Another sun filtered afternoon. Another spontaneous still life.
I read this interesting thought and it stuck with me:
“The name still life says it all - these are pictures of calm, peaceful life, which they invite and encourage us to enter. In our utilitarian, ever-moving world, still lifes give us pause. This is life without movement, going nowhere.” Christpohe André
Knowledge comes from noticing resemblances and recurrences in the events that happen around us,” Wilfred Trotter
Diving into my woefully disorganised camera roll is one of my favourite ways to learn from my scattered visual notes. Amid the chaos, I can sometimes make connections from one set of photos to another. It is a messy but intuitive and unpolished way to see the subtle threads that connect one local culture or location to another, often thousands of kilometres apart. These waterless dives are meditative and accidentally informative and yeah, also enormously cathartic and rewarding.
My latest wander through my camera roll lead to a gentle study of how certain complex human needs are deciphered and manifested onto our streets. In this case the need is spiritual and it is revealed by the dedicated places for passersby to leave a brief silent prayer or pay a nod of respect.
Today I am drawing lines from the street side shrines I encountered in Malaga to the O-Jizo-sama of my local neighbourhood in Tokyo.
It goes without saying pavement prayer pit stops tell more than a particular culture’s requirement for roadside reverence. They tell of faith, piety, hope, pain, respect and sometime superstition. But they also tell us plenty by how they are presented, what they are made of, how they are maintained and where they are positioned. Floral offerings seem universal regardless of religion. Specific to Japan are the garlands of senbazuru found beside O-Jizo-sama, they strike a poignant chord with me. The patience and dedication it takes to make 1000 origami cranes really moves me.
Are there any such places for roadside reverence where you are? I would love to see your observations and read your thoughts.
Please share with me via email: Yasumi @ Superordinarylife.com or via Instagram
Send photos, words and let me know where they are taken and where you would like me cite and link credits to.
Brassaï (pseudonym of Gyula Halász; 9 September 1899 – 8 July 1984) was a Hungarian–French photographer, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker who rose to international fame in France in the 20th century.
![BRASSAI [gyula halasz] - Le ruisseau serpente -1932](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59de7afe8fd4d2d9babb60f5/1617176161951-SRCJCRHWOMVPU0M9HK12/b8289186a53f1792470e39fb1c438db3.jpg)
BRASSAI [gyula halasz] - Le ruisseau serpente -1932
One might not think of light as a matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find.
Dan Flavin
Translucent, transparent and lucid.
Itoman is a fading fishing port on Okinawa’s main Island, Naha. The Itoman region has a bitter past as the final front in the Battle of Okinawa during WWII and a site of a mass suicide at the end of the battle. The sleepy port we strolled through one July afternoon was barely populated and smelled of sun on stone . Oddly, it reminded me a bit of Stone Town in Zanzibar. Sun and typhoon weathered, the streets felt worn, salty and full of an unusual atmosphere that lingers somewhere between melancholy and determination.
The above stroll was on and around Tomoe-dori towards the Itoman fishing port.
We became acquainted with Kakio when we used to visit Hiro’s parents in Shinyurigaoka. Although they have since moved away , we still like to make an occasional trip to the sleepy little neighbourhood for a quiet stroll. It’s sufficiently hype-less to fly anyone’s radar yet it’s steeped in that “fading Japan” charm that really pulls on my heart strings. Sun-bleached hand painted signage, rusty iron cladding, toy shops run by daring old folks stocking the same Shōwa charm-filled items they probably have done for decades. The look on the faces of the shopkeepers when our young boys rush in to see all the things is just priceless.
Kakio is nicest around New Year when they host a Daruma market and in Autumn when its leafy persona really shines. Make the mini hike from the station to Jokei-ji temple - their congregation of monks sill put a smile on your face - guaranteed and in autumn the wooden area is carpeted with higanbana (spider lilies).
Lines that are interrupted, misaligned or go awry.
