My first encounter

Sometime in Summer 1991 – Kinokuniya Bookstore, Downtown Los Angeles

All I can think is that this man is in pain.

There’s a large book in my hands with a cover photo that I don’t understand.  It’s an old Japanese man.  He’s holding a flower, stem twisted and bent, petals shriveled.  His hands and arms curl inward close to his chest, arching down, concave.  His left shoulder droops low, withering.  Twisted, asymmetrical, near to chaos, his body struggling to stay standing, or upright at all.  Patchy white makeup covers every inch of his body, as if applied unevenly on purpose, or as if lived in too long.  Bright red lipstick and yellowed teeth, mouth only half-open but somehow feeling agape, as if that’s all he can muster, as if he has something to say, but instead of coming out through his tongue, the words are bleeding, oozing through pores at random points all over his body. 

Long, unevenly painted eyebrows.  Over the eyelids, smears of sky blue, desperate for attention, not rooted in attraction, but rather in pity, a long-lost desire to be someone’s queen for a day, or an hour, a minute even, an inexorable slide into decay.  And those eyes.  Surrounded by pure black, painted thick and messy, three streaks trailing off to the side of his face, simultaneously hopeful and despairing.  He’s looking upward, longing, resigned, saintly.

It’s obvious.  He’s dying.  You’re not supposed to watch this kind of thing happening.  I can’t keep my eyes off of him.  Other customers in the store are beginning to stare at me staring at this book. 

I’ve never seen anything so beautiful…

That’s what I felt, then. 

I look at this photo now, and I notice how staged it is.  The curve of the flower petals perfectly matching the arc of the lips, the fall of the hair, and the center point in the frame.  No tension in the large hands.  The dancer’s pose seems static, as if tailored and held for the camera.  There is still, however, that expression.

Ohno Kazuo sees something.  Heaven or God, since he is a devout Christian, opening his mouth wide to take in the breath of angels?  Or maybe he senses a ghost, a lost or kindred soul that fills him with childlike awe as well as aged exhaustion.  Either way, it’s a liminal feeling he’s created.  Even after 19 years, I feel a space opening up every time I see this photo.  Ohno appears to me intimidated by and anxious for what comes next, and its effect is visceral even now, just as it was when I first stood staring at it in that bookstore.  For me, the photo itself engenders a sense of liminality.  I look at it and have no idea what just happened or, even more, what is about to happen.

The image, however, could also simply be an interesting composition that the photographer, Ethan Hoffman, artfully captured, an instant when cosmic vision was activated in glass, metal, and silver halides, an old trick of the light, as they say.  We might remember that among the first photographers in history were the competing desires to either capture or depict reality.  Passive or active?  After over 170 years, we assume it’s a conscious decision made by every photographer, but, in reality, it’s a controversy that may never be resolved, just as after three millennia, most God-fearing worshippers have never reached consensus on whether to live their lives submitting to God’s will or doing his bidding.