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Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts Fall/Winter 2007, Volume 34, No. 2 Katsushige Nakahashi $8 each (no discount) [Add to Cart] table of contents 04: in this issue memento mori by Chuck Mobley 07: the alpha and the omega: the work of katsushige nakahashi by Aaron Kerner 15: katsushige nakahashi: anti-sculpture by Shinichiro Osaki 20: the depth of memory: an interview with katsushige nakahashi by Aaron Kerner Part two of this interview available online 28: in the gallery The Spitting Image by Terri Whitlock 32: artist profile Uncanny Perceptions: Symbolic Views and Iconic Signs in the Camera Obscura and Photogram Works of Shi Guorui by Daniell Cornell 36: exhibition review New Work: Sylvie Blocher by Emma Tramposch 39: exhibition review Oliver Herring at Max Protetch Gallery by Carlos Motta 42: book reviews Kota Ezawa, Elena Dorfman, Marco Breuer, Mona Kuhn, David Maisel, Roger Newton   in this issue MEMENTO MORI By Chuck Mobley This issue of Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts features a broad range of work by a diverse group of international artists. Two of San Francisco’s most important curators, Daniell Cornell of the de Young Museum and Terri Whitlock of SFMOMA, whose rigorous curatorial efforts in the field of contemporary art immensely enhance the cultural landscape of the Bay Area, are deserving of special recognition.  Camerawork is privileged to include their contributions to this issue. Japanese artist Katsushige Nakahashi is featured here prominently, as Camerawork will stage his first San Francisco exhibition, Katsushige Nakahashi: The Depth of Memory, in its gallery in January 2008. Key to this exhibition is the creation of a simulacrum of a Japanese Kaiten torpedo-assembled from over 20,000 photographs of a miniature model that Nakahashi painstakingly photographed with a micro lens in his studio. It is essential to Nakahashi’s art practice that the construction of this piece be done in the gallery, during the exhibition, with as broad a cross section of volunteers as can be organized. Nakahashi’s practice can be situated within a framework of relational aesthetics. As the photographs of the miniature are only pices of the artwork, they are corollary to their subsequent assembly/interaction of artist and viewer/participant. Art critic Nicolas Bourriaud has built on Duchamp’s notion that it’s the beholder who makes pictures by positioning “dialogue” in relational art “as the actual origin of the image-making process.”1 So it is with Nakahashi’s projects. Sharing stories with new people is what most interests him and helps to complete the cathartic process of his work. In the spirit of this form of dialogue, I would like to share with you the following story. In the middle of editing this issue – fact checking, photographic research, copyediting – I received an email from my father. His second cousin had died in World War II on a submarine, and he wrote to tell me that after 63 years the submarine had finally been found. I have only one, yet very distinct, memory of this distant cousin and it is as a small child during a visit to his mother’s Kirksville, Missouri, home in the mid-1970s. She had on her wall his official U.S. Navy portrait, his Purple Heart citation, and a letter from President Truman. I have no idea why it is that I remember this visit other than perhaps the solemnity with which these things were pointed out. I might never have conjured that memory had it not been for my father’s email.  Further, I might not have researched his story were it not for the work Katsushige Nakahashi and my strong desire to have something to share with him upon his visit to San Francisco. At the beginning of my research I understood the history of World War II in broad strokes: Hitler, the Holocaust, D-Day, Pearl Harbor, Kamikaze fighters, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and, through the photography of Dorothea Lange and Hansel Mieth, the internment of Japanese Americans – a exceptionally abhorrent part of San Francisco history. The story of the manned Kaiten torpedo and suicide warfare  enflamed by extreme nationalism is, of course, redolent of the current situation in Iraq and Afghanistan. The history of the the war in the Pacific and the subsequent testing of nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands during the ensuing Cold War are unsettling; these topics are covered in some detail in this issue. The following is what I came to discover about my thir cousin’s short tenure in the U.S. Navy in the years after the attack on Peal Harbor. At the age of 19, Howard Eugene McGilton joined the crew of the USS Wahoo in Vallejo, California, at the Mare Island Naval Ship Yard, where the submarine was being overhauled following its fifth patrol. In a letter to his mother dated Saturday, July 31, 1943, his excitement of being a crewmand on the Wahoo is palpable; he boasts: “This sub, Wahoo, I am on now is really swell. The crew is ‘4.0,’ the officers are ‘regulars,’ and as a whole, the Wahoo is the fight’nest sub in the whole fleet!! (As has been proven by observers and statistics.)” Unfortunately he would experience only one successful patrol on the Wahoo–its sixth-before it was lost on its seventh patrol four months later. It was during that sixth