Going from the bottom to the top I have a picture of a Buddhist priest praying, a Buddhist priest and his disciple, a picture of lanterns, a country scene of a person walking in the forest, and lastly a beautiful picture of a person fishing. The order of the pictures follows the theme of harmony and self-knowledge. the self knowledge is embodied in the pictures of the priests and the disciple. The lanterns are harmonious with their surroundings and seem to belong to the building it is attached to. The two outdoor scenes represent man and the way he uses and is encompassed by nature in everyday life.
Yet again, a very nice album, but a commentary that only scratches the surface of what we have been trying to do in this course, which makes me wonder what I've been doing wrong. I'm taking it that the commentary is in "Charles Prete's" voice. This commentary is descriptive and is not self-conscious or critical. There is no sense of the historical, social, economic, or cultural context of the photographs as commodities that would be purchased by a foreign traveler in the Japan of the 1920s. What is the image of "Japan" held by this traveler? What might the traveler have been seeking in "Japan"? Why would this traveler be showing these lantern slides to his or her friends back in the States? "Harmony and self-knowledge"--are these values typically part of the discourse of an American traveler about, say, Paris? They are, of course, values associated with the Romantic movement. Are there any potential connections between Wordsworth and this traveler?
ReplyDelete-Mizenko
I think that if the traveler was a Romanticist, his thoughts on these images might go something like this:
ReplyDelete"Look at that beautiful sunrise! The colors are pure, perfect, like sunrises in England used to be... before we industrialized. Now all you see if that ugly black smoke spewing against the sky, black like the corrupted government and Church. And the second image... now there is a good, honest countryman working. These people may be primitive, may be heathen, but at least they still have a purity of life about them. I wonder how their religion works. Does it stifle them? Do they find contentness within it?"
Maybe.
I do love your idea of harmony, all thoses pictures have something in common. I would be more interesting to think of what is the link between them and how it seems expressed in the Japanese culture, way of life, and even how we consider it.
ReplyDeleteDoes this Harmony as a major component of the Japanese culture actually exist (or still exist) or is it just a romanticist idea of Westerners about Japan ?
Hmmm... So we equate these monks with harmony. How quickly the Western eye forgets the warrior monks. They are equated with priests, not viewed as their own idea. Granted these photos were most likely arranged with this feeling in mind, evoking it.
ReplyDelete