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EVENT REPORT: AM Projects「Abstracts」Book Launch Artist Talk & Demonstration by Daisuke Yokota

text = Kenji Takazawa

photo = Sho Kobayashi

When is a photograph made? Is it at the time of shooting, or at exposure, or at printing? Or is it when it’s seen by someone, including the photographer? After going digital, exposure became an automated process inside the camera, but the question still remains: is the photograph created when the shutter button is pressed, or when the image is seen?

But, on this day, I can say that we witnessed the moment of photograph being born.

It was on 27th June 2015, at “AM PROJECTS ABSTRACTS BOOK LAUNCH ARTIST TALK & DEMONSTRATION by DAISUKE YOKOTA” held at VACANT. I was in dialogue with him as well as being the commentator, and I’d like to take this opportunity to look back at this event.

The event was held partially due to the publication of Abstracts, the second photo book from AM Projects, an international collective of photographers which Yokota is a part of. “AM” is a play on “After Midnight” and “Ante Meridiem”.

As an homage to their nocturnal schedule, their first photobook was entitled Nocturnes. The second book Abstracts, then, is all about abstract expression. Other than Yokota, the artists are: Antony Cairns, Tiane Doan na Champassak, Olivier Pin-Fat, and Ester Vonplon. They respectively work in the UK, France, Italy and Switzerland.

Yokota came to join the collective after sending his zine Back Yard to The Independent Photobook, a blog showcasing independent photographers. Having seen the zine on there, AM Projects sent him an invitation. In there was a statement of purpose: separate from their respective works in galleries, the artists are to collectively publish photo books, open exhibitions, or present their works in festivals and fairs. I’ll quote from what he said about AM Projects during the talk.

KENJI TAKAZAWA (KT): Are there many projects like this, where several artists sustain a relaxed connection and work together?

DAISUKE YOKOTA (DY): There are often collaborations between independent artists—through zines, for example. I think many people are grappling with the question of: how do we stay active as artists, not just showing work in commercial galleries?

KT: Business-wise, it’s important to exhibit and sell works in commercial galleries, but they also want to work autonomously. In dealing with that need, if we gather fellow artists to act as stimulants for each other—the group allows them to do that.

DY: Yes. Selling work isn’t the premise. There are both good and bad to that, but it’s true that we don’t dilute the purity of our art when everyone involved is an artist.

KT: The artists in your collective are located all over the world. How do you maintain contact?

DY: Mostly on our Facebook group page. We ask for advice there, post images and such. We’re all talkative, filling up the timeline really fast, but I’m actually the only one who doesn’t really read English. There’s a time lag. So for me, I usually keep to giving YES or NO when asked for a final decision.

Just as the artists are dotted around the globe, their collaborators come from far and wide. Nocturnes was published by dienacht Publishing in Germany, and Abstract by Adad Books in London.

DY: dienacht Publishing issues a photography magazine called dienacht, and they gave us the funds for shooting. And instead of monetary payment, we received the finished product. Adad Books is a publisher run by two women. Both the publishers we found through the artists’ own connections. With every project we do, we want to expand our collaborators list—the process is a collaboration in its own right. If we were all working individually in our respective countries, it would be difficult to send our photo books in less-connected areas of other countries. We wouldn’t receive information. The benefit of having a multicultural group is that we can take advantage of the connections or the community the individual artists already have. By changing publishers every book, by having that uncertainty, I think we’re expanding the possibility of connecting.

Nocturnes and Abstracts aren’t just published; they’re also presented in photography fairs and exhibitions. Nocturnes was presented in Unseen Photo Fair 2012 at Amsterdam’s Noorderlicht Photography, and Abstracts was presented in London’s Copperfield Gallery this past May.

KT: Does the entire collective gather to prepare the exhibition together?

DY: No, I haven’t gone actually.

KT: So you sent the prints and exhibition plan to them?

DY: Yes, the exhibition plan. For the exhibition at Noorderlicht, I sent the data and they made the print over there.

KT: So you didn’t send any physical material. But you can still exhibit! Perhaps that’s unbelievable to artists who focus on the concept of original print.

DY: As far as I remember this space was non-profit, so I don’t think they sold the prints either. They mainly helped us print and frame our work for the exhibition.

