ABSTRACT
Société Irf insists on locality. A reclaiming of ‘locality’ is also suggested in the club’s name, a reversal of the Japanese word furui for ‘old’ into a meaningless irufu, which accompanies the French word for ‘society’. However, the insistence on a specific locality departs from Shimozato Yoshio’s earlier definition of the ‘camera’s automatism’ as an abstraction of individual desire into its understanding as a mirror reflection of the social process determining everyday life. Importantly, at the point of the January 1940 issue of Photo Times, in which the shift towards traditional aesthetics reached its peak, all the photographs produced in the project do not manifest an enthusiastic view of ‘Japaneseness’, or a celebration of locality, but show abstract renditions of placeless, ruptured and ruined textures. Simultaneously to Yamanaka’s article in July 1940, Minoru Sakata published ‘A New Pair of Straw Sandals’, and this text represents well the stakes involved in his work at the time.
