A Conversation With 10×10 Photobooks

A couple of years ago, I compiled statistics of the photobooks featured in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s The Photobook: A History, volumes 1 and 2. Volume 1 features 191 books by male artists and 18 by female artists. The ratio is very slightly less skewed in volume 2: it’s 174 vs 37. But note that I counted books and not artists: volume 2 features 11 books by Roni Horn, a fact that drastically lowers the already very low number of female artists. As you can probably imagine, the numbers of white people versus people of colour or of Western European/North American vs the rest of the world are equally depressing.

On 12 November 2021, the winners of the 2021 PhotoBook Awards were announced. What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999 by Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich was chosen as the Photography Catalogue of the Year (full disclosure: I contributed an essay to the book). In very obvious ways, What They Saw serves as the much needed corrective to the very skewed field presented in books like The Photobook: A History (and similar publications).

Lederman and Yatskevich are two of the driving forces behind 10×10 Photobooks, a non-profit with a focus on the photobook. I spoke with Lederman and Yatskevich after the release of What They Saw (before the announcement of the PhotoBook Awards). The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Jörg Colberg
Let’s start out with talking about 10×10 Photobooks. What’s the idea?

Russet Lederman
We’re almost 10 years old now. We started in 2012. We started as a resource for the community, a way that people interested in photobooks could meet up. Olga had created the Facebook group a few months before and organized a meet-up at a small Japanese cafe in Long Island City. She asked me and my husband, Jeff, to bring some of our Japanese books to share. In essence, that created the first salon, which became part of 10×10’s multi-platform programming.

We then realized that more people would want to see these books. So we launched our first Reading Room, also in 2012, which was timed with the New York art book fair, in conjunction with ICP. It was a Japanese Reading Room of 100 books. We reached out to friends in Japan, and they sent books. It was a success, and we continued to offer reading rooms in 10×10’s programming.

Now we also have a grants program to further support research in photobook history specifically. This history is still very young, starting in 1999 with Horacio Fernández’s show and book Fotografía pública/Photography in Print 1919–1939 at the Reina Sofía. Many of the contributions since that anthology have been mostly from collectors and have been highly biased. Most of these collectors have been of a certain age, socio-economic, and racial background. This has skewed photobook history to be less inclusive.

We felt that broader voices for this history should be included. The research grants area way to do that. We give a topic each year. This was our first year, and our board members Dave Solo and Richard Grosbard spearheaded it. We chose the theme of women to sync with the current What They Saw project. But that is not necessarily what the grants will focus on in the future. They will be in underserved areas that need further research.

JC
For those who don’t know, the Reading Room — what is it? What do I have to imagine when I think of a Reading Room?

Olga Yatskevich
As Russet said, our first Reading Room was focused on Japanese photobooks. The idea was to bring contemporary Japanese photobooks that were not easily available in New York. We invited 10 people who selected 10 contemporary photobooks by Japanese photographers, and we then brought them into a space: a Reading Room. It was important for us that people had access to the books, could sit down, look through books, and really spend a good amount of time with them. We did have people who had spent a couple of hours taking notes and asking us where they could purchase those books.

That idea translated to all our other Reading Rooms where we invited people to come and spend time with the books and see them in the context of the entire project. The Reading Rooms will usually last over a weekend or a couple of days, and we usually take them to several locations. It’s important for us that after the project, the books are donated to a library where people can still access them. To record the projects, we started publishing our publications, the catalogs. So each Reading Room is also presented in a book format.

It was important for us that people had access to the books, could sit down, look through books, and really spend a good amount of time with them.
— Olga Yatskevich

JC
I was going to ask about that. There was also an American 10×10.

OY
Our first one was on Japanese photobooks. Then it was American photobooks. Then we focused on Latin American photobooks. After that, we moved to contemporary photobooks by women. The last one is historical photobooks by women.

RL
We should add that in between, there have been pop-up events that are similar to Reading Rooms. We did a hybrid reading room / book fair event called Awake with the Magnum Foundation, where we invited a bunch of independent publishers to each have a table. They did not have to pay for the table, so it was not like a commercial fair in that sense. Under the theme of protest, they could share their books. In the middle of the space, we also had a long table with donated books and books from the ICP Library on protest. Those not owned by ICP were donated to the Brooklyn Museum at the end of the project. Unlike many private collectors who might sell their collection to an institution, 10×10 always donates any books we receive for a project. Our goal is for the books to remain in an institution where they can be accessible to the public, such as the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Museum Library or other public institutions. We’re trying to reach various types of photobook people, as well as introduce the concept of the photobook to a new and expanded audience.

