Major Project

After thinking long and hard about the grandfather project, it’s starting to look unjustifiable to me at this stage to travel to both inner mongolia and egypt to take pictures of sand…! I’ve decided instead to focus on the parallel rural communities they both lived in before they were swept away to these arid battlefields. So it’s looking like Japan and Devon is on the agenda for the summer. Will carry on brainstorming…

Major Project

Came back from rooting around old boxes and files in my gran’s house at the weekend and turned up some interesting nuggets of information. I found a commemorative album for the 8th Army, printed in 1944 that seems to parallel the China book given to my Japanese grandad. Also found out more about my grandfather’s time in North Africa and just writing to a surviving member of his group who currently lives in Australia.

With the approach to the project, I’m thinking of keeping the scrapbook idea, using the materials I already have and place them alongside a series of parallel landscape images that begin in my grandads’ rural villages and gradually end up in their desert postings. Having a few wacky ideas, but at the moment nothing seems to suite this project better than a more formal landscape approach. Also I’m wondering if the two parallel pictures visually connect in some way, it might make it more interesting…

Major Project – new idea!

After the conflict photography presentation, I thought it would be interesting to discover more about my grandfather’s experiences in the war and create a piece of work for the main project over the summer. I’m thinking it would take the shape of a photographic journey, retracing his steps and revisiting the locations where he served and fought, which were mostly in the deserts of Inner Mongolia. I’m not sure if it will be possible, but it would combine well with a project on my English grandfather’s war experiences, a Devonshire man who also came from a simple rural farming community and ended up fighting in a distant desert in North Africa. I’m just not sure if I’ve got the funds to do both this year…

This project will be fascinating for me personally, but I’ll try to think hard about an approach to the project so it doesn’t turn out to be a very private and self-absorbed piece of work. Hopefully I can come up with something that has a bit more to say than the usual retracing of family histories that you often see.

In the meantime I’m just trying to collect as much information as possible. On the Japanese side, I’m waiting on the Japanese military archives for the battalion field reports and the reason my grandfather left the war early and I should find out more about my English granddad from my gran who I’m seeing this weekend.

Main Project

Apologies to all for my lack of tlc for this blog. Seeing the first post continually must have become quite annoying… I’ll endeavor to dedicate a lot more time to it these coming weeks!

It’s quite general, but with regards the main project I would like to focus on an aspect of life either here or in Japan. One idea I had is a project on Mount Fuji, which has always been the ultimate symbolic landmark for the Japanese. The mountain is open for climbers during the summer months, the busiest time being around mid-August. The idea amongst climbers is to climb during the night to be at the summit in time for the morning sun, another symbol for the Japanese. It’s a pretty full on symbolic experience.

What I found interesting when I reached the summit (that is both a shrine, kitsch shop and post office) was how different people reacted when the sun began to rise. Most pulled out their mobile phones and digital cameras, but a large number began to spontaneously sing the national anthem or pray. In a country that is both increasingly secular and quite reluctant to face its recent Imperialist past (where the national anthem is rather neglected from everyday life) I thought it was an interesting reaction. So I’ve started thinking this relationship between the Japanese and Mt Fuji warrants some form of photographic documentation…I’m just trying to figure out how to approach it.

The people praying also got me thinking. In Japan, there is a word ‘mokuto’ 黙祷 which means ’silent prayer’ and originates from religious practices, but is also used much like the minute’s silence in the West. Mokuto is also performed at the beginning and the end of certain martial arts. It’s basically a form of meditation to quieten the mind. As a photographic project, I thought it might be interesting to photograph different individuals from different walks of life, each with their own form of ‘Mokuto’ in modern Tokyo, where time for meditation and contemplation seem to be at a premium..

I think I’ll keep doing a bit of mokuto myself and come up with better ideas…