Exploring photography as a medium of description.

Amada Marina (AM): What was your first encounter or experience of photography?
Ono Tadashi (OT): I’ve never been an amateur photographer or taken up photography as a hobby. I didn’t have any fondness for photography or anything about photography itself. For example, when I was in high school, I thought that those guys in the photography club, in a darkroom, were such mechanical nerds and a little bit strange. I started to finally take pictures when I was working in an editorial production agency in Tokyo. Because it was a small agency, I had to do everything from design, writing, editing to taking pictures. It was only when I was in my late 20’s, I moved to France to become a student at École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles (National Postgraduate School of Photography in Arles), that I seriously became involved in photography.

AM : What made you decide to study photography in Arles?
OT : At that time, in my mid-twenties, I was one of those young people who were frustrated without defined purpose in life, but I was somehow sure that I wanted to go somewhere very far. I had been a devoted mountaineer since my teenage years, and when I was in my University, I took one year off to tour in Europe to see the natural environment. I hitch hiked my way through Western Europe from Norway to Greece. It was one of the richest experiences of my life. During this time, I stopped by Paris, and knew that I wanted to live here one day. It was totally different from Tokyo, especially for its multi-cultural, cosmopolitan aspect. I was astonished by the diversity of people with different backgrounds, races and languages coming together to reside in this city. In the last year of working at the editorial production agency, I was working on a magazine commissioned by a big travel company. So, I had to make frequent trips to foreign embassies’ travel and tourism division to gather information and resources. One day, while at the French Embassy, I came across a pamphlet about École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles. And I decided to apply myself. Before starting at École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles, I went to a French language school in Aix en Provence and attended as an auditor in the art history classes at the Aix-Marseille University. I did that because I did not have any background in art, since I majored in Ecology and Forestry in my undergraduate program in Japan. It was the only time in my life. I decided to do something on my own, made a project, planned it, and succeeded because the rest of my life is full of failures! It’s the biggest miracle of my life. There were about 400 applicants, at that time, and only 25 were accepted. This school opened in ’82, so it was in its 6th year. I was their first Japanese student, as well as their first Asian student. I thought that if I didn’t change my life here at the end of my 20s, I would be a salaryman in Tokyo for the rest of my life. It was that sense of crisis rather than the photography that pushed me to work hard during this admission process.

AM : What a story and fate, especially since you have now settled in Arles, and are teaching at École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles. How did your photographic practice evolve over time?
OT : Initially, I wanted to do street snapshots. I loved traveling, especially the big cities, so I wandered around the urban streets with a small camera. That’s how I started.

AM: That is very far from the types of the images you are now creating. I associate your work very much with static landscape photography.
OT : I have always been interested in landscape theoretically, regardless of photography, because I was studying the natural environment in my undergraduate program at the University. I have written theoretical papers on the landscape especially from the perspective of the interaction between humans and nature. Having said all that, a school is a place that deconstructs students in a way. And I met such a professor in Arles, so I was completely deconstructed. From my second year to my third year, I couldn’t even take photographs until the year I graduated. When nothing seems to be working, you must completely change your methodology. That’s why I stopped working with a small camera and started making works with a 4×5 large format camera, and that’s when I started to see something. When I was a student, French photography was going through an important change. Humanist or journalistic photography, like the works of Robert Doisneau or Henri Cartier-Bresson, were references for many people interested in French photography. But then, there was also the Düsseldorf School in Germany. They had a completely new approach with a new objectivity of photography. Instead of the conventional photography world structured by professional photographers, a new movement that is more committed to contemporary art emerged. In France, several photographers influenced by this new movement started to show their works. My professor, Christian Milovanoff, was one of them. Through his classes, I had been progressively interested in the works of Gustave Le Gray, Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, and also the works of painters such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, for example. So, amid all this, I started to use a large format camera to take more descriptive, carefully composed photographs. Some people were saying that my work itself was a photographic theory asking what photography was. In any case, the process of creating my work has changed dramatically.

AM: I see, and what are you working on right now?
OT : Since 2022, I have been collaborating with the ONF (Office National des Forêts = national forest office of France) on a project that archives the current state of forests and their changes in Bouche-du-Rhône prefecture. With the staff members of ONF, we walk through various forests and photograph, sometimes the burned forest after a big fire. Some students from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles also participate in this project to take photographs while learning about forests from the staff members of the ONF. The knowledge of forests includes so many layers: ecology, botany, politics, economy, and social issues. It is a complex subject. The students are surprised to learn that our forests are not just green masses of nature, but completely human-controlled territory. Their assumptions about nature are shaken, making it difficult to take pictures. But this is what I’m aiming for in this project. Landscapes have their histories, and we need to understand that our forests are the result of human interference with nature since the 19th century. For 200 years, they have been photographed, archived, and studied. For this project, I and some students use FIJIFILM medium-format digital camera. Our school (ENSP) has support from FUJIFILM who lends us GFX50 and GFX100. These cameras are very useful for photographing the natural environment because of their compactness and their image quality due to the performance of the image sensor.

AM: I’d like to ask you about your series “Coastal Motifs” exhibited at “Reflection – 11/3/11” at The Rencontres d’Arles (The International Photography Festival in Arles.) In your works, “nature” and “modernity” are key words, but what does “modernity” mean to you?
OT : I think that photography is one of the most important inventions of Western modernity, and photography is quite an interesting tool to think about modernity. When you take a photograph, you embody the modern gaze. You put yourself in the history of optical vision as well as the history of contradiction, between objectivity and autocentrism. In the 21st century, it has become very difficult to take photographs, as many things that were considered as “progress” in the modern era are now at impasse in many ways, and no longer functioning well. For example, industrialization needs to be re-examined in relationship to earth’s resources and the environmental consequences. This is true in neoliberalism and gender issues as well – photography and its history embody a male-centric gaze. We are now being forced to rethink everything established in the 19th and 20th centuries, in which the contribution of photography has been very important. Photography is for me an ambivalent medium. Fragmentary and inclusive, descriptive and abstract, ephemeral and timeless, mechanical and organic…it’s quite elusive…but perhaps that is why it continues to fascinate younger generations despite its old-fashioned aspect. I remember Jeff Wall saying that for sure photography is fundamentally the medium of description. I agree and am exploring its ability to depict meticulously anything in front of the lens. This vision is made by a single mechanical eye and an empty brain without interference from language. In my photographs, there’s always something I didn’t see when I took them. The work “Coastal Motifs” shows what happening in our world as a documentary but contains the details that we never try to see.

AM: You once mentioned that the photographic practice of trying to depict the world with high resolution existed long before the camera, so in a sense, the photographic practice is timeless, maybe?
OT : Well, I guess so. If you look at Albrecht Dürer’s drawings, that’s exactly what it is. I admire them. You know that “photo-graphic” practice has existed since the Renaissance, or even before, as Aristoteles described about phenomenon of light. Galileo Galilei was drawing also the sunspots with an astronomical telescope, right? Humans have been using optical instruments for a long time to depict the world from the smallest things to the farthest things. I’m one of those who think the history of photography has been started much before Nicéphore Niépce.

Interviewed by Marina Amada June, 2024
Related publication: Réplique 11/03/11 – Des photographes japonais face au cataclysm
Related exhibition : Arles les Rencontres de la Photographie, REFLECTION – 11/03/11
JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHERS FACING THE CATACLYSM