’undulating piles of lead-coloured rubble’

I’ve been working on images with long horizontal lines of small visual incidents packed closely together. The idea came, I think, from a trip to Japan a year ago, where I travelled on the bullet trains from, amongst other places, Hiroshima to Kyoto. The trains are so fast that the landscape/cityscape seems to speed past you in one continuous rush. The lettering on adverts moves too quickly to be deciphered, and I wouldn’t understand it anyway. The words in this image come from clear plastic bags printed with names of galleries or shops. When used for photograms, writing is superimposed on writing, words appear backwards, letters obscuring each other.

I’ve also been reading Ian Jeffrey’s introduction to his selection of photos by the great postwar Japanese photographer Shomei Tomatsu. As a young photographer in the 50s Tomatsu worked for Iwanami Shashin Bunko, a publication conceived by Natori Yonosuke, who aimed to ‘express everything through images, to use them to replace language’. Tomatsu, working in black and white, liked to produce images that had to be peered into to be understood. He preferred to deploy shadows, obscuring significant physical details, producing arrangements in chiaroscuro. You can see a connection to Junichiro Tanizaki’s ‘In Praise of Shadows’, the traditional Japanese love of half-light.

Tomatsu photographed postwar devastation (‘Memories of Defeat’) and the aftermath of a typhoon in which his childhood home was destroyed. The ruined, pitted, flooded surfaces resemble Art Informel or Arte Povera from the same period in Europe. His most famous series of pictures are from the 60s, when he photographed partially melted objects from the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and produced images of surviving victims 20 years on.

Which makes me think of the poet Naka Tarō, a member of that same generation who grew up during the war and witnessed the destruction of cities. The quote I’ve used above comes from one of his poems: ‘the earth under the undulating piles/ of lead-coloured rubble’. Or I could have chosen ‘the dark sky that has lost everything/ performs a requiem of dazzling tones’.

I’ve written about Tanizaki and Tomatsu before. Not exactly direct influences, but writers and photographers I’ve kept thinking about in the last year. Detail, shadow, semi-decipherable images and enigmatic surfaces.