patrol on the morning of August 20, 1943, that the Wahoo, after passing through the Etorofu Strait, came upon a fishing boat just of the Kuril Islands in northern Japan.2 Six fishermen were captured and taken on board as prisoners of war; their boat sunk by Wahoo’s deck gun. The fishermen were held in the aft torpedo room, which is likely where Howard was stationed as torpedoman’s mate, third class.3 While it is interesting to see these two cultures come together in Howard’s August 1943 letter to his mother, his observations of the sailors’ physical characteristics and language seem picayune to a twenty-first-century reader. It is important to remember that he was a teenager from Missouri who found himself in an unlikely environment with unarmed fishermen who were in the ill-fated position of representing the enemy. They were on the submarine together for nine days en route to Pearl Harbor where, presumably, the fishermen would be held until the end of the war. Less than two months later the Wahoo vanished. An official press release issued by the U.S. Navy on October 31, 2006 declared the USS Wahoo found. “’In July, the Russian dive team ”Iskra” photographed wreckage lying in about 213 feet (65 meters) of water in the La Perouse (Soya) Strait between the Japanese island of Hokkaido and the Russian island of Sakhalin…[A]fter reviewing the records and information, we are certain USS Wahoo has been located,’ said Adm. Gary Roughead, the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander.”4 A memorial to Japanese and U.S. sailors lost at sea was erected at Cape Soya, Wakkanai City, on the island of Hokkaido, Japan, in 1995. The monument’s inscription details the Wahoo’s last patrol: On October 11, 1943, the Japanese Navy sank the American Submarine Wahoo in a five-hour air and sea attack. Wahoo was leaving the Sea of Japan after having sunk several ships in a two-week raid. When the Wahoo was lost it was the highest scoring submarine in the U.S. Navy. Eighty Americans sleep in the Syoa Strait 12 miles northeast of here. Many Japanese sleep in the Sea of Japan from Wahoo attacks.This monument was erected by the members of the Japanese Attack Group and relatives of Americans lying in Wahoo. Old enemies met as brothers to dedicate that our countries will have lasting peace and war will never again destroy the friendship we now enjoy today.5 A poignant footnote to this story lies among the belongings of Howard’s mother sent to bme by my unle in Missouri. Included was a scrapbook that she maintained. Within it she had pasted various newspaper articles about the Wahoo as well as other stories relating to the war. Further into the scrapbook I came upon a yellowing clipping of a story about sailors who had been rescued on a makeshift raft after 83 days stranded at sea. It suddenly seemed as if she were holding out hope that her only child might be found alive. This discovery was even more moving than the Western Union telegram notifying her of his disappearance. Sixty-four years following the death of my distant cousin in the Sea of Japan, I will host a Japanese artist in America. An artist who, as you will read in the following essays, embarked on what has become a journey of self-realization filled with uncanny coincidences and, in doing so, has made part of his journey mine. It seems only fitting then, as I take a break from writing this introduction to peruse the news online, I realize that is Memorial Day. -Chuck Mobley, Associate Director San Francisco Camerawork I would like to gratefully acknowledge my colleague on this endeavor, Aaron Kerner, as well as editorial assistants Nic Lyons and Emma Tramposch for a highly professional and engaging collaboration. Also, I am deeply indebted to San Francisco Camerawork's executive director, Sharon Tanenbaum, for her enthusiastic encouragement of this project from its earliest inception more than two years ago. Finally, I extend special thanks to my uncle for passing on the memorabilia of our shared family history and most expecially my father for opening the door -- one of many.   NOTES 1 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Ronza Woods (Paris: Les presses du reel, 2002), 26. Baurriaud offers a broader definition of relational art as “an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” (14). Richard H. O’Kane, Wahoo: The Patrols of America’s Most Famous WWII Submarine (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1987), 300. Forest J. Sterling, Wake of the Wahoo (Placentia, CA: R.A. Cline, 1999), 198. Forest Sterling joined the Whoo on its second patrol and was transferred just before its seventh and final patrol. He writes about his encounter with the Japanese fishermen: “We became so attached to our prisoners that we began to feel that they were part of the crew. The guards became a formality. It was amazing how quickly our prisoners learned the English language.” U.S. Pacific Fleet Public Affairs, “Navy Says Wreck Found off Japan is Legendary Sub USS Wahoo.” Press release, October 31, 2006. www.navy.mil/search/display.asp?sotry_id=26378. Bryan MacKinnon, “Wahoo Peace Memorial Dedication notes,” 1995. www.usswahoo.org  return to past issues of Camerawork journals home | about | exhibitions | bookstore | events | membership | journal | mentoring | links Copyright 2007. SF Camerawork. All Rights Reserved.