Japanese Houses 1997-2019

 

In Japan, a family member is commonly referred to as “a person in one’s house,” and the word “house” represents not only a residence (architecture) but also a group of residents = a family. In the spring of 1997, I became interested in the relationship between Japanese people and their houses when my family moved to our new house built by local carpenters. Japanese Houses (1997-) is a series of works commenting on family identity. This series is composed of multiple montages of Japanese family portraits and photographs of houses built for them, and the finished images represent the strong attachment and aspiration of the models towards their own houses. Images of houses cut out from backgrounds and placed on their heads become masks to conceal the identities of each family member while providing a unified identity for the entire family. In other words, a house can be a family’s face.  The surreal images created by combining portraits of houses and families become “anthropomorphism” to explore similarities between architecture and the human body.

 

Photo-collage and photo-montage were techniques to create subjective and complex images attempted by Bauhaus, Russian constructivists, and surrealist artists. While the Japanese Houses is a series of photo-collages/photo-montage in terms of its technique, its content is created with the awareness of typology presented by August Sander, the German portrait photographer in the prewar era, and Bernd & Hilla Becher, the German photographers in the post-war era. Thus, this work is composed of “Sander (people) + Becher (buildings).” The reason why I started shooting the Japanese Houses using monochrome films was my interest in the objective typology in monochrome photographs by Sander and the Bechers. In fact, I attempted to create a photo-montage study using photographs by Sander and the Bechers beforehand to test combinations of people and buildings for their effects.

 

At that time, a common photographic technique was changing rapidly from a wet (film) technique to a dry (digital) one. In the early summer of 1997, I returned from Boston, the United States, and started shooting in western Hamamatsu, where my parents’ house was located, with the thought that these might be the last works by monochrome films and silver-halide prints. In the suburbs of the United States where I lived back then, house owners wouldn’t build their residences as custom ones unless they were meant to be second houses. What the owners could do was only paint exterior walls in yellow, pink, or colors they liked, or add some decorations and those were built-for-sale houses originally developed and built with same designs by certain developers. Noticing the differences between suburban housing in Japan and that in the United States that I lived in that time, I considered Japan was a convenient location for this series since owners’ preferences are reflected better on their house designs and Japanese houses have a rich variety of styles such as Western, Japanese, and Japanese-Western. Above all, Japanese people have a firm attachment to a house and a place. Since the shooting started off at my parents’ house, the series has acquired diverse typology that combines houses and families thanks to a wide range of supporters: my relatives, family, friends, acquaintances, a house furnished with a store, and a temple.

 

Monochrome works of the series feature rich gradation and soft tone achieved by a monochrome film and a silver-halide print, houses’ outlines carefully cut out from the background with a knife, and bold collage work in which prints of houses directly stuck on the faces in family portraits. In addition to the aim at the house and family from the front angle, I also attempted shooting from an oblique side to create not only frontality but also depth in the works. This attempt led to shooting from behind in color works of the series.

 

When I started living in Kyoto in 2002, I restarted Japanese Houses with color photography. I technically shifted to  the dry (digital) technique, and enlarged prints using digital silver-halide output with image data. In contrast to the works from 1997, whose shades of black and white create a classical and intimate impression, the digital color prints are more up-to-date in terms of vividness of colors, realistic depiction of details, and the enlarged format. Although I started the shooting of color works in 2002 in western Hamamatsu as in that of monochrome works, the range of shooting locations ended up expanding to Tokyo. In recent years, I have photographed works in Kyoto and Otsu close to where I currently live. Compared to Hamamatsu, one of provincial towns far apart from a metropolis where many traditional country-style houses are, the houses and residents recently photographed in Kyoto are seemingly urbanized and sophisticated. Houses reflect not only families but also the natural and cultural environment of where they are built. In fact, sceneries that appear as the background behind families are gardens in the houses or their surrounding environment. I examine the relations among humans, architecture, and surrounding environment through Japanese Houses.

 

—Toshihiro Komatsu

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