KT: If you were to exhibit and sell at the gallery, the materiality of the print is an important factor; but if you’re only exhibiting, you can take advantage of the reproductive nature of photography. You could exhibit anywhere in the world, simultaneously.

DY: That approach is becoming more and more common.

KT: How are the gallerists involved? Copperfield Gallery is a commercial gallery, right?

DY: They provide us the space, basically. The editor at Adad Books knew the gallery from before, so she helped us a lot.

The theme of Abstracts is abstract expression. In it, Yokota includes previously unseen colour pieces. He began the creative process about two years ago, waiting for the right time to publish them. He felt the pieces went well with the abstract theme and included them in the book.

KT: Looking at works by members of AM Projects, I feel a commonality in their critical awareness. A questioning of photography’s material nature, existence of photography… I heard you sympathised with that and joined the collective.

DY: Many of our members were documentary makers before. For example, Olivier Pin-Fat used to be a part of a photo agency called VU. VU has a gallery now, but to begin with they were like France’s Magnum Photo.

KT: An established agency.

DY: Olivier’s no longer at VU, but he used to be, and Ester is now at VU as well. Tianne used to make documentary films too, but he began searching for a creative process that’s not tied down by the conventions of the documentary form. So there are many of us whose documentary style still remains strongly in the photograph used as a base, but upon it we try to bring out the texture of the photo paper, or we use dissolved photosensitive emulsion, for example. Ester, she uses 8x10 or 4x5 polaroid, but because she takes pictures in snowy mountains, the photosensitive emulsion freezes. And when that emulsion melts, its materiality is emphasized. The snow mountain, once captured, is being eroded. The material of paper, existing in the present, erodes the documented past— the time of the current phenomenon obscures the documented past. It interrupts its documentary nature, and simultaneously moves it to a more abstract image. I think the AM Projects artists have the use of such techniques in common.

KT: We know that photography has a function of documenting reality, and we believe that once it’s documented it’ll remain forever. But it’s actually more fragile. As long as it is material, it changes with time. And what is the image that’s borne out of that process? It’s an interesting question.

DY: As a premise, I think there’s a hierarchy of importance regarding the documentary nature of photography. Because photography has a documentary function, the material existence is important. But I think recordings and documents are originally vague. You can’t touch it, and even if the visual details are accurately reproduced, it’s just an image on a paper. Even though there’s a specific material of paper/film in front of you, you look at the surface of it and feel some reality that used to exist. I find that reversal fun.

KT: I can’t help but think of Daido Moriyama’s Farewell Photography. Film with perforation, exposure so messed up that you couldn’t even tell what the subject was, prints full of unusable garbage. A book that overwhelmingly reminds us that photographs are just things. What Moriyama did in an era where there was only film, and what you’re doing in the digital era, do you think there’s a correlation?

DY: I’m not sure if this will be an answer, but when I started photography I was a big fan of Daido Moriyama, and kept copying him in some way. But I knew that wouldn’t produce anything worthwhile. Until then, I was determined to only use film, but once digital became the mainstream, I thought I should try it. Once I tried it, I realised there was no financial restrictions. I could shoot so much. I could shoot an abnormally large amount, compared to when using a film camera. And I felt as if liberated from having intent for every single photo.

KT: You were no longer focused on every single photo?

DY: Yes. To shoot with film requires time and money. You can’t make a mistake. Until then, I would imagine something, then try to reproduce it with photography; when I went digital, I was freed from that. I thought to actively take photos of things around me. And I shot for one or two years continuously, not even looking at or editing what I’d taken. It accumulated to a certain amount.

KT: Must be a huge amount!

DY: Because it had accumulated, I decided to look back at it, and found many things that had photographed differently than I’d imagined. Back then, I considered that a bad factor, so I wanted to try erasing it. By erasing the bad factors, I wanted to make my interest and intentions clear.

KT: Instead of adding to it with image editing, you wanted to subtract from it.

DY: Yes. To delete. That’s how I started using Photoshop.

KT: Your early works can be seen on your official site. I’ve seen people reduced to silhouettes, for example. Makes you go: “this is a photograph?” That’s how much you’ve subtracted from them.

DY: It’s almost graphics. When I reduced people or cities to their silhouettes, I was wondering— if I erase this much, does anything photographic remain? What’s the photographic nature that remains there?

