Jerry Takigawa: Accelerating Time

by Richard Pitnick

Black & White Magazine, Fall 2012

(Release date July 24, 2012)

Time and the arc of memory are the central themes of Jerry Takigawa’s elegantly conceived and executed “Landscapes of Presence” portfolio. Working with a range of elemental natural objects and forms photographed against a variety of backdrops that include Asian textiles, calligraphic writing and blurred photographic images, Takigawa explores the nature and meaning of time as it relates to the mind’s fluctuating relationship between past, present and the eternal.

“We live in an information-rich yet time-poor culture,” observes Takigawa, who, in addition to his work as a fine art photographer runs a successful graphic design agency on the Monterey Peninsula, “and I see a society that is becoming more and more disconnected from nature and its rhythms, cycles, and seasons.

“Fascinated with the concept of time, I have been seeking to understand the feeling that time is speeding up, by exploring the concept of ‘no time’ which means ‘no mind’, and which reflects the belief in Eastern philosophies that the present moment is the only ‘reality’ and that past and future are an illusion.”

The concept of time as an illusion becomes especially heightened in those images in which Takigawa uses blurred photographs — often old family photographs that he prints as blurred images — to be used as a background. All of the final images are made in-camera shot with black and white, chromogenic, C-41 film. Through a clever visual sleight-of-hand in which depth-of-field and scale are both compressed and expanded, Takigawa distorts spatial awareness that parallels the ways in which the conscious mind uses memory to travel back and forth through time.

“All of my images are very emotionally based rather than intellectually based,” notes the artist. “When they look at these images, I want people to have the same experience I had when I made the images, a feeling of calmness and being in a moment that transcends time.”

There is something comforting yet also disturbing about these pictures. The welcoming expressions on the faces in the background photos — sensed more than seen — are offset by the shadow of mortality suggested by the blurring. We can identify with them even if we don’t share Takigawa’s ethnicity, as we all tend to interact with our memories through a kind of out-of-focus mental filter.

They seduce us by evoking our own family albums, and thus open the floodgates to myriad familial associations and emotions. They seem to reach out to us as we attempt to embrace them. Yet the distancing effect of the sharply focused objects and writing prevents us from succumbing to sentimentality, and forces us to consider social, cultural and even environmental issues that reside well beyond our personal parameters.

Takigawa first took up photography in the early 1970s studying the medium under noted landscape and botanical photographer Don Worth while also earning a BA in Art with an emphasis in painting from San Francisco State. During this period, he concentrated on photo-realist paintings and drawings. Over the decades, Takigawa’s photography has drawn deeply from a range of influences and has been defined by a peripatetic creativity that has found the artist exploring documentary photography, color landscape, figurative work, and experiments with fill-flash, blurred imagery, reflected imagery, and long exposure techniques.

“My background in painting has informed my photography compositionally,” says Takigawa, who compares his collection of natural objects to tubes of paint with which he constructs his images. “I do compose as if I were making a drawing or painting. Additionally, my background and upbringing as a Japanese-American has also given me a foundation in terms of my aesthetics.

“Western art is about the subject, the individual and Newtonian fragmented reality, while Eastern art is all about context, the group and the universal,” Takigawa elaborates. “I recently realized my life as an artist has been about seeking to create work that is original and individual, but that also brings the universal together.

“For me in making these images there is a feeling of wanting to be more connected to my family and history, to bring old memories into the present moment and make them new today, to give them new expression and new life in the present.”

Despite the seeming formality and compositional care that goes into his imagery, Takigawa insists that his photographs are all about process. Working from both an instinctive and intuitive perspective, Takigawa strives in his work to balance the personal with broader aesthetic meaning. “When I make photographs, I don’t want there to be too much formality or have my images look like they were overdone in any way,” he says. The simplicity of the compositions contributes to the spontaneity he seeks. Like his complementary “The Kimono” and “False Food” series, which share certain formal and thematic imperatives, the images in “Landscapes of Presence” are both random and not random, ordered and not ordered.

“In my work there is always content in the image that I can see and feel that reflects my life, but I’m not always sure it communicates to other people. The only thing I can do is hope my images have some longevity beyond their personal content, and my goal is to create something that has a timeless aesthetic to it.”

“My work has always embodied a spiritual approach that has to do with my beliefs about reality and life,” adds Takigawa, “and I hope that somebody who lives with one of my pictures will get a sense of presence, calm and peacefulness.

“Presence is what is needed to become aware of beauty and sacredness in nature. Photography is one way to experience the moment, suspend time and reconnect with being. With this work, it’s my hope to create an intimate conversation that takes the viewer to a place of quiet contemplation.” Fact File Jerry Takigawa’s prints are in the permanent collections of San Francisco MoMA, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress, among many others. Pigment prints