JC
The previous project was How We See — Photobooks by Women. Now there is What They Saw — Historical Photobooks by Women. I’m curious about this leap from a (for a lack of a better word) curated survey towards what actually is real scholarship. How did that transition come about? Can you talk more about this project?

OY
I think with all our projects, we’re trying to figure out what works the best for each project. But also try not to repeat the same patterns. For our CLAP! publication, we expanded the number of people who selected books and asked them to select between 8 and 12 books. For our How We See project we asked experts to each select 10 photobooks by women. Through conversations and feedback from that Reading Room, we realized that there was a very strong interest in historical photobooks by women. We agreed that it was also time to rethink how we approach this project. This latest project, What They Saw, is arranged in chronological order.

RL
In How We See, we also had a historical selection, which was not in the Reading Room. It was more of a reference section where we asked librarians, historians, critics, and writers to each recommend 10 books. What They Saw grew from that selection and expanded.

We also found that people were asking about books that women did in the 1920s, or in the 19th century that our historical reference section touched upon lightly. To expand research on these books, we reached out to experts who, for example, might be specialists in African photobooks or photography experts or scholars in South Asian photography.

We also found that how we define a book now in the 21st century didn’t necessarily hold true for what we had to use as a definition in some of the earlier periods, particularly in areas that did not have access to offset or other forms of printing. We found that for some women, their socio-economic situation was such that they didn’t have the funding or resources personally. So we started to include scrapbooks and albums and unbound collected portfolios to address this issue. The singular way of defining a photobook as a bound book with hardcovers distributed through either a trade or independently was not necessarily what everyone called a book or could make. What They Saw is not only about researching a marginalized group, in this particular case women, but also about expanding the definition of what constitutes a photobook to account for the obstacles women had to overcome. I should add that we define women quite loosely—for example, there is a book by a crossdresser.

JC
What were your most exciting discoveries?

OY
I’m still fascinated by the albums by Arabella Chapman that Russet found. I think those are incredible. Also, Alice Seeley Harris’ The Camera and the Congo Crime was something that I found really outstanding. It was published in the early 20th century. It can be considered one of the earliest examples of a humanitarian photography campaign. One Time, One Place by Eudora Welty, a well-known American author, captures life in her home state of Mississippi in the mid-30s. It was published as a book four decades later. Also, Passion by Cameroonian photographer Angèle Etoundi Essamba, published in 1989, offers complex, empowering and beautiful portraits of Black women, breaking existing stereotypes. There are a lot of great discoveries!

RL
For me also the albums, of course. I expected that we would find most of the 19th-century and early 20th-century albums in the US, Britain, Western Europe because of the pervasiveness of photography and access by women of a certain class.

One of the exciting things for me was how women were able to make photography and the conditions and new definitions they created as a result. Take the Russian avant-garde artist Varvara Stepanova, who regularly worked with her husband Aleksander Rodchenko: you can’t find a book that is just her. And that’s true of many female members of the Russian avant-garde because most of the projects were collaborative. You have to remember that making a book is a multi-layered process. In the case of Varvara, she took Boris Ignatovich’s photographs and montaged them to create these beautiful endpapers of a repeated image of a Red Army soldier.

I also found the WSPU album (Women’s Social and Political Union), a Suffragette movement in the UK. A woman named Isabel Marian Seymour created that album from postcards made by Christina Broom and others. Christina Brooms is amazing. Her husband had a disability and was incapable of working. So she learned photography, started following the Suffragettes and photographed them. She also photographed British soldiers from World War 1, before they left for the frontlines. She set up kiosk stands to sell her postcards, which her daughter printed. Learning all of the things that these women had to do to survive and make money by means of photography is eye-opening.

Or take Alice Austen. She was one of the first LGBTQ+ figures in New York. She was a well-to-do Staten Island woman who, among other things, was a big bicycle advocate. These kinds of layers of pushing the envelope — not just in photography — were so interesting. She had long-term relationships with other women and circulated within a group of well-known lesbians. She went out with her camera and photographed New York street people, such as mailmen, newsboys and shoeshine boys. In my opinion, she’s the first street photographer. Her photos were in an unbound portfolio. Maybe we wouldn’t call that a book if we hadn’t changed our definition.

More contemporary: Adrian Piper did a book called Colored People. It’s a very conceptual, democratic project. She reached out to friends and colleagues and asked them to send her a photograph of themselves emoting based on tcliché emotional terms like “tickled pink” or “green with envy.” She then crudely colored portions of the received photos with the corresponding emotional color. She titled the book Colored People, which in itself is a racial commentary. We think of her as an artist and not often as a photographer or a bookmaker. These are the discoveries I really enjoy—ones where when we rethink assumptions and simplified classifications.

