Life; Your Private Life Is in Your Photography” — On Chinese I-Photography, published in Art Today in 2006. As ideology and values shifted, a new generation of Chinese young people who had grown up with mass media began using photography above all to express themselves.

“It was the same in Japan. At first everyone pursued realism and social reportage, and only after an evolution, especially from the 1990s, did we start searching for the self. I think that same passage, which happened earlier in Japan, is happening in China right now.”

“Chinese photographers have made their own attempts at exploring the self before this. But I think from here the theme will grow stronger and more concrete in China.”

(Interview translation: Tang Shi, commissioning editor of On I-Photography)

The cover image and banner are from On I-Photography; the photograph is in Shigeo Gocho’s In Familiar Streets, originally in color. The long cover image is from Masahisa Fukase’s Ravens. Unless otherwise noted, the cover image, long cover image, banner and in-article images come from On I-Photography, provided by Purui Culture.