Memorandum

Mirrored, multiplied, and made strange, a manicured hand here reaches into unfamiliar terrain. Photographer Keiichiro Goto combines multiple exposures of this hand in a deft montage, juxtaposing its pale skin and stylish nails against a weathered scrim of rock and soil. His darkroom creation presses past the limits of eye or lens, into uncanny realms of the subconscious. This is unusual territory for a photojournalist like Goto, who covered World War II and its aftermath in his native Nagoya, Japan. But if this professional work introduced him to the extremes of human experience, concurrent encounters with Surrealist art may have offered a new language to contend with them. In Nagoya, as in Tokyo and Osaka, traveling exhibitions of western avant-garde photography inspired a spate of modernist picture-making. In 1937, a local iteration of the International Surrealist Exhibition brought with it works by Man Ray, Max Ernst, and Yves Tanguy. Invigorated by such encounters, photo-clubs in Nagoya fostered a culture of experimental practice, often collaborating with poets and venturing into abstraction. This activity was the subject of governmental censure during the war, but resurfaced in the mid-1940s. In 1947, Goto and his collaborators founded a new group, VIVI, in order to revive the city’s avant-garde scene. This photograph, made in the same period, seems to reckon with the war years, even as it probes new photographic possibilities.