KT: And once you’ve subtracted this much, it returns to a work that contains information.

DY: Yes. For example, even just a person’s silhouette, that’s not something I drew. A kind of coincidence, something photographic remains in that silhouette. That was a good discovery, but it still looks like graphics. How do I add a photographic factor to this? And then I thought of scarring the printed product. Adding time to the print, leaving marks, would add the photograph’s documentary, recording nature, to the work.

KT: What do you mean specifically by the marks on prints adding time to it?

DY: To submerge a print out of the copy machine in water for a long time, until it’s dripping and soft, then crumpling it up, stretching it straight again then drying it. I’m manipulating time.

KT: So you’re adding, like in mathematics, time to it. Even a new print looks old if you’ve messed it up, and in fact, you could say it’s a chronicling of the time when it was receiving damage.

DY: As its final form, I take a copy of it again, but the past record has been messed up. To copy a damaged thing proves that there a time period has passed, a time period of it being damaged, before it was copied.

KT: Right. Usually, photography is adhering the moment on film roll or pixels. But in your case, by subtracting information from the image of that moment, then damaging the paper that the image is on, you’re adding time to it.

DY: Yes.

KT: Not just the time that’s passed since you took the photo, but you’re adding different time to it. Or, it looks like there’s been time added to it. That’s why it’s “manipulation”. By capturing it in a photograph, you can make the added time visual. A mode of expression especially made possible in the medium of photography.

DY: That process is where my current creative process originated from. Right now, I print out my digital shots then shoot the print with an analogue camera. Then I take the rough pixels – caused by heat – and put them on the original image.

KT: You do that in your first photo book site/cloud (artbeat publishers) and your recent one VERTIGO (Newfave). What about Abstracts

DY: This time I haven’t shot any colour images. I’ve just put 30 lightly exposed 4x5 films in a developing tank, with hot water and developing solution.

KT: It’s only chemical reactions this time.

DY: The presence or absence of shooting, it makes such a difference. I noticed while looking at Abstracts, that the artists other than me are making images by shooting first, then emphasizing the materiality of paper or film. Their abstraction is in the physical marks or damage, but behind that are captures of mountains, buildings, or people. When you notice what’s photographed, the abstract expressions begin to look like a visual effect upon the photographed subjects. On the other hand, my work—where shooting wasn’t a part of the process—is on the opposite end of the vector. Because there is no documentation or chronicling. You can see that it’s probably film that’s been processed; you come to associate the patterns and marks with mountains, forests, buildings. It begins to look like something. By not photographing, I don’t determine the landscape, and the viewer is free to read something from the piece.

KT: That’s very interesting. Other artists make reality abstract, but the viewers end up regarding the abstraction as an effect. Whereas your work doesn’t contain the reality, so the viewers try to find something realistic in the film surface. The vector is indeed reversed. And such phenomena can only occur in photography. I’m sure there are people who look at your colour pieces and say it’s not photography. But you’ve used its function of producing an image, so it could be called photography—as long as you’re using film, you can’t say it’s not photography. That leads us to the question: is using film the essence of photography? We constantly ask, “what is photography?” Perhaps using film or image pixels make something photographic. Then what is the act of shooting a photo?

DY: There are digital cameras now; film is unnecessary. Generally speaking, digital is superior in convenience, speed, depiction. We could say the necessity of documenting with film is long gone. If so, I feel like film has escaped the restrictive responsibility of documentation.

KT: What you said reminded me of the relationship between painting and photography. When photography was invented, the historical painter Delaroche is claimed to have declared: “from today, painting is dead.” But painting didn’t die. Rather, by entrusting the task of depicting reality to photography, painting was freed from realistic depiction, and began a new development. With that in mind, we could say—as you said—that because there is digital, the potential of film has been liberated.

DY: Until now, film was very much focused on how to erase its existence.

KT: How fine the grain can be, how to thwart viewers from consciously regarding what they see as photography—that’s what drove the technological development.

DY: How to make the existence of film invisible. Much technology has been renewed with this purpose, but I think we could take advantage of the material with a different purpose. When working on this series, I really was surprised by the chemical reaction of development. It’s so fleshy. Before, it was like skin—to express using its surface—but once that surface was torn, a bloody materiality came out. That was so surprising. Hmm [sighs], how do I put it.

