This month's featured artist is photographer and poet Trane DeVore, whose photographic journey through mysterious places in Nagano, "Hidden Doors," is featured in this issue and can be found here.
Why 8 questions? Well, the number 8--八--is lucky in Japan, but in many cultures, it means eternity. Art and creativity are endless across time, cultures, and even individuals. I hope that each issue will provide us with insight from a featured artist, insight that will inspire the creative process in you.
Why 8 questions? Well, the number 8--八--is lucky in Japan, but in many cultures, it means eternity. Art and creativity are endless across time, cultures, and even individuals. I hope that each issue will provide us with insight from a featured artist, insight that will inspire the creative process in you.
Trane DeVore
Photo by Trane Devore
1. As a longterm resident of Japan, how has your creativity changed from when you first arrived in the country to today?
This is a really difficult question to answer, for a couple of reasons. The first is that I grew up surrounded by Japanese culture in the San Francisco Bay area, so moving to Japan didn’t really result in the kind of ‘shock of the new’ experience that happens to a lot of people. In fact, Japanese aesthetics were already an influence on my work long before I ever thought of visiting Japan. The second reason is just that I’ve lived here for so long, it’s hard to remember particular changes in my approach – so many things that once were spurs to creativity have become sort of invisible to me now. One example of this is the wonderfully quirky and fractured English that ends up on so many t-shirts here. When I first arrived, I was writing down every phrase I saw, thinking I might do something with them. By the time my friend Damion Searls came sometime in my third or fourth year of living here, they had become totally invisible to me. He started pointing out shirt after shirt as we walked through downtown Osaka, and suddenly it all opened up to me again, and I had a couple of days where walking through Osaka was like walking through a discount warehouse packed floor to ceiling with experimental poetry.
One of most obvious changes when I moved to Japan was that I was no longer surrounded by the Bay Area poetry scene, a scene I was heavily involved with. I was going to readings once or sometimes twice in a week, meeting with friends to talk about poetry over drinks, working collaboratively with different people, and just engaged in a constant exchange of language and ideas. That changed dramatically when I moved to Japan. Since I spoke no Japanese at the time, I couldn’t just transition into a dialogue with the Japanese poetic community, so instead I made ties with that much smaller group of poets living in Japan who write in English. These have been wonderful connections to have, and I’ve done some really nice collaborative work with the poets Goro Takano and Yoko Danno, both of whom write almost exclusively in English. Also, I’ve become friends with groups of poets related to Paul Rossiter’s Isobar Press as well as people involved with the Tokyo Poetry Journal. There’s a lot of good work going on here. I still keep in contact with many US poets, but virtual connection is never the same as being there.
My first trip to Japan was in 2001. I came for a week and stayed with my friend Tomo in Tokyo. At the time, I had no intention at all of moving to Japan, but that experience was probably the richest for me in terms of encountering an aesthetics of the everyday that stood out to me as slightly uncanny, a slightly askew beauty or sense, just slantwise from what my own everyday experience was like. I don’t mean traditional Japanese aesthetics – the kimono, shrines, temple bells, that kind of thing – instead I mean things like the colors of flip-phones, the sound of train announcements and gate bells, the bright colors used in advertising, the shapes and colors of the trains. Everything was entirely recognizable, and yet entirely not the same. In his novel Pattern Recognition, William Gibson – specifically referencing Japan - refers to this as the “mirror world” effect. It’s the experience of encountering the familiar in its just-a-little-bit-different guise. I definitely remember this in terms of the photos I was taking when I visited – often just things like the light blue, pink, and soft green plastic containers holding utensils at a roadside food stop, for example. In 2001, there was still a lot more of what the kids these days call the “Showa vibe” around, and I really loved that aesthetic. It’s being replaced now by a much cleaner, sleeker kind of design and production that I actually find quite boring. Or maybe grumpy old men are just the same everywhere: “It was better in the old days.”
