Obviously Japan, evidently Tokyo…

Let’s assume! Let’s assume I woke up unexpectedly, in a small flat, very early in the morning. What would my senses reveal to me about my whereabouts?

A pillow filled with buckwheat is less comfortable than the accustomed eiderdown, but provides the neck with excellent support. The futon is pleasantly hard. Slightly starched bedding conveys a sense of coolness even on a summery morning. My hands reach out searchingly and find the smooth lines of the tatami mats. At such an early hour the world outside is still remarkably quiet; lorry noise makes its way to my ears in the form of a hum. Conspicuous, the loud caws of ravens. Now and then a screech, when one of the blue-black birds whets its beak on a traffic sign. Neighbours begin puttering about with breakfast tins, only a few centimetres and a few thin walls away. Then, my eyes still closed, I notice a very specific scent. The mats used for sleeping always smell of rice straw, even after years of use. And the heartiness of the morning meal spreads its massive aroma of rice, soy, fish, tofu, soup and tea, a menu still unaccustomed even after decades. A shaft of opaque light enters the room through a window clad in frosted glass and paper. Even at this early hour, its simplicity is striking. Ochre yellow walls, a closet with blue paper sliding doors, heaps of cushions, a flat screen. Obviously Japan.

At this hour, Tokyo is so singularly, strangely beautiful it is hard to bear. The twenty-five million people who will be getting up and moving about over the course of the next two hours are still dozing. An old man sweeps the street in front of his house near Yoyogi Park. Cottony bread rolls are delivered to the coffee shop and very hot coffee is served. This is Frauke Eigen’s time of day.

Frauke Eigen calls one section of her Japan project “Mapping Tokyo”. She sleeks through the narrow lanes of the city centre and discovers house skins. In the apparently haphazard sea of little structures which account for the majority of buildings between Narita and Kobe, the façades are made primarily of tiles, mosaics, corrugated plastic and metal or similar durable materials. Japanese architecture is generally carried out in half-timber style and plywood, sometimes with frameworks of steel. For protection against the aggressive ocean air – after all, Tokyo is located on the Pacific coast, even if that fact is hardly noticeable – these meagre depreciation properties are covered in very mundane but easy-to-clean structures which are like skins.

Small square tesserae here, elongated hexagons there, meanderingly etched wired glass, vertical ridges, perforated sheet metal, lamellae, crystalline structures, more rarely high-grade exposed concrete: one banality follows close on the heels of the other in lanes with traffic signs inscribed in the ground underfoot, and telephone and power poles draped with freely hanging cables overhead, as well as gracefully curving street lamps. The cladding of the houses serves the purpose of cleanliness; the houses are washable, shampooable. This cleanliness is something that immediately strikes the eye in Japan; even the ingenious architect Bruno Taut raves about it in his first diary entry of 1933. It is probably the basis of the Japanese viability which allows coexistence at such close quarters.

Frauke Eigen investigates these house skins in detail, looking for sections usually about one square metre in size. She thus carries the anonymity of the architecture to the point of abstraction, reduces the surfaces to grids whose uniformity determine the pictorial rhythm. It is not the melancholy of minimalism that comes about as a result, however, but a high degree of tension. The found symmetry is usually subjected to disruptions: irregularities in the lighting, minimal warps in the metal, material fatigue, breakage, the confrontation with nature, projections of nature and, finally, subjective disconcernments.

In Omotesando, for example, the photographer has nature encounter architecture in all abruptness. The pictorial background wall exhibits a fine, vertical comb-like structure that dematerializes towards the top in the increasing brightness. In front of it stands a very solid-looking birch tree, placed slightly eccentrically to the right, its trunk bandaged with burlap and its sparse crown likewise seeming to dissolve toward the upper edge. The chosen section of wall and the lighting unite the two pictorial components in a happy balance. Material impenetrability becomes an ephemeral zone.

Nature also becomes architecture’s partner in the form of a shadow, as in Shibuya II. Delicate branches cast their dark reflection on the white of a façade mosaic. Two expansion joints in the wall divide the picture into a triptych and remind the viewer of a folding screen, the traditional Japanese byōbu. A further association is the direct exposure of objects on photographic paper as practised, for example, by Man Ray in his experiments with what he called ‘rayography’. These evanescent images evoke the memory of Japanese cloud painting.

