Module 3, The Literary Photograph. We've seen in our other two modules, that depictions of the human figure in the 19th century in Japan often are accompanied by, or inspired by, created because of words, which are written down and located either on the image itself or very close to it. So that you can read the image and the text together. We've also learned that many images of the human figure are portrayed, in the first place, to convey a message, an allegory, often political, sometimes social or cultural, as a metaphor often for something else. In other words, the human visage, the face, or the expression, the way that one is dressed up or the relationship between the illustrator and the person, who's being illustrated, convey something beyond the illustration itself, in other words. In our next module, the Literary Photograph, I want to take a look at what happens towards the end of the 19th century into the 20th century as the new technology of photography is introduced into Japan and spreads very, very rapidly as a commercial endeavor, but also as a cultural medium, which doesn't take over, overwrite or deny the place of painting and prints and other forms of traditional illustration. It sort of coincides with it. But there are a lot of things about photography, by its nature, what's expected of it, all of this sort of ideological and historical baggage that came with it from the West. A lot of these aspects of photography prompted Japanese image making and the words, the texts that go along with the images, to change within the 19th century and the 20th century. First of all though today I want to take a look at two things before we actually dive into the photographs. One is how before the advent in Japan, the introduction of photography, Japanese illustrators, artists, depicted the moment. In other words, how specific moments, discrete moments in time, were captured by illustrations in Japan, especially in the start of the 19th century. I'd like to show one paining with an inscription on it, which is by a literatus painter who lived in Edo in the 1810s and the 1820s, he was active there until about the 1830s, a man named Yoda Chikkoku. He's joined by four of his associates, friends who travel to a post station or a post town north of Edo, which is currently Tokyo, in order to perform there, to present a calligraphy and painting gathering at a large temple in this small post town, at the invitation of a doctor there. They spend a couple of days there, and all of the people from the town come along and have these artists perform. It's almost like a sort of performance or an installation piece in a sense, painters and calligraphers, including one woman -we'll take a look at this a little bit later on- spent two days actually creating new works of art for the residents of this rural area in the north of the Kanto region in Japan. Anyway, the thing that I want to bring to your attention is that there's a painting here which is made from, it's polychrome, but it's made of very, very light colors. It's painted, very, very quickly as a record of what was actually going on that day. We know that it's a record because of what's written on top of it. An inscription by Kameta Bōsai, a very important calligrapher and artist, poet at this time and one of the participants in this gathering. We'll take a look at this a little bit later on. But I just want you to remember that even before the introduction of photography to Japan, Japanese illustrators and patrons of the art, like the men and women who gathered at this calligraphy and painting performance in 1817, were interested and intrigued by the possibility of capturing the moment. Being in the moment, having a record of what was going on at that time, visually, but then also supported by words, so that they know and they can transmit what they were gathering for that day. A sort of meta art, sort of situation that we have. The other thing that I want to point out before we take a look at the photographs themselves is the relationship between the image, which we see right here, and the word itself. If you go to old book stores in Tokyo that sell thread-bound, old Japanese books, you often find that the readers, the men and the women who owned the books, 120, 200, 300 years ago, have written in the margins. Most modern Japanese people don't do that. They're taught from a young age, like everyone else probably in the world, that they're not supposed to mark up their books. But Japanese writers, students, anyone who was basically literate in the 19th century, would read books and face them and have a sort of connection with them through writing onto the books themselves. And we see very, very important discoveries about Japanese literature and Japanese literary thought come from the discovery of these books. That happen to have very interesting, or writing, commentary, scribblings in the margins by famous authors or writers and so forth, which come up once in a while in antiquarian booksellers. But anyway, people in the 19th century, who would be reading things like these inscriptions here or the printed word in books, thought of the written word, not just as a reflection of the ideas and the spirit and the soul of the writer. But in a way the word encapsulated or actually represented itself beyond the words itself, and the sounds, the phonetic aspects of it, and the meanings, the semantics, and so forth. Something about the spirit of the person who wrote it, who may have died 10 years ago, 100 years ago, or hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Let's take a look at a scary story, which was written in the 1830s about a man who scribbled in the margins of lots of his books and then something very, very terrible happened to him. But anyway, I don't want to give away the story before we look at it. It's a simple story written in the 1830s [COUGH] for men and women, perhaps in the early teens, who were beginning to study. I believe the author wanted to communicate to his audience how important it is to respect the word and respect the spirit of the writer behind the word, in other words. In our next lesson, let's take a look at this essay called On Reading.
