The Guardian is my newspaper of choice, simply because I always find plenty of writing within its pages which is just extremely interesting, intriguing and often, eerily relevant to me. After only a few seconds on the paper’s front page I am usually clicking on link after link, reading up on some new and fascinating subject that I was unaware of just a few minutes before.
A few days ago I was filling up my time reading the Guardian pages when I came across one such article. The subject was the Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase (深瀬 昌久), whose book Karasu (Ravens) had recently been voted as the best photobook of the last 25 years by the British Journal of Photography.
The photos that greet you in the gallery are eerie and portentous. In one, silhouettes of ravens crowd the frame, their wings a blur as the flock launches from the ground. In another, an imperious bird seems to be almost posing for a portrait; its gnarled claws outstretched as if in salute. The images are tinged with sadness and loneliness, and they have an apocalyptic feel about them. According to the Guardian piece, Fukase undertook the project after being left by his wife, who had previously been his photographic muse. The photos are the epitome of longing and melancholy. I just had a look to see if I could buy a copy of the photobook, but seeing as it’s more than ￥30,000 (around 200 GB pounds) for a copy from Amazon, it might have to wait a little while. It wasn’t only the photos that caught my eye, but also the fact that many are taken in Hokkaido, my adoptive island in the north of Japan, where crows and ravens seems to be everywhere.
I have a little trouble telling crows and ravens apart, and there’s a lot of confusing information surrounding common names and taxonomies. From what I can gather, ravens are a subspecies of the crow genus, corvus. But anyhow, they’re both closely related and they’re bloody massive creatures, with gunmetal-colored beaks that look like they could do some serious pecking. They just look like a mass of pure muscle, bones and feathers. There is only one way to describe their eyes, beady. However it’s their colour that is the most symbolic of all, intense, depthless black. Seeing a dozen of these black splodges in a distant tree is enough to send shivers down your spine. Perhaps the most delicious apt crow/raven fact is that the collective noun for them is a murder.
Obviously Masahisa Fukase is by far not the first person to see something sinister , powerful and otherworldly in these birds. They have been a feature of many cultures’ mythologies for a very long time, and have continued to be a feature of a lot of more modern literature and culture. Interestingly, according to this authoritative corvus-concerned blog, Japanese mythology has featured a three-legged raven for a long time, and it’s still visible in a number of different guises in modern Japan, such as in the logo for the Japanese football team.
As for western culture, surely it’s Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, ‘The Raven’, which really sets the standard in modern chill-inducing, raven-referencing literature. I’m sure a lot of people, including me, have first come across the poem not in the library or in an English class but in an Hallowe’en episode of the Simpsons, where Homer plays the part of the narrator, mourning the loss of his wife Lenore, who is visited by a tapping at his chamber door, which turns out to be a Bart-shaped raven, who quoth, ‘Nevermore’. Watching it when I was 12 or so, I remember loving the spooky gothic feel to the episode and genuinely liking the poem, although I’m surprised that it seems to have taken me another 11 years or so to actually look the poem up properly. This verse sums up the raven far better than any other writing that I’ve read about them:
But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore -
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking `Nevermore.’
It makes you feel like Fukase went on a photographic mission straight after reading the poem, intent on capturing on film the essence of the raven that Poe so vividly describes. I seem to have a tendency to like art, in whatever form, that makes me feel a little uncomfortable. Or at least a little bit challenged. One of my favourite films is ‘Mulholland Drive’, directed by David Lynch, a film that never really lets you rest while watching it – the pervasive uneasiness to the film makes me squirm and shiver with a kind of perverse delight . When I first listened to Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’ a decade ago, I was in thrall to the elegiac beauty of its music and the frenzied images of displacement, fear and paranoia that were conjured up within its verses. Iain Banks’ book, ‘The Wasp Factory’ is pure, unrelenting darkness, yet it manages to retain an element of frisson and intrigue which prevents it from just being completely abhorrent. Fukase’s images are hewn from the same vein. In an ideal world I’d like to be taking photos that have the same effect on the viewer as these works; photos that entertain yet are strange, dark and ever so slightly disquieting.
Back in August last year I went on a little road trip with my girlfriend and a few of our friends to a soba festival in Teshikaga, a town just north of Kushiro. After devouring giant bowls of noodles and milking a fake cow, we headed off to Iozan, a sulphur-spewing mound that looks like the surface of Mars. There were plenty of giant black birds there, hopping around on the curiously coloured rocks. There was also an old woman there who was selling eggs that had been boiled in the geothermically heated springs that bubbled out of the ground. There happened to be a giant raven perched on a rock, seemingly very interested in the eggs, and I managed to get a shot of it just as it launched itself into the air. It didn’t go for the eggs in the end. The photo turned out pretty well, although it would have been even better if the egg seller had been a little more visible in the photo, but she happened to lean down just as the bird took off. So far this has been the only decent photo I’ve managed to get featuring one of these birds.
More recently, this past weekend in fact, the sea fog that is a constant feature of Kushiro rolled in from the Pacific and installed itself on top of the city. Nearby to our apartment is Harutori Lake, apparently the biggest lake situated within a Japanese city. On a normal day the lake isn’t particularly stunning, though it’s a nice place for a Sunday morning stroll. When the fog descends however, the place is transformed into another world. Walking around the lake, with my tripod and camera in hand, I couldn’t see the other side of the lake, just a white void. The fog also seemed to have drowned out the noise from the road that hugs one side of the lake, and there was no-one else around so it was deathly quiet. Except for the harsh cawing of the ravens in a few trees in the wood by the lake, a sound that sent the inevitable tingle down my spine. I climbed the hill into the woods to get a better view of the birds and to try and get a shot of them on film, but they were perching on the branches of a few trees that were partially obscured from view. I intead turned to the sky and tried to get a few shots of the birds silhouetted against the grey, with just a small lampost jutting into shot for context. I haven’t got the developed negatives back from Kitamura no Kamera yet, so I haven’t any clue how they turned out.
Specks of rain began to fall so I made my way back down to the lakeside, the birds now wheeling overhead. I walked a little further around the lake but by then the weighty Mamiya and the tripod were beginning to take their toll on my arms, so I went back to near where I had parked the car. When it’s warm enough (in Kushiro that means roughly only June and July), you can hire helicopter-shaped pedalos from a small pier
that juts out into the lake, and parallel to this pier is another, disused one. The boat house was all shut-up and both pier gates were locked. With the thick fog swirling around the wooden pier and no signs of life nearby it was reminiscent of when I last walked around the lake camera in hand, in February, when Hokkaido was still mired in a thick coating of snow. I spent a good while then trying to get some decent shots of the pier whilst turning my extremities into ice. Hopefully I managed to capture a sense of the sheer snowiness of Hokkaido in winter. These photos were taken with my digital Nikon, not the Mamiya medium format film camera, and one of them now graces the top of this blog.
Back to last Saturday, I found a small spider’s web that was glistening with moisture from the fog. It was hanging from the low gate that lead onto the disused pier so it took some awkward manoeuvring of the tripod and myself before I could get any frames taken. The wind was pretty strong by then and the light was failing, and the film that was in the Mamiya was only 100 ISO, which made it particularly frustrating trying to stop the movement of the web in the breeze. It’ll also be a while until I know whether it worked or not as Kitamura take forever to develop their films, they must send them down to some far-flung city like Tokyo or Osaka or somewhere.
As I left the still-deserted Harutori lakeside, the fog was as thick as ever, but through it the black shapes of the birds were still visible, rising from their perches to swoop around the trees, cawing and cawing. I would be lying if I said my pace wasn’t a little quicker than usual as I made my way back to the car.