Learning all of the things that these women had to do to survive and make money by means of photography is eye-opening.
— Russet Lederman

JC
I think all of that might point to the fact that when we talk about photobooks, we keep them as photo objects. In a lot of anthologies, there is very little connection to the world outside or how the books actually connected with that time. What’s so interesting about your project is how it connects out into the world, in all these different circumstances. Is that something that you see in the same way? Maybe this can teach us something about how we can approach photobooks in a more fruitful manner?

RL
I think that’s very important. The photobook world is in danger of imploding. It’s a niche community and very insular.

In order for the photobook world to grow and survive, it has to speak to the larger society, and it has to speak to its time. This is why we asked each of the authors who wrote an essay for What They Saw to put the books within their time in a social, economic, political and cultural context. If you do not do that, you lose a lot of people who may need a broader context to appreciate a photobook.

Also, we wanted to avoid making the photobook something too precious. Instead, I see the photobook as something that should be part of our daily lives. It should be something that we enjoy in the same way we enjoy a paperback that’s sitting by the side of our bed. Maybe we turn the page down on it, and now it’s a bit dog-eared.

OY
Each chapter begins with an essay that provides a necessary political, social, and cultural background to place those books in their time period. They answer several questions, such as why these books were published and why they were possible. But they also pose questions: Why were there no photobooks published in certain periods? Or why were some subjects missing? It offers a more nuanced context to understand those photobooks.

RL
Olga came up with the concept of the timeline that runs throughout the book. It’s brilliant. It solves so many problems. There were several books, particularly in the 19th century, where we got a lead or someone mentioned something that could have produced a book. But we couldn’t find the book. The trail went dead. One example is an “assumed” journal with contributions by an Iranian princess, who had learned photography because she and her husband were members of the Shah’s court during the Qatar period, where photography was advocated. She kept her husband’s diary, which supposedly included several of her photographs. It’s a unique book that is most likely in a library in Iran, but we could not find any visual documentation of it. Still, we wanted to mention it, hoping that some future researcher would then say, I found it; here’s a photograph of it.

There were many things like that. The first Japanese woman to take a photograph collaborated with her husband. They ran a studio together in the Gunma Prefecture in the 1860s. All the work, for the most part, is attributed to him. There are two albums, which I found in an exhibition that was in a Hokkaido museum. Via my friend Yoko Sawada, we asked Kohtaro Iizawa, an expert in Japanese photography, if he thought the wife also contributed to these albums? He said, most likely, but that there was no definitive proof.

These were things that went into the timeline, along with events that could have produced atypical photo-literature that could have arisen from feminist or self-publishing. Magazines and the picture press were also a jumping board during WWII and after for womens’ involvement with photography. Some did phenomenal work in Life magazine or Vu, but they didn’t produce a book. Do we leave them out? This was a means to acknowledge that photography and words are not just a book. The picture press was a very inexpensive way — they were getting paid — for women like Lee Miller, who only produced one or two books. Quite honestly, I think the work she did for Vogue magazine during WWII is phenomenal. The timeline provided this really wonderful area to put things down that didn’t fit into a book-by-a-single-author definition..

We should mention that with What They Saw, we’re doing the Reading Room a bit differently. Typically, we travel a collection of books that 10×10 owns and then donates to an institution at the end of the tour. In this case, several books are unique albums that cannot be easily accessed. So we are partnering with institutions that already have deep holdings in many of the 258 books for the Reading Room. We also put together a fund to buy many books. That way, we can recontextualize what already exists within an institution’s collection and supplement it with the books we purchased.

We have two confirmed sites so far, the NYPL and the Hirsch Library at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. We will also be doing public programming, whether it’s public talks or posters in branch libraries or outdoor signage showcasing books by women photographers,, These public initiatives bring the books beyond the four walls of the reading room itself. This is a vital aspect: reaching out. In that sense, maybe educational is the best word. —empowering individuals to be their own experts.

The photobook world is in danger of imploding. It’s a niche community and very insular.
— Russet Lederman

JC
… and maybe get beyond this model of the precious object that is hidden away somewhere, that you don’t really have access to, and that’s too precious to engage with.

RL
That for us is key, wherever we are. In many cases, the books at the NYPL have library bindings, which makes them extremely handleable. People can touch them because they’re indestructible. You won’t see them in that Reading Room with fragile dust jackets on them. Instead, they can be touched to your heart’s content, while a few of the rare books will be in a dedicated space that will require registration. But those are the exceptions rather than the rule.