Look down! There’s a sprawling canvas of stripes beneath our feet. Everyday we pace across the lines that organise our cities and most of the time, we don’t give it a second thought. Tokyo’s street lines are altered by the way of life here. Scorching summers, constant road works and amendments that are reactions to the fast paced changing needs mean that street lines are very often a mess.
I like the mess.
Going through life on autopilot, glossing over the ordinary while we speed ahead striving for constant escapism to define our lives is kinda depressing.
Yet that’s how we are wired to think.
Work hard. Play hard.
Work hard . So bloody hard that you reach burnout levels. Then pay for a holiday to escape your ordinary life. Come back. Feel sad about it. Go back to work “refreshed” and ready to float towards another burnout. All the while overlooking the staggering amount of beauty, inspiration and detail around us even in our ordinary everyday environments.
Travelling is good for the soul. Going to new places to see and experience new things is good for the soul.
Coming home and reconnecting with our ordinariness without bitterness is also good for the soul. How we connect and appreciate these moments in may ways defines who we are.
“The passage from one to the other takes place in the infrathin”
Marcel Duchamp
I’ve been pondering about Marcel Duchamp’s term “infrathin” as a way of fine-tuning my perception of the overlooked and under-appreciated experiences in ordinary life. It’s really playing on my mind….. Mainly because the word is quite ineffable and partly because it is such a alluring concept to me.
Let’s start by using Duchamp’s own words to try and capture the essence of the term:
During an interview in 1945, Duchamp deliberated, "one can only give examples of it:"
The warmth of a seat (which has just/been left) is infrathin
when the tobacco smoke smells also of the/mouth which exhales it, the two odors/marry by infrathin
Infra thin separation between the detonation noise of a gun (very close) and the apparition of the bullet hole in the target.
forms cast in/the same mold (?) differ from each other by an infrathin separative amount.
So, the Infrathin in terms of everyday experiences can be described barely imperceptible moments. More like margins….Imperceptible margins between states of being, ideas and things as they transition into, out of and between one to the other.
I suppose such moments require a certain sensitivity to perceive? It takes practice to tune into ourselves in able to perceive them. And that is my mission (okay, one of my missions) for this year.
Here are a few visual examples that I have collected:
Infrathin. Liminal. Non retinal. Gaps.
I love it when I notice a good hedge hug.
You know what I mean, right?
It’s when a hedge appears to be extending an embrace to an object that just happens to be in its proximity. Like these:
We’d love to share your hedge hugs here! Please email them to us and let us know where you saw them and where you would like us to credit and link the images to.
Actually, If you’re partial to any street objects that seem to be embracing. Not just hedges, it could be anything that caught your eye. please do get in touch. It’s always good to hear from you.
“Our culture has beheld with suspicion unproductive time, things not utilitarian, and daydreaming in general, but we live in a time when it is especially challenging to articulate the importance of experiences that don’t produce anything obvious, aren’t easily quantifiable, resist measurement, aren’t easily named, are categorically in-between”
Ann Hamilton
I’ve read and reread Ann Hamilton’s essay, “Making not knowing” a couple of times now. I have a now dogeared copy that I printed from a PDF that found online. Scribbled notes are growing all over the thing. It’s one of those wordy finds that filters into my heart and head combing out the tangled half thoughts and feelings into an articulate wisdom leaving me nodding away, moved with the reverberations.
In a culture that is just as obsessed with productivity as it is productivity shaming, unrealistic expectations for our productivity in creative work has become increasingly unrealistic. The need to ‘produce and show’ on social media has become a performance that is as toxic as it is soul corrupting.
The simple truth is that creativity is not efficient and it is quite often unquantifiable because not all work- especially creative work is visible. A lot of it is internal. It happens in thinking, walking, daydreaming and and other ways that seem unproductive. Creativity is also uncertain. The clearest of paths can shift and change and take a massive U-turn. All these marvellously convoluted miasmic aspects of creativity are what shape us and hone us in our work.