Praise of the shadow becomes an important formative principle in the “Mapping Tokyo” series, as seen in Togoshi. At first glance, the wall of the house appears to be made of absolutely smooth, monochrome concrete. A single horizontal expansion joint in the upper eighth of the picture – like a pitch-black line – and an arc lamp with a funnel-shaped shade – shifted leftward to a barely perceivably degree – provide the only structure. In its diversity, the play of shadows beneath this lamp virtually defies description. As we watch, however, a form emerges, inviting interpretation as a floating angel in our fantasy and in the fineness of the silver bromide print. Here the concrete develops the qualities of the epidermis.

On occasion, for instance in Hasune III, the photograph overlooks reality. A unicoloured ventilation shaft mounted in a smooth white wall captivates the eye by virtue of the various shadowing towards the bottom. A product of technology, it ascends, slightly tapering, like an infinite ladder. The picture could go on this way forever. Only the enlargement process brings out the contour of a bird, like an Egyptian hieroglyph, in the lower half: an owl in profile and thus the sign for the consonant “m”. Its form of existence, its origins are inexplicable.

Other impressions that appear in the midst of abstractions are clearer – indeed, incisively so. In Yushima, three cracks – evidently brought about by a seismic shock – traverse a diagonally arranged pane of white-grounded wired glass. The latter clearly reflects the mass of the building opposite, which the said cracks now seem virtually to caress. The malheur thus takes on a human dimension, forming two legs and two arms, and the gaping crack at the top right changes direction, becoming the hand of Corbusier’s modular man.

Such playful allusions are very much part and parcel of the tradition of Japanese visual customs, which turn accidental ornament into a figure or landscape. It is a pleasure to let the eye roam over the salt or ash glaze of the tea set, as if to “see one’s way in”, or along the raked lines of a stone garden, and dream of the sea and islands.

Frauke Eigen adheres to Japanese formative principles in a number of ways. For one thing, her work is distinguished by strong ethics of material revolving around the prints the artists makes herself or has made under her meticulous supervision. The choice of photographic paper and the Japanese technique of lamination with rice starch blur the distinction between handicrafts and art. Eigen thus succeeds in showing the fineness of nuances the eye has discovered – or sometimes only surmised – in the motif. Already at the time of the exposure, and all the more so during the development, the photographer decides on what – usually small – section of the scene she will show, thus luring the viewer to complete the picture on his own. She does this in the manner of the Japanese painters for whom three jets of water and nothingness suffice to convey the coolness of a waterfall. In the exposure as well as development phases, she waits patiently for the happy moment of the right light which will bring out the balance between black and white on the picture’s surface. This process requires practise – we are reminded of the ceaseless exercise of the calligrapher who must virtually learn to recognize the moment the stone stands still after being cast upward into the air and before plummeting back to earth.

Frauke Eigen likewise obeys these principles in two more recent series, devoted to the human being’s second skin – the kimono – and the bare skin itself. The close-up view shows two embroidered chrysanthemums on an obi (kimono sash), the webbed pattern of a kimono collar, a small strip of the lining and, at an almost inaccessible distance, the barest hint of a neck. The conscious omission of depth of field allows striking insights into the textile reality and the erotic promise of the skin. In the pictures of nudes, the details lead from erotic promises to an aesthetic of the epidermis as already seen in the house skins. The artist instinctively senses the typical Japanese attitude towards the corporeal and the strict distinction between exterior and interior. Out of doors carefully protected from view, indoors the body is presented with self-confidence, pride and lack of inhibition.

How can these three series be classified as views of Japan? “Evidently Tokyo” is the first thought that comes to mind on looking at the house skins, “obviously Japan” in the case of the kimonos – but the nudes? Is the light different there, soaked with humidity? Are the fabrics finer, even if they don’t cost a fortune? Is the skin softer due to the daily hot bath?

Frauke Eigen knows how to immerse herself patiently in another world, even if it is a world no longer strange to her. With her serial works on Japan and her previous ones on Los Angeles, Kosovo and Afghanistan she exhibits the ability to capture the concealed, minimal qualities of places and their residents – often not showing the latter themselves – in cautious imagery. Like all pictures, Frauke Eigen’s photographs require a connotative consciousness in order to be understood. It is not their aesthetic that is their paramount feature, but the invitation to explore their depth. This requires a lot of patience and all five senses. But that’s the way it is in Japan…

SHOKU Book

Publisher: only photography Berlin

1.Edition 2008, 500 copies

Text: Prof. Dr. Ulrich Schneider

Shoku, term used in Japan until 1961 for a unit of luminous intensity, whereby one shoku – nowadays generally measured in candela – is roughly equivalent to the luminosity of a candle