Japanese artist Kikuji Kawada‘s book The Map (Chizu in the romanized form of its original title) is widely seen as a landmark photobook. Published in 1965, there exist two recent reissues that both reproduce the original more or less faithfully, as a modestly sized book with a large number of gatefolds. But now, another version has appeared: the Maquette Edition. The book was co-published by MACK and the New York Public Library. With a long interview with the artist himself, and added scholarship by Joshua Chuang (Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Associate Director for Art, Prints, and Photographs and Robert B. Menschel Senior Curator of Photography at the New York Public Library) and Miyuki Hinton (an independent art researcher living in Tokyo), the publication serves to shed a lot of light on an artist who isn’t as well known and understood in the West as the fame of his book might make you think.

Spread from photography annual Sekai Shashin Nenkan ’62: Photography of the World (Tokyo: Heibonsha), showing photographs by Kikuji Kawada on the left and Shōmei Tōmatsu on the right. (Imaging by Yukinobu Kobayashi.)

The Map can only be fully understood when its context is taken into consideration. After all, it is one of a number of Japanese photobooks covering the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1958, Ken Domon published Hiroshima, which largely focused on survivors. Three years later, some of Domon’s photographs were paired with work by Shōmei Tōmatsu in Hiroshima-Nagasaki Document 1961. Five years later, Tōmatsu published Nagasaki <11:02> August 9, 1945. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki <11:02> would be re-published by their authors in expanded/edited versions later. “I have taken around 12,00 photographs of Nagasaki,” Tōmatsu writes in the epilogue of the 1995 version of his book. “Fourteen years passed between the first two books, and fifteen between the second and the third. When so much time elapses — I grow older, accumulate so much more experience — my selection of photographs is sure to differ. […] it is like the buri (yellowtail), whose name changes as it grows. We call it inada when it is very young; hamachi when it is bigger; and buri when it is mature.” Tōmatsu’s approach might serve to help with the conundrum that the Maquette Edition poses for Westerners expecting just one — the definitive — edition of a book: it doesn’t have to be this way. As much as not any one version of Nagasaki <11:02> is definitive (collectors probably have different ideas), we can approach The Map the same way.

Spread from the weekly magazine Shukan Shincho (3/25/1956) with Kawada’s photographs in a feature titled “Tokyo no Higashi” (East of Tokyo) about a land-fill area in Urayasu, Chiba Prefecture. (Imaging by Yukinobu Kobayashi.)

In 1952, Kawada received the top prize for his very first submission to a contest in Camera magazine. As Kōtarō IIzawa outlines in his essay The Evolution of Postwar Photography, which can be found in The History of Japanese Photography (Yale University Press, 2003), Domon had been tasked to be the judge. In his role, Domon not only selected winning photographs, but also wrote detailed critiques of them. Furthermore, he engaged in an exchange with photographer Ihee Kimura on photo-realism, defining it as “strictly a realm in which only the objective truth in the subject motif is pursued, not the subjective image or fantasy of the artist.” As Miyuki Hinton outlines in her essay in the Maquette Edition, Kawada was persuaded by Domon’s modernist beliefs. “The topic of debate was whether photography should be concerned first and foremost with ‘realism,’” Hinton says, “but there was also debate on the definition of ‘realism.’” The discussions themselves are probably a lot less interesting in hindsight than the fact that they happened: they provided a fertile atmosphere for photographers attempting to understand what they were doing.

Spread from volume 2

Originally emerging from a more realist position, like many of other members of his generation Kawada ended up moving towards a very different type of photography. In 1959, he co-founded a short-lived, yet influential group of photographers called VIVO. The group included Shōmei Tōmatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, and others. The Map reflects its maker’s artistic development through both the more straight photographs and the expressionistic abstractions. In the straight part (in the Maquette Edition its own book, featuring a white cover and referred to as volume 2), the influence of both Domon, the mentor, and especially Tōmatsu, a peer, can be felt. In fact, the imagery stretches from Domonesque straight work (such as an abandoned military concrete structure) to Tōmatsuesque pictures that often place the photographer much closer to his subject (such as a crumpled pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes) all the way to abstract imagery that would not feel out of place in the other book (volume 1). Even as the Maquette Edition separates straight and fully abstract pictures into two separate books, which seemingly serves to drive home their differences, there is a strong connection between them. This connection becomes more easily apparent in the one-volume edition. In the Maquette Edition, the contrast between two books amounts to encountering two different worlds: where volume 2 moves in and out of the terror of war and destruction, volume 1 immerses the viewer in a bewildering experience that reminded me of watching Nobuo Nakagawa’s 1960 Jigoku, a movie that includes depictions of hell. Of course, unlike in the movie the terror in Kawada’s work is only abstract. But that doesn’t make it any less terrifying.

