“JAPAN 1954”

A few years ago an American magazine ran a photo on the cover of Marilyn Monroe taken by Bert Stearns. What was unusual about the image was that it was a blow-up of a contact sheet image. Monroe had hated the image so much that she’d tried to scrape it out with a sharp object. She’d also tried erasing the image out with yellow ink. Needless to say, the resulting image was far more interesting — and certainly a far more convincing psychological portrait of Monroe than the mere photo might have been.

Truman Capote said that the things we’re ashamed of are the things that make the best stories. In North America we’re collectively ashamed of the 1970s and we try and pretend they didn’t really happen, whereas Japanese kids ransack the American 1970s looking for style cues and psychologically interesting fragments. Yet at the same time, the Japanese try to erase the fifties and early 1960s, and that, to me, makes them interesting.