“Impossible de mettre de l’ordre dans l’élémentaire.” – Samuel Beckett.¹

Isoda Tomoko could refer to Afterimage, her underground series of photographs, as night photographs. As we stand on the ground, night opens up right under our feet in a place that is completely unknown. It is an undeveloped, uncultivated night that no one has ever seen, but we are always connected to it through the earth. A natural night, a primitive night that is strangely close but far from the light.

However, Isoda’s photographs are taken in a place of night that, even if unexplored, is riddled with holes and easily accessible. Here is a unique opportunity for making art that has not been noticed or considered before. A mundane night slightly enlivened by installed lights; a thoroughly boring night unbroken by the most trivial incident; an unexceptional night that has been forgotten and cast off. A night in which people who are scattered and separated come together at the sound of a whistle, a buzzer, or an electronic signal to queue up as if in a wedding line. A night where a train arrives with a deafening roar, subtly vibrating or roughly shaking, pulling up to a long, low, narrow platform, scattering or gathering people. People in the subway, people speed through paths of the subconscious mind, turning into moving lines, speeding lines of light. The subway moves straight ahead, curves, snakes, and stops, but this motion is not limited to nighttime alone. The subway moves during the day as well as night.

It is night underground. It is always night here. An essential quality of visible form is that it is delineated and reproduced by the reflection of light, but such form is obscured in this underground darkness. In the underground night a false sun shines. Something must be found to substitute for the sun, diminishing this great light source. The light here is weak and artificial. All of us who accept this as a second form of natural light as we ride the underground train are orphans rocking in the cradle of the subway. We are abandoned children rushing along under the skin of the anonymous city, random points, propertyless and homeless, consumable goods, pacified baggage.

So then, what emerges from this underground world? In the transient light substituting the true source that has been taken away, what can be produced through a photographic process that is not typical of this most representative reproductive apparatus? What if light could be captured on photosensitive paper from an underground light source, a secondary source, an improperly prepared false statement or copy? What if the underground photograph were a fragment reproduced without the source, born of a step-parent, a false sun?

Here we might enlist Nadar to trace a roundabout path into this territory. The oldest underground photograph was a view of the catacombs filled with skeletons taken by Nadar in artificial light. It is like a view of the descent of Orpheus into Hades in search of Eurydice. Recognizing that Nadar showed the photograph to be a fundamental source of virtual death/virtual life by temporarily resurrecting the dead, we can see how, with Nadar, the photographer came to be identified with Orpheus.

However, Isoda’s act of subway photography is not a descent into the space of death. Her photographs belong to a more worldly plane. There is no Hades where the Orpheus of this world descends. It is a journey into the underground as an ordinary neighbourhood without mystery, a stroll down a path that is open to the anonymous Everyman, a passage through the innumerable holes and tunnels opened up in the ground in cities throughout the world. After descending a narrow stairway below ground and standing on the platform for a certain length of time, this artist disappears into the subway. Her behaviour recalls that of a terrorist carrying a concealed weapon.

Early in the morning, Isoda waits for the first train at a private railway station in the suburbs, a train that connects with the subway. She rides to the end of the subway line that she chooses that day, goes above ground for a while, and then returns by the same route. During this time, she takes photographs. Her work is clearly different from the terrorism of many photographers, which is naturally associated with carrying a camera. Isoda’s photography is not based on phallus-consciousness or romanticism, the attitude expressed in the metaphor of shooting or firing a gun. After getting on the subway, she takes pictures from the back window of the last car, releasing the shutter in response to light that is falling away, forgotten, and left behind by the subway. She does not aim and shoot at the light coming toward her as the subway moves forward but passively retrieves the light that is fading away. A drifting realization of impossible terror.

Is the underground the only symbolic outside or nature left under present conditions? Is it an archive of codes waiting to be deciphered? Is it an example of a liberated region of the repressed unconscious? Or is it a territory that needs to be given the same order as the world above ground, where violence and other threats need to be suppressed to make it safe as a public place? In 1995, Tokyo subway cars became the site of terrible memories of religious terror. In the same year, a great earthquake destroyed broad areas above ground in the cities of Osaka and Kobe. In 2000, five years later, many underground places in Japan were shaken by movements of molten rock, literally opening up cracks and ruptures in previously secure ground.

In order to look directly at the underground, a sensory region that presents naked anxiety or misfortune often concealed on the surface of the ground, we might call in Walker Evans, a pioneer in the taking of subway photographs. There is a continuity here, a passage from the surface to the underground. Let us look at the album Many Are Called, produced by illegally photographing passengers on the New York subway with a concealed camera.²

These photographs are not brutal exposures but restrained elegies to the anonymous individual in the night, to each one of the many who are called, and the fragmentary solitude in which they exist in this neutral place. Clearly, Evans’s Subway Photographs are not a topographical record of the factors that disturb ‘above ground’ values. Like the view of Manhattan on a Sunday morning that appears at the beginning of Weegee’s Naked City (1945), they present the skin of the city, one of many layers of covering and modes of judgement, after the protective clothing has been stripped away. Going beyond the subway space depicted by Evans, Isoda’s current project reinvents photography, moving it subward as forward³ finding a region in the tissues below the skin, below the layers of both skin and clothing. In Isoda’s Afterimage, photographic dramas of concealment and revelation of the city’s skin are re-enacted, forming a thick layer where clothing sticks to the epidermis and piercing through this layer.

Isoda’s photographs appear lonely. However, that is only because this is a basic condition of their setting. If light exists, forms appear within the range of illumination, including the area of the light source, and remain as images. That is all. There is nothing more to it. Because of the simplicity of the situation, there are no secondary considerations. This is the plane where the photographs are formed, and it is what makes Isoda’s photographs inventive.

Of course, it is possible to re-enact the beginnings of photographic technique, and resuscitating the original spirit of experimentation could be instructive for present practice, a critical point in the process of passing on image technology to the next generation. However, there is no need to retain the archetype of the photographer as an active experimenter. It is only necessary to review the past to find things that can be converted or transformed for use in the present. The photographs, not Isoda, are involved with beginnings. And this is probably true of all photographs, not just hers. Only those who cannot bear the brutality of simple photographs try to make them more complex.

¹ Samuel Beckett, ‘La peinture des van Velde ou le Monde et le Pantalon’ (1945), in Beckett, ‘Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment’, edited by Rudy Cobn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 127
² Walker Evans: ‘Many Are Called’, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1966
³ Toshima Shigeyuki, director and leader of the Molecular Theater, has carried out an interesting experiment in recent years on the interface between photography and theatre. In the flyer for the play Legend of Ho, performed at the Monchu Tenjo Hall in Tokyo on September 22 and 23, 2000, he wrote, Just below SUBWAY PHOTOGRAPHS (1938-41/66), imagine SUBWARD HOTOGLYPHS (1996-00/02)! Subward Hotoglyphs appears to mean imprintings and inscriptions of Ho in an underground, downward region or a section of a hospital (subward). Ho in English is an interjection used to add emphasis when calling someone from/to a certain direction. Toshima took it from the title of a collection of Beckett’s late prose, Worstward Ho! Adding the meaning of uncertainty about the direction to be taken, he translates it with a Chinese character that is read ho in Japanese and means to be amazed or disgusted at the stupidity of someone’s words or actions. During the performance, the audience climbs into a subway car set on a second-storey level, looking down at the stage. This is a unique and literal visual device. This essay was inspired by Toshima’s concept of subward theatre.