I’ve been working on a long-term project based around writing short, impression-based poems in a goshuin stamp book (the books you collect stamps in at temples and shrines). I intend to write 152 poems, and my working title is 152 Temples and Shrines, but really the poems don’t have much to do with temples or shrines, though they often have to do with experiences of place that might include a temple or shrine. I’m writing them with a fude-pen (a brush pen) given to me years ago by a friend. In fact, writing English with a brush is just about the stupidest thing you can do. It’s sloppy, and the letters look awful. However, as a writing practice it produces interesting results, so I’m keeping with the brush until the end of the project. A few of these poems have been published - most recently in the online journal Cha, out of Hong Kong.
2. You have lived in Osaka and now in Nagano. How has your location influenced your art? Do you find that one art form screams to be expressed over another depending on where you are living?
In terms of my photography, there has been a big change in my style. Osaka is an amazing city – full of color, character, and a fantastic frantic energy. There is a huge underground and DIY art scene, and in fact, a lot of people who live in Osaka lead a kind of DIY lifestyle where they construct the kinds of (sometimes wild) identities that they want to live. There’s also a really vibrant live music scene, although a lot of venues have closed – but certainly one could talk of a distinctly Osaka vibe or sound when it comes to live performance. I think a lot of this comes from the fact that Osaka, a lot like San Francisco before the tech boom, is a city where artists and musicians can work a day job that gives them enough money to get by and then do what they want to do the rest of the time. If you look around, cost of living can be very low in Osaka.
So, when I lived in Osaka I tended to shoot color film, I used a lot of high-speed film so I could easily shoot at night (Natura 1600 was a favorite), and I often shot with wide-angle lenses so I could capture groups of people in smaller spaces (like a standing bar, for example). One of my favorite things to do was just go out drinking with friends, wait for everyone to get loose, and then start snapping away. The naturalness of these shots, and the sense of moment and place they conveyed was, I thought, fantastic. One friend from Taiwan once jokingly referred to me as “the master of the snapshot,” and there’s definitely something to that; mostly just my ability to judge the moment at which I could take out the camera and start shooting without creating any obvious ripples in the mood.
Nagano, on the other hand, is a much quieter city, and if you pull out a camera, suddenly your shot is most likely going to become a posed, portrait style photo. There just isn’t the mass of people necessary to create that frenzied energy that allows the camera to be invisible even as it’s in plain sight. Because of this, I’ve moved away from shooting people in Nagano and instead started heading out into the countryside to see what I can discover. There are so many temples, shrines, stone markers, and other historical remains just everywhere here. I mean, in Kansai as well – but here you’ll find them in places where there are literally no other people. It’s just you and a weathered torii facing a very worn pile of stones somewhere on a side road off of an apple farm up in the mountains. Everything about this is quiet, and it creates a kind of solid sense of mystery, like an electromagnetic atmosphere that is somehow attached to place. You might, for example, come across a group of five stone jizo statues on the edge of an isolated rice field. They have the red hats and bibs, but they’re faded, and the statues themselves are weather-worn and covered in lichen. There is not a sound except a strong wind that blows across this field all day long. And you think to yourself, this has been exactly like this for the last 150 years, like this, in this quiet place. It’s hard to express.
Shots of these places felt like they should be taken in black and white, so I’ve been using my Ricoh GR II, which produces excellent black and white tones. I’ll carry it around with me when I’m out cycling, or just on a hike or a wander through the countryside and see what I can find. I’ve let these photos become much darker than I would have previously. I think I like the idea of conveying the kind of feeling of yugen (幽玄) – which in its original sense is a kind of feeling of deep mystery - that I experience when I encounter some of these places. Points of reference for my current work might include the amazing black and white photography of Hiroshi Sugimoto (especially his empty movie theaters and his photographs of Buddhist statuary) or the photographs of the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. Not that I’m in any way comparing the quality of my work to the quality of theirs.
3. You are a poet and photographer. Are there are other media that you explore?
I had a short stint drawing comics when I was in graduate school. The Bay Area was a hothouse for self-published independent comics, and I decided to draw a few strips myself. A couple of these were published in a New York poetry and culture newspaper called Boog City, probably sometime in the late 90s. I met the editor/publisher, David Kirschenbaum, at one of the famous summer sessions offered by the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. We later collaborated on a piece, I think called “Bubblegum,” that was a poem that David wrote and I illustrated. That one appeared in the comics issue of the literary journal Chain.
