Mindfulness of the Earth: Perceptions and Correspondences in Kan Azuma’s Erosion (1973)

• In Event: Photographing Environmental Histories: capturing, presenting, and circulating environmental change in the past and present

Abstract

The environmental turn in photographic studies has focussed on practices that document disasters, illustrate change through systematic comparisons of then-and-now, and generates impressive works alternatively categorized as a photographic sublime or eco-pornography. These works are easily distinguished from photographs of natural beauty, whose embedded message is ‘preservation’ – the magisterial landscapes by members of the Sierra Club (Ansel Adams, Philip Hyde, and Elliot Porter). These forms have been fully explicated by Karla McManus in her studies of ‘ecophotography’.
But feelings for the earth and attempts to capture the interconnectedness of human beings and the environment can also be detected in less hortatory photographic forms – works of heightened perception, visual poems of synaesthetic motifs. This paper argues that the environmental movement of the early 1970s found photographic expression in works that translated the sensorial experience of the natural and built environments to photographic images of creeping catastrophe and impending loss.
In 1973, Japanese Canadian photographer Kan Azuma (Tokyo, 1946) completed a large cycle of black and white landscape photographs entitled Erosion. Launched at York University in Toronto, the work was also published as a portfolio in the photographic magazine Impressions (1974). Fifty prints were acquired for the national collection of contemporary Canadian photography and circulated across Canada as a travelling exhibition (1974-1984). Erosion was promoted as a fusion of Japanese photographic tradition and the Canadian landscape.
This paper argues that far more was intended and experienced. Prefaced in Impressions by Symbolist poetry and contextualized in exhibition by an autobiographical statement of struggling to consciousness, Erosion is the visual performance of a mind-body awakening to its precarious condition and potential agency. Reclaiming this work for environmental thinking enriches its history, and may also open our minds to photographic expressions of connectedness as hopeful indicators of a global ecological turn.

Author

• Martha Langford, Concordia University