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A friend sent me a page from a book she was reading. It was Michael Sakamoto’s “An Empty Room” (2022), which describes the author’s experience and understanding of Butoh dance — an avante-garde form of performance art, originating in Japan in the late 1950’s. It has become quite a phenomenon in the world of dance. Dance and photography are beautiful bedfellows and I had the pleasure of photographing pieces by choreographer Saburo Teshigawara in Qatar last year, whose work often falls in or near Butoh.
In Sakamoto’s book, he describes looking at the cover of another book, “Buto: Dance of the Dark,” with an arresting cover image taken by photographer Ethan Hoffman:
I notice how staged this photo is. The curve of the flower petals perfectly matching the arc of the lips, the fall of the hair, and the center point in the frame. No obvious tension in the large hands. The dancer’s static pose in perfect focus seems tailored and held for the camera.
There is still, however, that expression.
Ohno Kazuo sees something. Heaven or God, perhaps, since he is a devout Christian, opening wide to take in the breath of angels. Or maybe a ghost, a lost or kindred soul that fills him with childlike awe and aged exhaustion. I still feel a visceral, potentialized space opening up every time I see this photo. Ohno seems intimidated and anxious for what comes next, engendering a sense of betweenness.
I may, however, be imposing my own predilections upon the image. In considering whether a photo is acting upon me or vice versa, I recall the competing desires among the first photographers in history, either to observe reality passively or actively to depict it. What many people assume is a conscious choice made by every photographer is, in fact, an existential question that has vexed artists and scholars to this day.
Indeed it has.
And this passage prompts us to ask, yet again: what does photography truly capture? The moment, as the quote often goes? Or something entirely new, perhaps, driven through the interjection of they…
