Sociology for the eye to do
Jan. 25th, 2007 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
Bruce Osborn's Oyako - Portraying Japanese Generations series, currently being exhibited on Pingmag, is photography as sociology. Each picture portrays two generations, father and son or mother and daughter, while captions below detail their professions. And so we get a theatre group leader (in drag) with his acting student son, a pet shop owner with his (naked) porn star daughter, a retired sumo wrestler-turned-restauranteur with his son, also a retired sumo wrestler-turned-restauranteur. As in August Sander's famous series of German portraits, people are portrayed here not just in their family ties, but in their professions.
Sander has also influenced Shoichi Aoki, the pre-eminent street style photographer of his generation. But in a very different way: here it's the frontal, full-figure composition which recalls Sander -- the documentary style, the rectangular framing, the entomological pinning. What's gone from the photos in Aoki's three magazines, Tune, FRUiTS and Street, is any sense of what these people do for a living. Many, we suspect, are market traders, hair and make-up salon workers, secondhand clothes shop owners, furitas, students or dandy sponges living at home with their parents. 
When we look at Kazu Asakura's street shoot in Sapporo for Shift zine, we get a slightly different set of people. These are the semi-professional "cafe girls" who interest themselves in art and design and frequent trendy cafes like the Shift Cafe many of these pictures are taken at. (Here I am two years ago making a podcast pilgrimage to that very cafe.) The Coromo Tokyo Street Style website gives us a different group again -- "professional" clothes shoppers in various parts of Tokyo. It's a reminder that, for some, consuming is also a kind of job, as essential to our society as Sander's clogged varnisher was to Cologne in 1930.
And then there are Rinko Kawauchi's keitai snaps. Here sociology has been replaced by a spiritually-infused subjectivity which transforms normal scenes -- a boy's bulbous head in an electronics store, a naked lightbulb flaring -- into something lonely, lyrical and mystical. No sociology here, no Sander; this is the world seen from the other side of the eye.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-25 10:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-25 10:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-25 10:20 am (UTC)Does it really matter if we can talk to people? Why do we privilege talking over all other forms of communication, especially visual ones? In a city, I'm going to pass thousands of strangers in a day. I won't talk to more than a few of them, but there will be some cursory communication on the visual level. I will see their faces, interpret expressions, read bodies and body language, perhaps have a sexual fantasy or two, perhaps feel some essential spiritual affinity or repulsion, and... catch their clothes. I personally do find my day considerably brightened by visual contact with people I have no expectation of any other contact with. You don't?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-25 10:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-25 10:46 am (UTC)OK, so I admit it, I'm wearing jeans at the moment...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-25 10:55 am (UTC)It doesn't mean I'd befriend or talk to them, though. Normally, if I pass such people on my street (and my street here in Berlin is the kind of place you see people like this), there's a sense that we're too cool to stare or speak. We "clock" each other and try to look unimpressed. But we're secretly reassured.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-25 11:22 am (UTC)The particular hipster "look" you're attracted to and occasionally sport yourself has an analogy with the rock world, where the poses and themes are all about rebellion, but in the most stiflingly derivative and conventional way possible. This hipsterism isn't so much about rebellion but is about difference and imagination (cf Momus's disdain for blue jeans). And yet the hipsters ultimately fall into the same trap as the rockers, expressing their 'difference' and 'imagination' in surprisingly conventional ways, in ways that you can 'read off' so easily (she's a hairdresser/fashion student, he goes to a lot of gallery openings...). You identify yourself with the art world, and fair do's: we all need our own world. N'empêche que beaucoup d'artistes que tu cites ici semblent amazingly derivative, haven't really moved on from Warhol or Ono in the sixties, and are, in that regard, not so different from the Strokes or whoever...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-25 11:36 am (UTC)I suppose it's reassuring to know that you chose an area that others with basically the same worldview chose too. It's nice when the process of infiltration is just beginning, as it is here in Neukolln, and there are still lots of working class people, immigrants and so on too. I don't like areas like Prenzlauerberg or Williamsburg where it's just hipsters. The "battle" has been won there, "our" values dominate. And that's the time to backlash against those values and embrace some other ones. This is, of course, classic pioneer snobbery, but it's founded in a love of diversity too. I like diverse areas. I vastly preferred Manhattan Chinatown to Williamsburg.
