While browsing the shelves of Moom photobook store last year I came across a recent work by Bruce Gilden titled Cherry Blossom. I was inclined to ignore it and move on. My impression of Gilden was not a favourable one, associating his work with aggressive, in your face (quite literally), photographic assaults on his subjects. No doubt that perception was reinforced - or perhaps initiated - by Joel Meyerowitz’s denunciation of Gilden in The Guardian:
He's a fucking bully. I despise the work, I despise the attitude, he's an aggressive bully and all the pictures look alike because he only has one idea – 'I'm gonna embarrass you, I'm going to humiliate you.' I'm sorry, but no.
Still, it was raining and I had time to kill, so I picked the book up and flicked through it. To my surprise, I liked it. So I bought it.
Cherry Blossom contains pictures taken in Japan, mostly Tokyo and Osaka, during several visits in the second half of the 90s. Gilden went in search of the Japan that polite society did not talk about and did not want to see.
There, Gilden found Yakuza gangsters, Bosozuko biker gangs and homeless people; the kind of people Gilden was interested in photographing. There is no ‘Hello Kitty’, no fashionable young people hanging out in Shinjuku, no geishas, not even - despite the title - any cherry blossoms. (Gilden explains the title comes from one of the images showing an elegant lady sitting in a park during cherry blossom season eating fried chicken.)
Japanese photographers appear to have largely ignored - deliberately or otherwise - these subjects, so perhaps it took a cultural outsider, and one as abrasive as Gilden to take these pictures.
There are plenty of close up, ‘in your face’ images and Gilden clearly made use of his flashgun, but I find these less aggressive, less dehumanizing than some of his more recent work. These are also balanced with images where Gilden has stepped back a little and given us a fuller picture.
Some of the characters Gilden shows us come across as flamboyant, some sad, others sinister. Some of the images are amusing, others disturbing. Despite Meyerowitz’s criticism, I don’t think it’s fair to say that in this work Gilden ‘only has one idea’.
The most challenging images are those of homeless people. I assume the Yakuza and the Bosozuko consented to be photographed, since organised crime and biker gangs undoubtedly have robust means of dealing with pushy photographers otherwise. This is less so for homeless people.
There are conflicting views among photographers around photographing homeless people, with many photographers and critics arguing that it is exploitative of people with little agency or power to object. I understand that criticism, but I’m not entirely convinced by it. Homeless people not only suffer material deprivation, but also experience erasure. Sometimes this is a physical erasure, pushed off the streets into neglected spaces - under bridges, along railway lines. Sometimes it is a psychological erasure when people like me pass them on the street and look past or even look through them. It seems to me that refusing to photograph homeless people could be seen as just another form of erasure.
As Gilden notes in his introductory comments in the book he does not generally photograph homeless people on the streets of New York, but he was taken aback by the sheer number of homeless people he found in Tokyo. Recall that these pictures were taken in the 1990s. As Japan’s economic miracle generated a massive bubble in the late 1980s, there was much talk of Japan’s GDP outstripping that of the United States. By the mid 1990s, when Gilden first visited the country, the bubble had burst.
Or rather, it was not so much a case of a bursting bubble as a slowly deflating balloon. Japan was still a wealthy country, and the European and North American public still had a vision of Japan shaped by the boom years of the late 1980s. Given this, Giden’s surprise at the number of homeless people and, perhaps, his decision to photograph them is understandable. All that said, Gilden’s explanation for photographing them is simply that he ‘just found them interesting’.
As for the specific photographs of homeless people, I have no problem with some of them but there are others that are very challenging to look at and leave me uncomfortable. Given the opportunity I could not take these pictures. I’ve written before about the paramount importance of respect in photographing people, and some of these images seem to me to be disrespectful. But I’m conscious that respectfulness is primarily a characteristic of the photographer, not the photograph, and I don’t want to read a perceived lack of respect in the photograph into the attitude or values of the photographer. And as Gilden points out in a Magnum interview following publication:
As Robert Frank wrote, ‘It’s important to see what’s invisible to others’. If you don’t look at the things I look at, how can you help people? You know, people may say they care, but they don’t look.
Cherry Blossom will not be to everyone’s taste but, despite the challenging nature of some of the work, I think this is a compelling collection that explores a side of Japan rarely seen. While Gilden will never rank among my favourite photographers I have certainly revised my view of - at least some of - his work.
In this short video Gilden discusses some of the images from the book.
While not specifically about Cherry Blossom this is a long free flowing conversation between Gilden and Martin Parr, primarily discussing Gilden’s life and work.
All images © Bruce Gilden
Bruce Gilden: Cherry Blossom
Thames & Hudson, 2021
ISBN 978-0-50054-555-3