There Are Two Sides to Every Noren:
Photo Exhibition as Art and Anthropology
のれんの表裏には異なる意味があります:
アートと人類学としての写真展
Abstract: Visual anthropology is an intersection of art and science – it entails commitment, ethical concerns, close relationships and ever-changing negotiations with participants (subjects and audience). This on-going research project is a visual ethnography of a tachinomiya (Japanese standing bar) in Osaka called Tenbun. It is based on my years of patronage, including two years of dedicated participant-observation and photography. Tenbun features many kinds of food and drink, a lively and relaxed atmosphere and plenty of colorful characters including the owner, employees and regular customers. One outstanding feature of this tachinomiya is its long, dark blue noren, a kind of fabric curtain as its entrance that signals that the shop is open for business and provides partial seclusion for the shop and customers. The noren can be seen as a fluid wall; when calm it blocks much of the view from the outside, but when the wind blows its separated partitions offer more glimpses of the inside. The glimpses can be narrow or revealing. One cannot control the wind; this fluid wall illustrates the complexities of personal privacy in public spaces in Japan, especially in the context of taking photographs in public and image rights. An important component of this project was a photo exhibition with prints and portraits illustrating the atmosphere of Tenbun. Initially I thought the photo exhibition to be the final product of the fieldwork and research. But I found the exhibition and interactions with the gallery audience to reveal important aspects of heuristic processes, meaning-creation, evocation and multivocality. Viewers were doing more than merely looking at my photographs, they were analyzing, scrutinizing, reacting and providing various interpretations and valuable feedback. In this multi-media presentation, I will discuss the "post-fieldwork encounters" of the photo exhibition as a collaborative media event through multimodal analyses and autoethnographic vignettes.
A/R/P (Art/Research/Practice) 2021
Tokyo University of the Arts
Oct. 3 - Session 7 - 13:30 - 15:00
via Zoom (conference registration required - free!)
https://arp.geidai.ac.jp/?fbclid=IwAR2sMtNm5ANkyfKO6iaSuRcLOl7GXktKmxlhcBrGJWq7oxZH42-FLmLTM4c
I'm really looking forward to this conference!
おすすめ！Check out Can Tamura's presentation, "Pandemic-Friendly Posthuman Ethnographic Filmmaking: The 24 Solar Terms of Echigo-Tsumari," Session 8, Oct. 3, 15:15-16:45.
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