Spread from volume 2

The idea of the artistic genius who produces amazing art seemingly out of a vacuum might make for appealing narratives. However, the reality of art making typically is very different, with artistic genius creating a fusion of elements that are in the air, possibly working with and against ideas used by those before her or him.

In the interview in the Maquette Edition, Kawada notes that he spoke with art critic Shūji Takashina because there were no discussions in the world of photography about what interested him. “He is skeptical of discussions about what is real or not in photographic terms,” Hinton tells me, “which is why he seeks out different types of criticism. Takashina provided that in his observation of the images. Kawada says he looked at each as a ‘tableau,’ in other words as a flat image plane that contains an artistic expression and whose formal qualities are put into question. Not some idealism or opinion about what is ‘real’ or what is worth recording with a camera.” Hinton observes that the world of photography had a tendency to become “isolated from the rest of art society, compartmentalized, and over-reliant on the opinions of peers” (which, I’d be happy to argue, it still is, whether in Japan or elsewhere).

Art was not the only environment that provided Kawada with ways to approach his images. “Another area Kawada investigated in the way of criticism is that of the written word,” Hinton says, “as in novels, poetry, and literature in general. Literary circles had a more mature culture of criticism about abstract and expressive forms of art.” It’s possible that these types of references might feel like adding too many details to the work. But if one wants to understand The Map, it is important to see where it was coming from: the book ultimately has a lot more in common with a piece of art than with photography — something that Kawada spoke of very forcefully when I heard him talk about the book in Tokyo a few years ago. Consequently, even as it is a photobook, to judge it only by that medium’s terms will not do it full justice.

Spread from volume 1

Kawada’s earlier connection to his mentor is of importance. There also is “his background in journalism,” Hinton says, “which Domon primed him for.” “I credit him as the reason I made Chizu… We were very close,” Kawada describes his relationship with Domon in the interview in the book, “but I think he mistook our relationship as being one of apprentice and master. I never thought of it that way. I was sometimes referred to as the prodigal apprentice, though I never saw our relationship that way.” There is this: the psychology of relationships. After all, artists are human beings. To have one’s work defined in relation to a well-known other figure’s achievements cannot have been easy. At the same time, there is a form of artistic debt that is being paid off with The Map: Hiroshima had to exist for it to come into being.

Kawada was born in 1933. Speaking of his biography, the late German Chancellor Helmut Kohl spoke of the “mercy of late birth.” Born in 1930, he wasn’t old enough to end up in a combat situation at the end of World War 2. Kohl’s sentiment was (and still is) widely seen as glib, given that it conveniently ignored many other people’s experiences, regardless of whether they were German or not. But there is something interesting about the generation born in the early 1930s. Its members were old enough to grasp the reality of war in ways that children would not. At the same time, they were spared becoming an active part of the war, even as they might have had a passive role. Kawada was a member of that generation. Hinton’s background essay provides a lot of details. Kawada was “raised in Tsuchiura, Ibaraki Prefecture, where the Japanese Naval Preparatory Flight Training Program (known as “Yokaren”) was established during the war. In the final year of the war, […] several oral-history accounts given by former residents include stories of watching air combat; some recall walking for miles to lay eyes on a fallen plane and its captive pilot.” (p. 25f.)

Spread from volume 2

I was struck by the fact that I had heard similar accounts in my own life time. When I was in high school, one day and completely out of the blue, my Latin teacher (who must have been born in the early 1930s) told us how he witnessed a low-flying fighter plane attack a commuter train that he was traveling on at the end of the war. He saw a number of other passengers fall from the train after being hit by bullets. When I heard the story, I was around the age that my teacher was at that time. Ever since, I have tried to wrap my head around how one would go about processing such events. “Kawada’s own impressions of the time are detached in tone,” Hinton writes, describing an incident where he witnessed a US plane that “glided through the air so close to the ground that young Kawada could see the face of the pilot as its machine guns issued bullets, rapid-fire.” (p. 26) Kawada’s story and my former high-school teacher’s are very similar. I now know that trauma cannot be processed in simple ways. But I was struck by the fact that Kawada “has repeatedly denied any association between Chizu and the trauma of war.” (p. 26) Hinton concludes the paragraph dealing with this aspect by writing that when asked, the artist admitted that he was “unwilling to probe deeper behind those closed doors.”

