Hiroshima-Nagasaki remembered through the body: haptic visuality and the skin of the photograph
- Submitting institution
-
The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- q1qz5
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1080/17540763.2017.1399289
- Title of journal
- Photographies
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 73
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 1754-0763
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of publication
- February
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- Taking as its focus the imagery produced in the wake of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this article makes a new contribution to our understanding of how the photograph is engaged with via the non-visual senses and of the interaction of the bodily senses in our reading of the photograph. Whereas embodiment theory has developed mainly within film studies, where a clear distinction is made between the still and the moving image, this article argues that in extending the deployment of such theory to still images of Hiroshima-Nagasaki and more specifically to the photobooks made in the decades following those attacks, an expanded understanding of the role of the photobook in relation to theories of embodiment is possible.
Using the work of theorists such as Vivian Sobchack and Laura Marks, the article deploys the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty together with subsequent embodiment theory to create an original analysis of some of the more intensely corporeal imagery created in the wake of the nuclear bombings. The analysis critically engages with primary texts as well as with secondary readings to make a theoretical case for an embodied reading, both of the nuclear documents and of later documentary projects around those events by photographers such as Domon Ken, Tōmatsu Shōmei and Kawada Kikuji. The article engages current debates about the analogue image, particularly amongst artists, in the wake of the widespread digitisation of the photographic image. to add further to our understanding of postwar Japanese photography and the shift in documentary practice experienced there, as well as to the development of the photobook in Japan.
The ideas for this article were first presented in a paper given at the Association of Art Historians annual conference in April 2016.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
