Kan Azuma

A beautiful photography exhibition has been installed temporarily at the National Gallery of Canada. It can be found on the second floor, not far from the Surrealists, and there is something in this adjacency— nothing to do with form and everything to do with creative states of mind. The photographs are by the Tokyo-born photographer Kan Azuma (b. 1946), who came to Canada by chance in 1970 and stayed for about a decade, making two significant bodies of work that re-authored the Canadian landscape: “Erosion,” 1973, and “Other Land (Divinity),” c. 1975. These series were acquired by the Still Photography Division of the National Film Board. “Erosion” was in fact purchased twice and widely circulated in Canada and abroad. Azuma’s Canadian landscapes are united in this exhibition with other projects from his time in North America and after his return to Japan. Their presentation by co-curators Andrea Kunard and Euijung McGillis, an event in itself, also marks the museum’s acquisition of the Kan Azuma fonds.

Kan Azuma was a trained photographer when he arrived in Vancouver after being refused a travel visa by the United States. He found a job in a lab, which allowed him to start shooting and printing again, before he moved on to Toronto, where he worked in the photography department of York University. Within a few years, he was a well-known figure on the burgeoning Canadian photography scene. His work was associated with that of Japanese émigré photographers, notably Shin Sugino and Shun Sasabuchi, while the elemental strength of his approach found supporters in Judith Eglington and Michael Semak, who doubtless connected him with the NFB. This institutional history is not incidental since it both recognized the power of the work and channelled it through the multiculturalist narrative of the day. Azuma’s landscapes were seen through a Canadian lens, and the current exhibition also ties him to Japanese movements, notably Provoke and the VIVO movement that were highly influential when he was starting out. There are certainly resonances with the cityscapes of Yutaka Takanashi, and Azuma acknowledges lessons in patience with the landscape from Ikkō Narahara. But this is where the story gets interesting and far more complex than was understood by his supporters, or indeed argued by the artist himself in the day. Azuma never framed his work in those exilic terms, as the transplanting of Japan’s distinct contemporary style to North American situations. He could have: the levers were available after the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented “New Japanese Photography” in 1974, and such distinguished critics as Max Kozloff began formulating their response. Kozloff’s ruminations about MoMA’s exhibition, first published in Artforum, are modestly expressed as a kind of “mental bother” during which he draws on Robert Jay Lifton’s discernment of the new protean personality, a function of historical dislocation and overwhelmedness by floods of images, superficial and undigested. Kozloff evokes the conditioning factors of an Occupied Japan, “wounded” and “goaded” by America, out of which the new Japanese photography is brilliantly emerging. His insights are usefully reread in view of Azuma’s accomplishments, reminding us, and I have confessed this elsewhere, that the qualities of Azuma’s work in the day did not bother us enough. Not to be too literal, but to shift the discussion a bit, Azuma’s provocation was to poeticize in passages of photographic language (“Erosion”) and further intensify in mesmerizing individual images (“Other Land [Divinity]”) his being-in-formation. Azuma’s work is the exquisite distillation of a decentred phenomenology.

His two series from the early ’70s have something in common. Each came with an origin story of encounter with the forces of nature. “Erosion” was inspired by an extended period of rain that Azuma heard was worrying the people of Point Pelee on Lake Erie. He wondered about this natural process “erosion”—what did it look like? What would it feel like? He went to see. It looked and felt like a landscape being washed away from human control, with vestiges of occupation—wharves, playing fields, signs—crumbling into postapocalyptic ruin, and the whole Earth threatened by the results of proud overreach. He assembled this vision from his shooting at Point Pelee and other places—this synthesis is important to the piece— unifying fragments of perception into a sequence of small, granular black and white prints. As seen in one key picture of a boy gazing out over this precarious terrain, the work figures vision, but the other senses are also evoked in images of breaking waves and bodies leaning into the wind—the fact that these are photographs, therefore silent, only strengthens feelings of disorientation and foreboding.

The other body of work is likewise explained as springing from a shock in nature. Azuma went to Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia where he was impressed by huge boulders that organic growth was trying to reclaim or, to anthropomorphize shamelessly, protectively to embrace. He photographed these boulders, but where they sent him was to the graveyard of solid form, a sand quarry near Toronto, where he photographed the formations of time’s pummelling and human intervention. The photographs are enthralling, for their vertiginous designs that draw the eye into unfathomable depths, and for their execution. Azuma’s prints are out-of-this-world. For that alone, the exhibition is magnificent.

Added to these enthralling assemblages are excerpts from Azuma’s archives: projects unfinished or unrecognized in the day; contact sheets; a bookwork; a series of portraits made in Japanese locations, and recording a pilgrimage after the death of his mother. Great enlargements from Azuma’s portraits are installed in the blind windows of the National Gallery and in an outdoor exhibition. Sharing his meetings with these kindly pilgrims is another gift. It underscores a curatorial theme of wandering or the diasporic yearning of finding one’s place. Azuma returned to Japan and might now be considered an important passeur were it not for the fact that his two major works have been feelingly re-emplaced within the greater context of his relational production. ❚

“Kan Azuma: A Matter of Place” was exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, from March 1, 2024, to June 24, 2024.

Martha Langford is research chair and director of the Gail and Stephen A Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University, Montreal.