Mrs Tsk *

I was in the Japan Folk Art Museum.


I was quite enjoying the air-conditioning, and the peculiar bunker-like architecture of the building.


The pottery collection was only moderately interesting. I found the display cases and the lights (yellow and white fluorescents, bouncing off the oblong cases) more gorgeous than the pots.


The whole of the top floor is given over to kokeshi dolls.


I started photographing them; many looked like people I know, and I thought of emailing these friends to say “I found your face in a museum!”


At first I tried to exclude the reflections of the fluorescent bulbs overhead. But then I decided I liked them.


I decided, in fact, that although the kokeshi dolls on their own were only a so-so subject, the kokeshi dolls plus the reflections were magnificent.


When I framed the pictures carefully, it looked as if the dolls were holding trays made of lines of pure white light, or were squeezing thought-beams out of their heads, or playing flute-beams.


The beauty of the wooden dolls and the beauty of the lights overhead meshed, like past and future multiplying each other.


The culture which produced the beautiful hand-painted wooden dolls couldn’t produce the brilliant lights, I thought.


And the culture which produces brilliant white lights doesn’t have the time or the skill to make handcrafted dolls as beautiful as these.


So the beauty of a photograph which combines them both is phantasmagoric: it contains the sadness of its own impossibility.


Or perhaps these pictures are beautiful because actually the dolls do resemble my vision of the Japanese: a people who’ve kept their ancient beauty alive even under the bright white light of a harsh and futuristic modernity.