Spread from volume 1

How could there not be a deep association between the book and his maker’s experiences? I asked Hinton about this, and her answer is worth quoting in full detail: “It seems to me that Kawada feels unable to pretend as though he can speak of the traumas of the war, because he survived the worst. He survived without being in the center of the worst experiences that fell upon so many people. That may be due to several factors. He was fortunate in that he didn’t live in a city that was completely destroyed. And he was a few years younger than the age at which he could have been enlisted or eligible to join the war. At the same time, he was growing up right next to that training center, not differentiating himself from those young men, young boys, who were employed. He believed the propaganda. Everyone believed the propaganda that this was a just war and that Japan was winning. He believed all of the hype up to a certain point. And then the war was over, he survived, and by the time he made the work was able to understand that any political stance is fraught with contradictions. It could be that because he has very strong principles he wouldn’t let himself speak about ‘the trauma of war’ or the ‘trauma of Hiroshima’ having been spared from it, and having moved on, living in a booming postwar world. It’s that proximity to the worst-case scenario that gave him this parallel view about life and about catastrophe. A Jungian Japanese psychologist named Kawai Hayao talks about ‘trans-personal’ experience. By Kawada not acting as first-hand victim or witness of wartime atrocity, he’s able to speak about a trans-personal experience. But once he pretends that he represents that trauma, he feels as though he’s betraying humanity.” The idea of the trans-personal experience can help us understand not only The Map, but also other pieces of art.

Spread from the study guide

Small section of the map of Chizu, comparing the two different versions

The value of the Maquette Edition lies in the combination of presenting the work in a different form than the one that is well known (yet hard to come by — copies tend to be prohibitively expensive for most people). A viewer might want to resist the temptation to decide which of the two versions is the definitive — or better — one (if you have followed my writing over the years, you probably realize that this is not easy for me, either). The writing in the form of the essays by Chuang and Hinton, a detailed artist’s biography, an interview with the artist, plus a large comparison chart that shows both versions side by side provide ample information to understand the artist and his work more deeply. Considerable research went into the making of the book. “I ended up collecting about 250 magazine articles with photographs and writing by Kawada between 1952 and 1966.” Hinton tells me. “This was based on my background in archival methods. I had studied archaeology and anthropology at Keio University as an undergrad and wrote my dissertation on applying archaeological methods to the analysis of vernacular photographs. I then learned, during my mentored internship with Ryuichi Kaneko at the TOP museum, that digging into the back-page margins of photo magazines sometimes yields rich information.”

The mystery of The Map remains. In both editions, the book exerts a strong pull on its viewers, making her or him face the abyss that humans appear to be so attracted to. Being able to place the work into its historical context allows for the making of connections and for an understanding of the man who produced it. Beyond that, meaning radiates out as it touches us in a number of ways. After all, we might note that this isn’t only a book about Japan: the nuclear bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of people didn’t come out of nowhere (I’m writing this article in a country that has so far been unwilling to face up to its past actions). If we want to have hope to step back from the abyss, we still have a lot of work ahead of us.

Kikuji Kawada: Chizu (Maquette Edition); two hardback books, each with a jacket, plus one paperback booklet with leporello fold; housed in a buckram bound hardback slipcase, protected in a printed cardboard mailer; bilingual essays (English, Japanese); 272 pages (total); MACK/New York Public Library; 2021

Earlier this year, Jenny Kim made it onto the British Journal of Photography‘s list of Ones To Watch. “Endless topics stem from the complexity of womanhood that I continually find fascinating and important to talk about” she says in an article about her work, which focuses on herself as much as on her partner and immediate family. I approached Kim to inquire whether she would talk to me about the work in more detail. In late October, we spoke on Zoom. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Jörg Colberg
Your parents came to the US as immigrants, is that right?

Jenny Kim
Right. They came in the early 1970s. They initially immigrated to Hawaii, where my dad’s sister was living with her family. My sister was born in Hawaii. And then they came over to the mainland. They finally settled in Los Angeles, where I was born.

JC
Why did they decide to come to the US?

JK
As far as I know, it was to have a better life. My mom thought everything would be better in America. It was the American dream.

JC
Do you think they were happy with the choice they made? Did they ever talk about this?

JK
They didn’t really say if they were happy or sad. But when I got a little bit older I remember my dad saying how he probably couldn’t live in Korea after having lived in America for so long, even though he didn’t move here until he was in his 30s. I don’t know that I’ve ever asked them if they were happy. I know my mom misses her mother. When my grandfather was still alive, she missed being able to see them both. Her parents are very important to her. I do wonder about that because most of her family is in Korea. She would like to see my grandmother more, because my grandmother is in her 90s.

