All photos from Triptych: a digital initiative of Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Swarthmore College libraries <http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/index.php>
All pictures I chose show nostalgia of old Japan - Japan when times went more slowly and people connected with each other more deeply.
As Japanese, I sometimes feel everything goes too fast and many things are too automatic now in Japan. However, in these pictures, kids are laughing and people are spending their time relaxed.
Interesting...old Japan...
ReplyDeleteHmmm....
Is the girl on the right in the first picture supposed to be a miko?
Also, I would like to bring attention to the fourth picture. You say that the pictures are supposed to represent old Japan. Fair enough. But you need to be more specific. What time period counts as "old Japan?" In the fourth picture, we see bicycles. When were they introduced into Japan? And, if they were introduced into Japan, can they really be said to represent "traditional" Japanese life?
Overall, it's an interesting album. But you need to be more specific about its theme.
Message by Nate
Interesting set of photographs. The second photograph is particularly interesting to me as the colors seem to be more complicated then in the other photographs where it's obvious certain areas have been painted over. The question of how old these pictures really are would be interesting to address. Any idea of what the red in the final photograph signifies? I find that to be very interesting for some reason.
ReplyDelete-Michael T.
Here we have at least two pictures of children who are not yet of school age, or at least, seem so. And yet in the second one, they are already in their roles as a man and a woman, placed together at a table while the girl pours tea. Even the girl is wearing 'good' clothes--her kimono sleeves are long, the boy is in yukata, and it's tradition as extrapolated into children. Like I've been starting to notice, the parents are absent here. These are disconnected images of 'children' put on display to show the viewer a typical Japanese child in the way they would expect them to be. At the temple grounds and the iage of the woman studying the water, the iamges are left open. The true portrait is not of the people but of the places, to display typical scenes of everyday life, while placing the bijin in to act as beauty for the eye and as a (deceptive) focus for the image for the viewers. All of these aim for this quiet aestheticism for the images, since not only are these to be displayed as makers of travel, but as expensive art pieces in the home. So the motivations are three-fold -- display typical children, typical scenes, and what they would consider 'art'.
ReplyDeleteI like this set of slides. I feel like that you see the development of people through them. First you have the children, then the young woman praying, and finally two older people in the last two slides. You get a sense of child, teenager, and adult but displayed in the Japanese cultural setting.
ReplyDeleteIt also shows everyday life, or what I assume to be, and all the slides are gorgeous. I think my favorite is the last one, because I really like the use of the color red and the woman's outfit.