I also played clarinet for several years, but probably the less said about that the better. I think the high point might have been a performance of Coltrane’s “Naima” with guitarist Teja Gerken that was broadcast on Petaluma’s local access cable channel.
I do write prose non-fiction as well. An essay about my dad, Darrell DeVore, and his music appeared in the Tokyo Poetry Journal a few years ago, and an essay of mine called “Groves” appeared in an American literary journal called Catamaran. It was a comparison of the forest around Yaegaki-jinja in Shimane (as described by Lafcadio Hearn) and the northern California forests I explored as a kid.
4. How does your creative process differ from one art form to the other?
For me, photography and poetry are both very different and very similar media in some ways. My own photography is very casual, almost more of a habit – I never go out into the world with a plan for what I’m going to take photos of. I just grab a couple of cameras and go. I do go through phases where there are things that obsess me, and I just take photo after photo of them, almost like a collection. Decorative Japanese manhole covers are an obvious example of this – I just can’t stop shooting them.
When I really get into the right mindset to shoot, it’s almost as if another mind takes over and as my eye travels across the sight plain, that other mind will suddenly create a frame and focus point, stop me, and make me shoot. It’s weirdly automatic. My dad, who was very anti-gun, used to refer to what he called “gun consciousness.” The way he explained it is that if you buy a gun, pretty soon you just start seeing everything as a target – the gun infects your mind and turns it into a pair of sights. Photography can work the same way for me. Wallace Stevens has that famous bit (in “The Snow Man”), where he writes
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow
When I’ve been consistently shooting photos for a few days in a row, I feel like my mind becomes a “mind of camera.” Even without a camera in my hand I can’t stop seeing photographs. It can feel a bit demented.
The Tokyo-based photographer Tommy Oshima did a series of photos, often of photographers and their cameras, and he titled each one “meditating Kamera.” I like the concept that the Kamera is something that thinks. It’s not the photographer that’s in control, but neither is it the camera, exactly. Instead there’s a kind of third mind that is created by the interaction of photographer and camera in investigation of the opti-world that surrounds us.
This is where I think there is some crossover between writing poetry and taking photos. When I write, I very often write with a project in mind, or a series of themes. But at the same time, I’m not entirely in control of what the language is going to do when I start writing. I will often have an idea of something to write about, and then suddenly a line or two will pop into my mind. I start with those lines, and then usually other lines, words, or phrases will auto-consciously generate from that point, like when you light one of those great creepy snake fireworks that starts out as a black disc and then becomes a spontaneously-generated nest of thick black spaghetti curls after you put fire to it. So then you have all these shapes and word combinations that you weren’t expecting, and you can start to put order to those and form them into some kind of sense. Once again that third mind emerges between intention and creative combustion.
5. Has the digital age changed how you approach art?
There was a time when I was really interested in how the Internet might enable new forms of poetics or photographic practice, but mostly I’m a recidivist these days and have returned to writing on paper and collaborating with people via email, which is sort of like going back to the stone age these days. There was a time when Flickr was a really vibrant photographic community and I was meeting a lot of people virtually, and then often becoming friends IRL, going on photo shoots together, sharing information about what films we were using and the like. It was fantastic to be able to look at so much incredible photography and be able to immediately find things out, like what camera, lens, and film was used – and often very detailed information about settings. It felt very much like the democratization of photography, but at the same time, it was a serious community of art-focused photographers (as opposed to selfie-obsessed Instagrammers). Now there are so many online platforms for photographers that everything feels more dispersed, and the excitement of that initial phase has also dispersed (at least for me).
The biggest change the digital age has brought for me is the disappearance of different types of film. One of the great joys of film photography was the ability to try out different films, to discover obscure film stocks you’d never even heard of, and to try out old stashes of discontinued film stock to see what effects the age of the chemicals would have on your final product. I’m actually not currently up on what films are still popular and being produced in number today, but there was a period of several years where, year by year, my favorite film types were disappearing from the market. It’s almost perverse to mourn the passing of a film stock, but that’s how it felt. I have friends who are film photographers who developed such a strong relationship with a particular type of film that when it would stop being produced, they would buy up a personal stock so they could keep using it for as many years as possible. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, though. It’s hard to express just how much I miss Fuji Natura 1600.