I think culturally, we didn’t really talk about a lot of stuff like that. Are you happy? No, you just work hard. That’s what you do. You follow the things in life you’re supposed to do: go to college, meet a good person, get married, have children, work hard.

JC
You’re a first generation Korean American then.

JK
Right.

JC
Did your family speak Korean at home, or did you grow up speaking English? How did this play out?

JK
My parents spoke Korean. A lot of what I remember as a kid is also from what my sister tells me happened because she’s almost five years older. There was a push for us to learn English. And to do well in school. The older I got, the more my Korean dropped off. When I speak to my mom in Korean or English she almost always responds to me in Korean. My parents still prefer to speak in Korean, especially with me and my sister.

JC
So you speak Korean?

JK
My Korean is not good. I find that some things don’t translate the same, or I can’t find the words in English, so that my mom will understand exactly what I mean. My sister’s is much better. She can really have a conversation. That’s one thing that I didn’t go back to and wish I had, to try to hold on to the language.

JC
To what extent do you feel that you’re in between cultures because you are American, but you also embedded in a Korean family? I could imagine that has shaped a lot of your life, trying to figure out who you are and how are you fit in? And how do you handle opposing or conflicting ways of seeing the world, or family, or whatever else?

JK
I think that there’s really no way around it. A lot of things that I do in life are based on the fact that I’m Korean and a woman. That’s just inherent. In terms of having kids and a family, there are a lot of things that I tried to think about. What is this urgency? What is this push that I always wanted to have kids? There is some kind of urgency inside me. I can’t ignore the fact that it is partially due to how I was raised, with my grandmother telling me my entire life, “you have to get married, you have to have kids.” Even the last time I saw her in 2019 she said, “you have to have kids.” That was the conversation. She means well. Still… You have to have kids. Period. There’s no talking about anything that’s going on. She doesn’t acknowledge my age and how it could be difficult. So there is that aspect of it, growing up in my culture that really emphasized that one of the most important things you can do as a woman is to have children. As far as the IVF goes, that decision was based on me being a woman of a certain age. Turning 40 and being unable to conceive leaves you with very little options as a woman who wants to have a child. Women aren’t afforded the luxury of time that men are when it comes to becoming a parent.

JC
I remember a picture of your family, and you’re all Korean or Korean American and then there’s Ian. Can you talk a little bit about that aspect? Here is this white guy.

JK
My mom is not the most typical Korean mother. There are things that are really hounded into growing up in a Korean family. Grades are extremely important. Your appearance is very important. She never nitpicked on things like that. I think she was too busy working. But the expectation to do well in school and act properly was there. We kept our grades up. We didn’t fall out of line. She always emphasized that meeting a good person and getting married was important. There was a point when she said, “you really have to find someone to be happy with. To love” I only remember her saying it to me once, but it stuck out. I didn’t meet Ian until I was 38. Part of me thinks that they were just so excited that I had met somebody, gotten engaged and that he’s a good guy. With my parents, there wasn’t that thing of “Oh, I wish he was Korean.”

JC
Maybe they’ve realized that they need to give you space. I mean, this is who you are.

JK
I would hope that would be it. But my grandmother said, “you have to have children”. And I’m thinking at the time, I’m 41 now. I’m trying but the likelihood of that happening is very slim. I couldn’t even explain it to her. For her, that was it. And then the conversation went on to something else. There wasn’t a dialogue.

JC
I seem to remember that you weren’t really sure whether you actually wanted to have children. Is that true?

JK
I always imagined my life with kids. I had previously talked to my doctors about having a child by myself. I had decided that that was something I couldn’t handle or that I wanted. I felt this pressure that I had to start trying with Ian, even though we had not been together a full year. I think I was feeling that as a woman, I don’t have a choice. I have to do it right now. We didn’t have time to be like a couple who met when they were 30.

This process has been… I’ve been thinking about it more seriously, biologically, since I was 33. What do I need to do to be prepared to maybe have kids one day? I’ve always had it on my mind. I considered freezing my eggs then. The cost was too much for me. Also, if I ever wanted to have children, doctors told me, I would have to have a myomectomy. I had that surgery when I was 35. It was the pressure of the timeline because everybody said that when you turn 40, it becomes exponentially harder. I was fighting that. I felt that I didn’t have time and had to do it — even if I wanted to or not right in that moment, you know?

JC
That is a difficult situation. But then to decide to make that a part of your photography cannot have been easy.

