ABSTRACT
In her landmark study Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Peggy Phelan argued that performance art exists only in and of its initial enactment. Recordings lack the immediacy, presence and full power of the original. In this chapter, the author argues that the affinities and exchanges between butoh dance and photomedia rest on a series of mobile, contradictory affiliations which are evoked through images of bodies subjected to fragmentation and change. Audiences access the body via its shifting fragments, pieces and ruptures, and in the transit between forms. Photographic butoh therefore functioned in opposition to the postwar school of Japanese Realist photography championed by Domon Ken, and inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson's Magnum organization. Cartier-Bresson famously proposed that photography should condense real-life events into a single, objective "decisive moment," coalescing narrative into an immediate, legible journalistic icon. Butoh might be considered in as a revival of photography's cultic origins, a concept also found in French Surrealist writings about photography.