As for your "derivative" point, sure, I think I said something similar yesterday when I commented that Cornelius was, in a way, doing something quite similar to Straightener. He was just ripping off cool avant garde stuff whereas they were ripping off Green Day. But, you know, that's a huge difference, enough to separate the sheep from the goats. I think on its own the charge "derivative" is fairly meaningless. It's what we derive things from that makes us fresh or stale.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-25 01:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-25 01:52 pm (UTC)Bleh Williamsburg. I recently moved in with a friend who has a place there towards Greenpoint... when everyone's into the same weird crap, it's not very exciting. It's like a total monochrome, even if it's a bright primary color.
Of course NYC these days has a "fall in line!" type culture, so there's no fun, challenging eccentricity in any neighborhood or borough.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-26 05:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-25 01:45 pm (UTC)I think a hipster can live with himself so long as he's distracted. But once he looks in the mirror, so to speak, he starts to hate who he is (no fulltime job yet somehow living in $900/month apt, white ipod headphones, predictable outfit), and has to move away from it.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-25 02:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-25 02:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-25 03:04 pm (UTC)And speaking of people who "decided to be flowers"...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-25 03:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-25 04:16 pm (UTC)Sons Of Pioneers
Date: 2007-01-25 03:56 pm (UTC)A New Way Of Seeing?
I am all for margins and edges and surviving them but the phrase "It's nice when the process of infiltration is just beginning, as it is here in Neukolln, and there are still lots of working class people, immigrants and so on too."
concerns me. There's almost a colonial exoticisation of the other about it.
Doesn't infiltration (in your sense) imply an agency unrelated to market forces like revanchism or regeneration of traditional communities. Or does it hang on their tails? Very often hipster infiltration is preying on the death of situations (working class culture) to gain leverage. Situations which, it could be said, lacked "vision".
Re: Sons Of Pioneers
Date: 2007-01-25 04:05 pm (UTC)Exoticisation of the other is what I'm all about. I'm afraid I don't accept that it's always evil. There is such a thing as "the good other". The other we see in compassionate and well-researched anthropology documentaries, for instance; the other from whom we have "much to learn", the other who will save us from our conformism and our logistical shortsightedness.
There is no "death of working class culture" going on in Neukolln. Many new immigrants are arriving here from Africa, Turkey and Asia all the time. The hipsters are but a tiny percentage of this influx. And this might well be what distinguishes the "pioneer" areas I'm talking about from the "conquered" ones. In the conquered ones there are negative consequences. Hipster culture becomes a monoculture, the dominant one, and rents become unaffordable for anyone else.
Re: Sons Of Pioneers
Date: 2007-01-25 04:16 pm (UTC)Its largely ignored how immigration almost preserves the traditional working class cultures rather than threatens them. The chattering classes in the media here seem to be really frightened of a rise of the angry right wing, white working class. It was almost personified in the short cull in Liverpool of Pit Bull Terriers.
As an aside.
I was looking for Baghdad art links and cannot find anything since 2004.
Then I read this amazing article from the Guardian.
Iraq a 'work of art in progress' says US general after 49 die (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1938419,00.html)
Re: Sons Of Pioneers
Date: 2007-01-25 05:21 pm (UTC)I meant to add to my hipsters/immigrants a link (http://imomus.livejournal.com/217216.html) to my essay "The cosmpolitanism of the poor" which points up links between the two groups.
Re: Sons Of Pioneers
Date: 2007-01-25 04:46 pm (UTC)I think if you look to US cities like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, etc., there might be some creative energy going on for the same reasons as Neukoln ... though in a more depressed, suffocated way. NYC is gone, though... more immigrants and kids are going into NJ, concentrating the financiers, hipsters, etc., into one big ghetto in and around Manhattan.
Re: Sons Of Pioneers
Date: 2007-01-25 05:16 pm (UTC)Re: Sons Of Pioneers
Date: 2007-01-26 05:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-25 04:46 pm (UTC)YOUR VIEW OF VIEWING
Date: 2007-01-26 12:51 am (UTC)YOUR VIEW OF VIEWING
Date: 2007-01-26 12:52 am (UTC)EXTRA EXTRA: SUBALTERN FINALLY SPEAKS!
Date: 2007-01-26 12:56 am (UTC)