jeremy stigter, photography of japan

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letter from paris : : matthew rose

jeremy stigter's japanese landscapes: an empire of emptiness
Jeremy Stigter's Japan, at least his landscapes of the country, is fraught with an understated sensuality, but not the kind one is accustomed to seeing in erotic block prints, pillow books, or the stories of Yukio Mishima. The Dutch photographer who lives and works in Paris, has produced a body of black and white photographs where lust and longing are soundly kept in check in order to exact what might best be described as a sensuality of the mind.

Furukawa, 1989, silver gelatin print, 48 x 48 cm
First exhibited at Dansk Möebel Kunst, on the Quai des Grands Augustins in Paris in June, 2003, these images, each 48 x 48 cm., date from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, and chronicle a haphazard erotic encounter with Japan. They behave in a certain way as stills from a lonely travelogue. This encounter is both empty and, paradoxically, overflowing with a melancholia and sense of hopelessness. Severe glimpses of seascapes, forests, rice paddies, bath houses, and moss gardens are minimal, yet potent, filled as they are with the barest modicum of craving for a romanticism that is more Epicurean and European than Stigter's overtly pornographic series of more recent years.
Stigter who produced hundreds of images, and chose only a sliver of his production for this exhibition, traveled throughout Japan the year before his son (who is half-Japanese) was born. One senses in these images a discovery of an adopted home with an unmistakable resistance to a full embrace.

Akita, 1989, silver gelatin print, 48 x 48 cm
The photographer, also known for his photo-novellas, a series of images captured from projected film (like The Jewish Bride, 2000), allows these silver gelatin prints to yield something far more subtle, particularly in their use of black, a black which Stigter treats as his version of ink. An empty bathhouse, a water bucket overturned, the wooden plank floors gleam with fractured light, yet the entire place seems bathed in black water. It could very well be an image from pre-war Japan.
One should not confuse Stigter's Japan with that of the intelligent tourist that peeks out of Barthe's Empire of Signs. He's not looking for signs, he's an aesthete looking for emptiness. And he finds it. Stigter projects his own Western wanderlust, and his yearning into the dark dull metals of an empty children's slide and swings, the frontal shot of these yard toys acting like kanji characters, telling a story of absence --and innocence, something lost and recoverable.

Koshihatta, 1998 silver gelatin print, 48 cm x 48 cm
Because these images are bereft of romance, the love Stigter kneads from a cage of pine trees - a forest older than him, tall and proud without bothering to brag about it - becomes a kind of sustenance. Their lines (trunks) are nearly abstract, parsing the space into black and white, negative and positive beams of light and dark. Stigter gets by with less, and manages his Western haiku with aplomb. Rice paddies are as formal as they could be, although he chooses a section of the watery grid with its patch pulled out and one senses it is indeed missing. Another image shows a small grove of pines reflecting in another section of the rice paddy and it is purposefully off kilter - deliberately not symmetric, deliberately not a European version of perfection.

Fukui, 1989, silver gelatin print, 48 x 48 cm
Two women sitting on a tram, light from a window fashioning a sort of murmuring glimpse of one's legs, while the others' toes push through her flip-flops, is a report on passing and fleeting eroticism. These images, one realizes, are about loss, the death of love, and the beauty inherent in that doleful consciousness.
Perhaps this is how a Westerner would view Japan after a nervous breakdown, looking at objects and mountains for quantifiable meaning. Except - and Stigter seems to know this - the mountains don't respond in any other language save for the one they've been speaking for eons: A deep and sonorous silence.

Matthew Rose is an artist and writer based in Paris. E: mistahrose@yahoo.com
Notes:
All Jeremy Stigter works: 1200 euros each; edition 10, with 2 artist proofs.
Galerie César Pape,
6 rue de Seine, Paris 75006
tél : + 33 1 43 26 16 20
e-mail : galerie.cesar.pape@wanadoo.fr
Jeremy Stigter, e-mail: stigter@noos.fr
Site in progress: www.jeremystigter.com

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