Artweek
From Different Cultures
San Francisco / Demetra Bowles
The work of two California photographers is on exhibit at Focus Gallery, offering a counterpoint of styles and subject matter. A retrospective of the fifty-year career of Lou Stoumen hangs with the Cibachrome prints of Jerry Takigawa, this year’s recipient of the Imogen Cunningham Photography Award.
Stoumen evades classification. While he is neither a landscapist, portraitist no documentarian, his approach to photography fits his work into all of these genres. Perhaps his career as filmmaker and teacher of film at the University of California, Los Angeles has most crucially colored his photographic work. An interest in motion pictures, beginning in 1950, led him to combine words and pictures in a form her termed “paper movie.” Words are not used as captions, nor are pictures used as illustrations; the two are brought together in counterpoint and form a new creation. Stoumen’s books fall into this category, and the family picture album is a prototype of this form.
Many of the forty-four images on exhibit capture the motion and transitoriness of the cinematic approach. Stoumen calls himself a street photographer, and as such he instantly choreographs the movements of the moment. As a street photographer he must figure the future, anticipate moves—in an instant. Street events happen now.
Stoumen’s strongest work registers this immediacy. His two series of New York, New York City, 1940 and New York City, 1978-1980, catch children laughing, smoke spewing from sewers, fat women, bent old women, young girls, hookers, and all the bustle of the city in motion revealing the vital urban rhythm.
Sailor and Girl, Subway, New York, from the 1940 series, reveals the romance and naivete of his early vision. Approached by a strange sailor while riding a subway train under Times Square, a young girl registers a look of surprise. Her innocence and his prowess are caught, as is the electricity of the moment, in what was undoubtedly a refreshing image for post-Depression viewers. Although this image remains comparivively restrained emotionally, some of Stoumen’s work, particularly when connected with his titles, lacks this control and begins to seem overly sentimental. Baby/Bed/Jesus, Los Angeles (1950), and some of the images recording the horrors of the Hiroshima holocaust in Japan, fall into this category.
Stoumen’s choice of ordinary subjects defines the overriding principle of his oeuvre. With an unusual humor and directness, his photographs celebrate the human condition, the ordinary and commonplace banalities of life. However, these “ordinary miracles,” ranging from its joys to its tragedies, also reveal a tendency to be maudlin.
Takigawa’s Cibachrome prints coolly sail beyond this indulgence to more strict formal studies of trees and kimonos. This sixth recipient of the Imogen Cunningham Photography Award (a respected award given to those whose work is not already widely known but deserves recognition) presents two series of work in this show: trees and kimonos. Each series is represented by eighteen images.
The tree series consists of haunting, often surreal images of twisted burned and ravaged trees photographed against the backdrop of a serene California ocean landscape. Most are photographed at sunset or at night with strobe lighting in order to create an ominous image. Although the individual images are strong, the series lacks variety, and the images risk being repetitive.
Takigawa’s photographs of kimonos, however, show a greater versatility and range of composition. Using materials as varied as gauze, silk and tulle within a landscape, Takigawa gives it meaning through this garment’s form and color.
Use of the kimono varies. Sheaths of bright color flash across a landscape, or the cloth is held before the lens through which a landscape is viewed, as in the photograph of a dark, silver-studded veil through which we see the star-studded sky. Sometimes the kimono is “embodied” in the landscape—with only the suggestion of a human figure in hands or an implicit shape. All of the images are untitled but one is particularly concrete in its evocation of a human figure. A woman lies on her side in a kimono. Her hand clutches the flap of the garment to her; at her stomach is a glimpse of a cratered moon and behind her is the setting sun. This lunar fantasy suggests the provocative, surreal quality of Takigawa’s work.
Often the use of color in photography is subordinate to subject matter, but in these images color, just as much as trees and kimonos, is subject. Takigawa uses color with brilliant strokes, a skill garnered from his training in painting. Trees and kimonos, both classic concerns of his Japanese heritage, are aptly chosen as subject matter. The stark and spare arrangement of his images reveals his indebtedness to his cultural tradition. His facility with color his pointed use of strobe lighting and the surreal simplicity of his compositions serve to develop Takigawa’s striking power and promise to add contributions to his future work.
