Nanako naked in front of a window.
The thickness of the paint, the confidence of the brush strokes and the texture, are some of the things I love about John Singer Sargent’s Lady Agnew. I spent about a year studying his painting process before moving from studying fine-art into a photography degree. I vaguely remember him telling a student that, “If it looks transparent, paint it transparent”—I’ve always hated bullshit sentences like that.
Proposal for a more sustainable photography
Jonathan Worth puts forward a proposal for a more sustainable photographic practice.
What about a sustainable holistic photographic practice that strove to empower both the photographer and their subject? What if the products from this were openly accessible and free from editorial or political agenda? Might this removal of traditional ‘gatekeepers’ not lead to a new generation of credible witnesses / new and dynamic dialogues?
Toby de Silva. From the series, The Perfect Place to Die.
De Silva comments:
Situated at the base of sacred Mount Fuji, the dark, grotesque and eerily silent forest of Aokigahara has for many years been Japans most notorious suicide destination. Often depicted in Japanese literature as haunted and deathly, it was described in Waturu Tsurumi’s The Complete Manual of Suicide as ‘The Perfect Place To Die’. The 3500 hectare forest is founded upon volcanic rock, which juts and plummets with uncertainly in all directions and is littered with the personal effects, clothing and mechanisms of suicide of its many victims, along with bouquets of flowers, shrines and food offerings left in their memory. It annually yields in excess of 60 corpses, many of which are removed in the regular body hunts which infamously leave behind the miles of colored tape which are used as guides to mark out the areas that have been surveyed and to direct recovery teams to the newly discovered remains.
Should one ask… how the Japanese Masters understand this contest of the archer with himself, and how they describe it, their answer would sound enigmatic in the extreme. For them the contest exists in the archer aiming at himself—and yet not at himself, in hitting himself—and yet not himself, and thus becoming simultaneously the aimer and the aim, the hitter and the hit. Or, to use some expressions which are nearest the heart of the Masters, it is necessary for the archer to become, in spite of himself, an unmoved center. Then comes the supreme and ultimate miracle: art becomes “artless,” shooting becomes not-shooting, a shooting without bow and arrow; the teacher becomes a pupil again, the Master a beginner, the end a beginning, and the beginning perfection.”,
— Eugen Herrigel. Zen in the Art of Archery. From a list of four books that Bresson insisted be read.