6. What do you see is the difference between a writer and a storyteller, an artist and a crafter?
For me, these distinctions are an unnecessary distraction, usually based around elitist notions of individual ‘genius’ or the modernist maxim that the role of the artist is to “make it new.” My attitude might partly be a result of having grown up in northern California in an environment where craft and art were strongly emphasized but neither privileged over the other. My mother, Cecily Axt, was involved with the “Art to Wear” movement, which emphasized the craft of handmade clothing as a creative locus, and my father made musical instruments – often from found objects – and used those instruments as the basis for musical composition. And, of course, I watched him practice the songs he wrote on piano again and again, crafting them into alternate versions, or shifting this or that element to improve the song. Where do you draw the line between what part of that piece of music is ‘art’ and what part ‘craft’?
I was hugely disappointed when the California College of the Arts, CCA, changed its name from the original California College of Arts and Crafts. I love CCA, but I thought something was really lost in that name change. A family friend, Mel Moss, used to teach there. He made the most beautiful table I have ever seen. It was made from a single, vertically cut slice of a redwood tree, which retained the original rough body shape of the tree. He lacquered and polished the surface by hand until it looked like a deep, liquid well full of the heart of a redwood. The legs were made from thick manzanita branches that retained all of the lightning-bolt twists they had when he found them. He sculpted them into an intertwining support frame under the table that was as wild as it was rock solid. I’ve never seen another table like that and never will.
7. Please name some of the artists, writers, poets, etc. who you particularly relate to. (Japanese and/or non-Japanese)
There are so many – there is so much incredible work out there. I’m going to twist the question a bit here and just mention a few of my most important influences.
So, I’ll start with my grandmother, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, and my grandfather, Robert Creeley – both writers and incredibly important influences in my life. My father, Darrell DeVore, who was a musician, and my mother, Cecily Axt, who has worked in both textiles and collage, and whose art surrounded me as I was growing up. These are probably the most formative artistic influences in my life. There are the poets who I took writing classes with – David Bromige at Sonoma State and Lyn Hejinian at Berkeley – and the poet D.A. Powell, who also went to Sonoma State and came out of the Sonoma County poetry scene.
I study 19th-century American literature, and Thoreau, Melville, Dickinson, and Whitman are all major influences. Among 20th-century authors, Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison have written three of the greatest American novels between them, and Ishmael Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo is a perennial favorite of mine. When it comes to 20th-century poets, there are just too many to name – including lots of friends - but I’ll just quickly mention Elizabeth Young because she’s an amazing poet and we’ve been writing a collaborative poem together for over a decade (with plans to finish soon).
I’ll just stop there, because this list could fill pages. Except I haven’t mentioned any Japanese writers or artists yet, so here’s the beginning of a list: Ono Yoko, Oi Kenzuburo, Hirokazu Koreeda, Kurosawa and Ozu, Osamu Tezuka (for Phoenix and Buddha), Ito Hiromi, Yoshimi P-Wee (especially for her work with OOIOO), Basho and Jakuchu, Tadanoori Yokoo . . .
This list really could fill pages.
8. Ramen or kaiseki?
I’m going to totally derail this question since I don’t want to get on the wrong side of either the Creative Ramen Crafters Union of Japan or the National Kaiseki Culinary Cooperative. Make enemies of those folks, and you’ll end up with sugar in your gas tank. Instead, I’m going to talk about Nagano apples, which really are incredible. I think there are something like twelve varieties grown in Nagano, and I think I’ve tried about eight of them. There are several apple orchards right around the danchi where I live, and farmers will bring those apples to the “Nagano grown” section of the local super. I can buy those apples on the day they were picked, and they taste entirely different than apples that are shipped to market (a point Thoreau emphasizes in Wild Fruits). The flavors are so much more rich, delicate, complex, and layered. And they pop! The dark purple akibae is one of my favorites.
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