Letting Images Come
By Sharon Sliwinski
April 2023
Blue Affair is a short, experimental documentary film and a photo book that are both based on Kosuke Okahara’s experiences of visiting Koza, Japan – officially known as Okinawa City.
Structurally adventurous, Blue Affair is composed entirely of still images that Okahara took in Koza over the course of three years. These images became the stuff of the photographer’s dreams, which provides the structure for the short film. Like the protagonist in Chris Marker’s 1962 classic, La Jetée, Okahara found himself drawn to particular people and places again and again. Along the way, Blue Affair questions the way memory and desire is itself structured as a relationship to images.
I spoke with Okahara, an established documentary photographer, late in December 2022. He was in the process of moving back to Tokyo after spending several years in Kyoto. As he relayed, Blue Affair began when he was sent to Okinawa for a news assignment.
The island of Okinawa is home to several U.S. military bases which have played a central role in the various wars that have occurred in the Pacific region since WWII. The U.S. military presence has been a subject of protest by Japanese residents for decades. The first wave of protests were launched when an American soldier raped and murdered a 6-year-old girl in 1955. A week later another child was raped. Since that time, Okinawans have never stopped protesting American presence on the island.
Okahara, who was in Okinawa to photograph the latest iteration of these protests, found himself unexpectedly spending a night in Koza. The encounter coincided with a period when he was questioning himself and the nature of his work: “When you go shoot a project [on assignment], you have something in your mind, you imagine what’s going to happen. If you’re in a civil war zone, for instance, you imagine you are going to capture war scenes. I realized knew what was going to happen in these places. In a way, I was there just to illustrate a story that was already written. The big question for me became: what’s the difference between documentary and editorial? I was questioning myself: Am I just illustrating an editorial?”
Okahara’s questioning turned into a kind of existential crisis. For two years, he was unable to make any images. To be clear, he continued accepting assignments and taking photographs – but in his mind, this practice had become something entirely different from making images. Taking pictures for a story that has been determined in advance was not the same as the practice of image making, which for Okahara, involves something more than capturing the picture he was expecting to see.
This was the crisis the photographer was grappling with when he found himself in Okinawa. After finishing the assignment, he drove through Okinawa City on the way back to the airport and was struck by the landscape of the city: “I found it interesting, the city, the houses…it was…how to say it…a little bit depressing. This city, which the residents all call Koza, is right next to the biggest American air force base in the Pacific. It is the biggest airport in Japan – much bigger than Tokyo’s airport, in fact.”
On impulse, he stopped, “just to take a look around.” Okahara immediately met someone on the street who took him to a street bar in a tiny alley: “I met some local people at the bar and I though, okay, I’ll stay one night. And that’s how it began. I didn’t imagine I was going to make images of this town, of these people. But when I got back to Tokyo, I was preoccupied by my question, by my problem with photography, and why I couldn’t just make pictures. And then for some reason I remembered the bar in Koza.” The photographer called the people he had met when he stopped that first night and found himself back in Koza, again with no agenda, with no story written in advance. He abandoned the method he had spent two decades developing, surrendering everything he knew about taking pictures. Instead, he let the images come to him.
Okahara continued returning to Koza for three years: “It took me a long time to understand what I was doing. I mean, what I was doing was simple. I just went there because I wanted to go there. And I made pictures randomly. But why, why, why?”
Eventually, the photographer realized that all this time he had been dreaming of the things he saw in Koza. A particular table in the bar where he drank with the locals. The washing machines in the laundry mat where he cleaned his clothes. Some of the people who had made strong impressions on him. Whenever he dreamt of Koza, he felt a pull to return. Over the course of three years, he came to terms with this new way of working: rather than chasing photographs that were already formed in his mind, Okahara was learning to let the images come to him.
“I was kind of afraid. I thought, if I make work this way, I was afraid people were going to laugh at me. But it was true. It was the only way that I can actually be honest with the pictures I photographed. I didn’t go to tell the stories of the people I met. The only way to be honest about what I was doing was to make it about the images that just came.”
This seems to be the profound teaching that Blue Affair bestowed upon the photographer, and which viewers, in turn, can glean in their engagement with the project: How to see the world anew? Try closing your eyes and let the images come.
Kosuke Okahara (b. 1980) is a documentary photographer based in Tokyo, Japan. Having grown up in Tokyo, Okahara started his career as a photographer after graduating from Waseda University, Tokyo, with a degree in education. In 2004, he began pursuing stories based on ‘Ibasyo,’ which, in Japanese, refers to the physical and emotional space in which one can exist – winning the W.Eugene Smith Fellowship in 2010 for the long-term project, ‘Ibasyo,’ about Japanese girls who self-harm. He has received several other awards and grants including Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography, Prix Kodak, and The Pierre & Alexandra Boulat Grant. Okahara is represented by Polka Galerie, Paris and Only Photography, Berlin. His work has been exhibited in various venues including museums, galleries and international photo festivals, such as Kunsthal in Rotterdam, Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris, C/O Berlin, Tokyo Photographic Art Museums, Paris Photo, AIPAD, and Kyotographie in Kyoto. He has published six monographs and several art books.