JOHN EDMONDSA Sidelong Glance

5756While it brings together images from six different cities across three continents, the project is less about the specificities of each place than the shared experience of being forced to search for a space in which to forge one’s identity. In Hashiguchi’s photographs, the city itself mostly acts as a backdrop. He favours the portrait, his subjects filling the frame and often staring directly into his camera. In many of these there are smiles, but these moments of mirth only briefly illuminate an altogether darker picture. When out shooting, Hashiguchi also brought a tape recorder with which to record the people he encountered. The quotes that open each chapter of the book capture a prevailing sense of being at once carefree and adrift. In the words of

an anonymous 16-year-old ‘heroin addict’ from West Berlin, ‘There’s always some sadness in happiness. We’ll never be com-pletely happy.’ Beyond its youthful and rebellious energy, We Have No Place to Be offers an early glimpse of the failure of the post-war project. The cities Hashiguchi photographed have all undergone profound transfor-mations over the last four decades, but the sentiment captured in the title of the series still hangs heavy in the air. While our understanding of identity has arguably become far broader and more accepting, the question of the spaces in which this identity can be expressed is one to which we have found too few answers.

— Text by Marc Feustel

ELSEWHERE

All images from the series We Have No Place to Be 1980–1982 © Joji Hashiguchi, courtesy of the artist

JOJI HASHIGUCHI was born in Kagoshima, Japan in 1940. He received an award for the 18th Taiyo Prize for Shisen (The Look) and in 1981, he published and exhibited his show domestically and internation-ally. Hashiguchi’s major publications include Seventeen 2001–2006 (2008), Couple (1992), Father (1990), Seven-teen’s Map (1988) and many others. The book We Have No Place to Be 1980-1982 was published in 2020 by Session Press

MARC FEUSTEL is an independent curator, writer and editor based in Paris. A specialist in Japanese photo-graphy, he has curated several exhibi-tions including Tokyo Stories (Kultur-huset, Stockholm), Eikoh Hosoe: Theatre of Memory (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney), Okinawa: une exception japonaise (Le Plac’Art Photo, Paris). Recent book projects include Michael Wolf: Works (2017), the first retrospective catalogue of Michael Wolf ’s work, and BLACKOUT by Hitoshi Fugo (2018). He writes regu-larly about photography and photo-books for publications including Brit-ish Journal of Photography, The Eyes, Foam, IMA, The PhotoBook Review and Polka.

A Sidelong Glance

It is much easier to write about histories, referentiality, and iconicity, than it is to write about movement, about gesture and presence, about a hand tracing the topog-raphy of the skin. One is epic and the other is frivolous, we are told, but history is already a kind of touch, and touch is a his-tory. We need both in order to collect and create narratives of origin, desire, space, ownership, dispossession, and disper-sion. We might therefore fill history books with recollections of a final embrace or an embrace that never occurred, and we might value such melodramas equally alongside the self-consciously grand narratives of discovery and innovation. The rise and fall of strong chests is akin to the cyclicality of Time. John Edmonds’ figures, be they human or man-made, do more than reflect or cri-tique or illustrate: they touch. In works like Young man looking at a female sculp-ture (from the Senufo) (2019) such touch is the kind we recognise and perhaps long

for, with eyes that penetrate even as they caress, eyes that look in you and through you but never past you. Edmonds’ figures/collaborators touch and are touched and do not require us to witness those loving gestures, so engrossed are they in a fluid, unabashedly sensual exchange of histories and temporalities. No gaze but the gaze of each other, each Self, each Other, mat-ters. We (depending, of course, on which we) might deem these agents, actors, sub-jects opaque. We wonder if the tautness of hair pulled tight feels like the tautness of the proverbial strings of the heart, but we cannot know. These figures should remain opaque if they wish to do so, but by the same token, they might expand endlessly into simultaneously new and archetypal proclamations of love and despair: for themselves, for communities, for lovers and places, for lost lives and stories. Such intimacies and opacities in Edmonds’ work are oppositional, to be sure, but we must be clearer about how. In

his critique of Linda Williams’ foundational text on melodrama, Fred Moten argues that despite the centrality of both Black-ness and gesturality to her formulation of the genre, she elides the possibility of Black gesturality at all. Instead, Blackness becomes only a metaphor or academic device, or only the non-sentient object of the progress promised by liberal rights-based discourses. Such is certainly the case in art history, wherein the interpola-tion of difference becomes not a marker of the plenitude of the Other, but rather the grand benevolence of the Master Narrative to allow itself to be touched (momentar-ily, to be sure) by the minoritarian body. A similar phenomenon is a play in queer art histories, wherein Black and trans are appended but never brought into corporeal proximity. What to do, then, with Edmonds’ photography, in which there is a lustful and delicate abundance of touch, in which time and skin and place and the accoutre-

71JOHN EDMONDS

LISETTA CARMII Travestiti

7372ments of the studio converge and diverge? We might look to Moten, ‘Therefore, one way to think of Blackness-as-abolitionism is as the site where madness and melos converge. It’s the site of a kind of unruly music that moves in disruptive, impro-visational excess — as opposed to a kind of absenting negation — of the very idea of the (art)work, and it is also the site of a certain lawless, fugitive theatricality, something on the order of that drama that Zora Neale Hurston argues is essential to black life.’ 1 So we might indeed under-stand Edmonds’ work to enact a series of critiques of art history, the museum, the gaze, of whose imaginaries and loves and deemed worthy of imaging and imagining. Yet, following Moten, we cannot under-stand these photographs as performing the negative affects associated with critique and opposition, nor can we understand them to be at all times critical and opposi-tional. That Moten focuses on melodrama, a genre often considered retrograde and complicit, or, alternatively, reclaimed as always already latently critical, is telling. Ultimately, it is harder to talk about touch and gesture than art history or art crit-icism, at least as we practice them now,

because the former are neither critical nor complicit and they tend to exceed lan-guage and the image. Touch is a harbinger of love and violence simultaneously. It is nostalgic and it hopes for the future, that the loved one might someday come to reciprocate, that the movie might end as it should. Touch and gesture and love require rest and activism at different times or all at once. Touch and gesture and love and the photographs of John Edmonds unearth histories both public and private, even as they protect those histories from unob-structed or unmediated viewing. Edmonds’ photographs gesture insistently outwards, towards innumerable discourses, even as they gesture toward those histories that speak to nothing exterior, nothing grand — only to the possibilities of caressing, see-ing, and attempting to know a loved body, a loved object.

— Text by William J. Simmons

1Fred Moten, Stolen Life, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018), 111.

ELSEWHERE

All images from the series A Sidelong Glance © John Edmonds, courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery

JOHN EDMONDS is an American artist and photographer who first came to public recognition with his intimate portraits of lovers, closer friends and strangers. He received his MFA from Yale University and his BFA from the Corcoran School of Arts + Design. His practice draws upon art historical representations of portrai-ture and figuration while expanding its roster to include individuals of his own creative community in New York and beyond. Incorporating everyday items of adornment and preservation while also juxtaposing these objects with sacred and spiritual sculptures from Central and West Africa, the art-ist has developed a distinct approach to photography as a critical tool for engaging with personal and collective history, commemorating the past and continually reshaping the present and future. In 2019, He was included in the 79th Whitney Biennial.

WILLIAM J. SIMMONS is an essayist, poet, and art historian. He is currently Provost Fellow in the Humanities in the University of Southern California’s art history PhD program. His work has appeared in numerous interna-tional magazines, edited volumes, and mono graphs. He is the co-editor of the Spring 2020 issue of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media.