[Audience laughter]

DY: That’s exciting! [laughing]

KT: My excitement is coming across [laughing]. I’ve seen in diagrams that film has three photosensitive layers which are protected by gelatin, but once they’re in a post-chemical reaction state, it’s surprising to see how they’ve made images that we can project reality onto. It looks like geographical patterns, rocks, or objet d’art. We think in links, like this looks like that. That’s what our brain recognises. Reminds me how full of wonder the act of looking is.

After this, Yokota explained Cell, a limited edition photo book made especially for this event. It was made by splitting one work into 56 fragments, which were then bound into a book. There are four versions. The split was done with a machine, thus uninfluenced by Yokota’s aesthetics, but still the viewer sees many images in which they can “discover” links and realities.

I wanted to ask him about it.

KT: I think works like this are unbearable to some type of people. As in, people who think: photography is meant to cut a piece out of the world, and it’s only excellent because the artist’s aesthetic intention is there. For example, Cartier-Bresson’s photographs are invaluable because only Cartier-Bresson can take them, that’s where the value lies. But your work: you haven’t shot it, and you don’t know what images will be created until after developing the film. On top of that, you’ve mechanically split it to make a photo book. And you put a price tag on it and sell it. [laughing] I’m sure there are people who think: “those are mostly coincidences, how can you call it an artwork?” What do you think about that?

DY: I rather think about finding possibilities that lie somewhere different from my decisions. In my earlier works, where I was shooting with film—I would imagine an ideal image, and using photographic techniques or darkroom techniques, I would try to get closer to that image. But in the end, the image inside my head is better. Despite having the image in my head, to make an inferior image in an attempt to recreate—that’s boring. That’s how I feel. It’s more exciting to be betrayed by the result. Shooting or making work with the desire of wanting to see a result that betrays my expectations, that’s more attractive to me.

KT: To “betray expectations” is also a specialty of photography. And even if something happens coincidentally, the artist is the first viewer, the first to see the intrigue in it. It’s important to pick up on the images that occur. Related to taking photographs, “looking” at photographs is a huge part of the equation. Whether you shoot or not, to focus on the potentials of photography, and to construct, making whether a book or an exhibition—to present like that, all of that is the photographer’s work.

DY: True, there are times when you photograph because you’re driven by the desire to see. When you’re trying capture your ideal image, you’re inevitably working with the mindset of showing it to somebody. And when someone sees that, they’re passively being showed to, and it restricts them from seeing it freely. Instead of that, I want it to be in a more disarmed state, where it’s possible to see more proactively. Most of the products and objects in today’s world has a clear specified use to them, and we’re primed with their significance and content. In there, we no longer need the act of looking. But, for example—when something is broken, we are then able to look at its materials and shape, separate from its use. Personally, I’m attracted to that. When I make work, it’s important to me how much of that phenomenon I can retain.

Then began the demonstration of his creative process.

He was to make a series, which will follow Abstracts, on the spot. Already the venue had thick acrylic boards displaying his chemically treated films; he was about to “develop” films in the same method.

In two developing tanks, there were 20-25 4x5 films. The film types were varied, including black & white, colour negatives, colour reversals, and even expired film that Yokota bid off internet auctions.

Having boiled water in an electric kettle, Yokota dissolved Fujifilm’s developing chemical Super Prodol, and poured the solution into the tanks.

He then set his iPhone timer to 5 minutes. He slowly shook the tanks three times, then simply waited.

I continued a running commentary, making it it look like some culinary TV channel, but darkroom work does remind me of cooking.

After five minutes, Yokota discarded some of the developing solution, but continued the developing process. The gelatin hadn’t dissolved enough.

He poured out some solution again, and this time we did see thin strips of gelatin floating.

He then poured in fixing solution. Normally, films are put in stop baths between developing and fixing solutions, but Yokota feels his results are better without stop baths.

After fixing, the tank is finally opened. We indeed see abstract images on the films. He washed them in a bucket, prying apart the films that had stuck to each other during developing.

And there they were: dripping, vivid-coloured “photographs”. But the process wasn’t over until they were scanned, still wet, and projected on a screen.