The Other Japan

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The New York Sun

Americans tend to imagine contemporary Japanese society as a realm of hightech proficiency, stellar sushi, obsequious politeness, and the mystic wisdom of one hand clapping. Bruce Gilden’s show at Silverstein Photography is a brief but powerful display of photographs of Japan – and it is another country.

Not that representations of the grimmer side of present-day Japan have been unavailable, but they have been the work of the Japanese themselves. Daido Moriyama, in particular, has photographed grainy enactments of commercial sex, casual violence, and epic trash, portraying big-city life as an endless series of stills from underexposed films noirs. Mr. Moriyama is influenced by Weegee, who during the 1930s and ’40s used his Speed Graphic and tungsten flash to memorialized the corpses of innumerable gangsters lying face down in the gutters of New York City’s mean streets.

The 11 black-and-white oversized (60 inches by 40 inches) pictures at Silverstein show that Mr. Gilden, too, is indebted to Weegee for his technique. And his subject matter is close to Mr. Moriyama’s in “Transvestite Outside Bar, Shinjuku” (1999). (Shinjuku is the section of Tokyo devoted to license.)

This is a pathetic creature. He is in a losing battle with contingency: the happenstance that made him a man, the inevitable attrition of mortality. He wears a miniskirt of black-and-white checkerboard squares, secured at the waist by a broad elasticized belt that seems painfully tight. His legs are encased in stockings of some shiny material and end in shoes secured with an elaborate arrangement of straps. A pocketbook and oversized necklaces, bracelets, and earrings complete the ensemble; it would be comic were it not for his face.

Mr. Gilden’s camera is pointed down from a position slightly above the transvestite’s head, which makes it seem larger than it really is. The face is round, flat-nosed, and high-cheeked. He has enormous eyelashes, heavy eyebrows, and a comically exaggerated cupid’s bow of lipstick framing his mouth. Like Weegee, Mr. Gilden uses a flash even when close up, which highlights the subject and separates it from the background. In this instance, the background has repeated copies of the sort of paper sales poster used by cheap discount stores, appropriate for a man who is merchandizing himself. His squared shoulders are the last vestiges of a terribly diminished dignity.

Shomei Tomatsu is another of the postwar Japanese photographers who took the measure of what defeat, occupation, Westernization, and the fading of tradition did to his people. New Yorkers had a chance to view his work up close during an exhibition at Japan Society in the fall of 2004. Mr. Tomatsu’s “Section Chief, Nagoya” (1958) catches the anxiety of this middle-management type: The subject’s face reflects the worries of the office even as he crosses the street. Mr. Gilden captures something similar in “Business Man at Lunchtime Outside JR Station, Tokyo, Kaeda” (1996).

This man’s face reflects his ledger sheets, the encounters with customers and competitors that have worn him down and hardened him. There are no emotive possibilities left for him. The narrow brim of his fedora and the toothpick between his lips are more expressive than the flesh they adorn. Mr. Gilden’s composition is again simple but effective.

The businessman’s sunlit face on the left of the frame is balanced with the back of another man’s head on the right. Between them is the front of a commercial Nissan truck, and the rest of the picture is filled with just enough buildings, signs, and strung wires to suggest the ambience. Like most of the photographs in this exhibition, this is a bold image, but a delicate reading of a foreign culture.

“Two Members of the Yakuza, Asakusa” (1998), a study in melodramatic evil, is reminiscent of Mr. Tomatsu’s “Untitled [Miyako-jima, Okinawa]”(1973), which catches the macho gesture of a yakuza man in his aviator sunglasses and white suit as he waits outside a boat station. The yakuza are the Japanese equivalent of the mafia, criminal organizations that deal in drugs, prostitution, and violence. Their members are sometimes romanticized in films as modern-day samurai, but basically they are thugs.

Here Mr. Gilden’s flash illuminates the brassy malevolence of the senior gangster, who is having his cigarette lit by a flunky. We note his plaid jacket, his heavy Rolex watch, his crude features, and his stare (one eye is wide open and the other is a bare slit).The flunky stands close behind and proffers the flame of a gold cigarette lighter: He has big shoulders, a moustache and goatee, and a look that is simultaneously obsequious and arrogant. The two seem as closeknit as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and they have comic possibilities, but they are intent on far less noble adventures.

In “Injured Homeless Man Lies in the Middle of the Street, Tokyo” (1999), Mr. Gilden makes effective use of the flash to highlight a beaten face with stitches like the lacing on a football, and to separate it from the deserted city street in the background. In “Homeless Man in Sleeping Bag Outside a Government Building” (2000), we see only the gnarled toes sticking out from the sleeping bag. The background is mostly black, but it is enough.

Also dramatic in its composition is “Man Smoking Cigarettes, Tokyo” (1999).The subject has a perfectly spherical head and flesh like the Pillsbury Doughboy. He wears a plaid shirt and a paisley kerchief on his head, and a small white cloud of smoke floats overhead. This is an enigmatic and strangely tender image.

Bruce Gilden was born in Brooklyn in 1946. He has seen the Japanese true, and done both them and us a favor.

wmeyers@nysun.com

Until June 3 (535 W. 24 Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-627-3930).


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