JK
I had been photographing other women who either did not have children by choice, or had had an abortion or a miscarriage, thinking this was working. But in a crit, everyone was asking, “what are you doing? What’s this really about?.” It took a lot for me to admit that it was about me. I got to the point where I realized that I’m trying to make all these other people do the work for me, when it’s really about me. It was about how I would deal with this void if I didn’t experience motherhood.

I would say that during the last year of school it was actually kind of therapeutic for me to have the photography aspect of it. I think it was an outlet to be able to say that I can have some way to express myself and have photos. That’s something I can see. That’s evidence — instead of me sitting here wondering if this is going to work: Ian and I trying to conceive, it not working, and there being no explanation. It was an outlet. Something positive was coming out of this. I think it really was helpful in that sense. It was difficult, but it was helpful for me at the time.

JC
I find that inspiring because you’re making yourself really vulnerable by sharing all of that with strangers.

JK
Any time I’ve gotten help or advice from somebody, specifically during fertility treatments, it has been because they’ve been vulnerable with me. I feel it’s a good way to talk about it. Until I started the process, I realized I didn’t know so much about it even though I have had friends go through it. I was wondering how that could be. Rightfully, there’s more and more talk about being a new mother, postpartum depression, and how hard it is to deal with all of that: motherhood and parenthood. I’m on the other side of the same coin. There are the same kinds of feelings, except you’re trying to work towards having a child. I’m not even on the other side yet where that difficulty is, we’re just pushing through and trying to get to that point. I’ve had emotions where I thought, “I don’t know what this emotion is,” trying to understand what I’m feeling, because it’s such a wide range of things happening. I think the only way that I could deal with it is to talk about it.

I’m still taking pictures. The bulk of this year has been fertility treatments. That has been the priority. I’m still shooting here and there. But it has been very draining. Emotionally, physically and mentally. I don’t know how people do it. I don’t know how we’re doing it. What has been frustrating for us is that we have what’s called unexplained infertility. There is nothing, quote unquote, wrong. We can’t… I can’t get pregnant. My age is the only factor that is proven to be why it’s difficult for me to get pregnant. It’s frustrating when you work towards something… Grad school was hard, but I worked and worked. Everybody works towards it, and you get to graduate. You have some semblance of a project, you have a book. It’s a very rewarding experience, even when it’s difficult during the process. But this… If you have a kid — that’s what you want out of this process — that’s very rewarding. But those chances are slim. So it’s been difficult to stay focused on the end goal.

JC
That sounds really draining and difficult.

JK
It’s a lot of mixed emotions. One day, I feel lucky. I’m glad that we’re in a position to be able to do it. I have insurance that is covering most of it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t even have had the option. Originally, we had looked into adoption. It turned out that IVF was less expensive because of my insurance. I have friends who can’t do IVF because they can’t afford it. That’s a whole other set of issues. It’s a lot of ups and downs of how I feel about this.

JC
It’s such a big topic that is so important for so many women, and yet it’s so mute. It doesn’t exist in the public consciousness.

JK
There’s a show called Master of None by Aziz Ansari on Netflix. This new season, they shifted the main characters and it deals with a woman doing IVF. When the season got released, on the same day I had multiple people ask me if I had seen it, because they knew I was doing IVF. I hadn’t seen it yet. I tried watching a couple of episodes. It was too difficult because it’s very real. They’re not glossing over anything. I talked to my doctor about it: Have you seen it? People keep telling me about it. She hadn’t seen it but said That’s good, right? It’s getting the word out that this is what it’s about.

You don’t see it much. I don’t know why because I think in Western cultures having children is seen as so important. Any time I’m out with my niece and nephew, people would be essentially congratulating me on how cute or smart they are. They would think I’m their mother. A month ago, I was out with them and Ian. This mom, who was with her daughter, gave me a knowing look and said something like, “you know how it’s like being a mom.” She gave me a big smile. And I thought, “No, I don’t.” I equate it to almost being more of a value to society if you’re a mother. There’s nothing more difficult and rewarding and important than being a mother. When I see mothers out, I think, “Yeah, that’s hard what you’re doing.” But I also think it’s just as fulfilling.

Before the process of fertility treatments, I used to think, “Okay, we get it, it’s a miracle. Having a baby is a miracle. But people have babies every day.” After my first consultation with our fertility doctor, I thought, “Oh, now I really understand why they say it’s a miracle.” My doctor actually broke down how difficult it is to get pregnant, stay pregnant, and have a healthy baby. On top of that, she was explaining the IVF cycle, which was a whole mess of things. I told her “this seems impossible.” She said, “it’s not impossible.” It feels like it though. I can see how I would be that mother… If I had a baby, I would say it’s a miracle. It was a miracle that this happened.

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