So do yourself a favour and take some time out to read Ann’s essay. It’s pretty darn pertinent: ANN HAMILTON MAKING NOT KNOWING
“One doesn’t arrive — in words or in art — by necessarily knowing where one is going. In every work of art something appears that does not previously exist, and so, by default, you work from what you know to what you don’t know. You may set out for New York but you may find yourself as I did in Ohio. You may set out to make a sculpture and find that time is your material. You may pick up a paint brush and find that your making is not on canvas or wood but in relations between people. You may set out to walk across the room but getting to what is on the other side might take ten years. You have to be open to all possibilities and to all routes — circuitous or otherwise.
But not knowing, waiting and finding — though they may happen accidentally, aren’t accidents. They involve work and research. Not knowing isn’t ignorance. (Fear springs from ignorance.) Not knowing is a permissive and rigorous willingness to trust, leaving knowing in suspension, trusting in possibility without result, regarding as possible all manner of response. The responsibility of the artist … is the practice of recognizing.”
― Ann Hamilton
“There is a feeling of comfort in using anonymous things that have been around for along time. Out-living other things, which proved less enduring, there have become so familiar to us that we rarely ask ourselves who their creator might have been.”
Naoto Fukasawa - Super Normal Sensations of the Ordinary.
When we started Super Ordinary Life, our intention was to dedicate half of journal to exploring the under appreciated examples of good design that improve of our daily lives while we all take them for granted. We made a good start and even had a steady flow of posts. Unfortunately the entire section was permanently deleted during a website format rejig. Yeah - tears were shed, all the cuss-words flew around and morale was knocked. Fast forward a year and we are going to do our best to bring it all back and then some.
Setting out what we mean by Super Ordinary Objects seems like the best logical way to begin. This may change as we continue plod along our learning curve. Speaking of learning, we tend to do most of our research in the analogue way. Books, magazines, listening to and watching documentaries with notebooks at hand and of course a ton of scribbling. So included below is the pile of books that we are currently working with.
Visual bibliography
everyday objects that are often low-cost, unsophisticated, anonymously designed and quite often unbranded yet epitomise “good design”.
to use a term coined by Sori Yanagi, these objects are “unconsciously beautiful” because they are functional without being expressions of the designer’s personal tastes and not created simply for aesthetic appreciation.
objects that have become part of our life stories, they are comfortable in our lives - weather we realise it or not. We’d really miss them if they were gone.
these objects are unfettered by trends - their function and appeal is timeless.
many of these objects are culturally relevant and address local needs rather than global ones.
Aside from the books pictured, we also have a digital copy of The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yanagi and various issues of Pen.
Here are 3 books that enabled me to articulate and tiptoe onto my path of “noticing more”. I remember the feeling of discovery when I first dipped into their pages, they were full of wide-eyed moments punctuated with, “YESSSSSSSS, THAT’S WHAT I AM TRYING TO SAY!".
These three books are I often quote and share pages of on our Instagram Stories. I drag them out when having wine-fuelled curious conversations with close friends. They are “up there” on my list of recommended reads and resources for all things Super Ordinary Life. In all honesty, they are much more than that - they extend and supersede anything that I can word and I just love them.
George Nelson. How to See. Visual Adventures in a World God Never Made.
Many will know George Nelson as a founding father of American modernism, industrial designer , architect and director at Herman Miller. Less might know that Nelson was rarely without a camera. “ He snapped photos spontaneously and constantly, less concerned about the niceties of artful composition that simply recording the people, places and things that caught his eye. dozens of rolls of films at a time”. Nelson accumulated tens of thousands of images that helped him articulate his fascination with what he called visual literacy”. This eventually grew into this manifesto on how to recognize, evaluate, and understand the objects and landscape of the man-made world.
John Pawson. A Visual Inventory.
Unfortunately, this book is out of print and I was sad when Phaidon emailed to confirm that it won’t be reprinted anytime soon. I managed to track one down online from a secondhand bookstore and it arrived a couple of days before we moved to Japan!
By the time A Visual Inventory was published in 2012, John Pawson’s photo archive held some 250,000 images. 288 of them have made it into this book where they collectively form an insightful visual diary accompanied with personal commentaries that inspire articulate ways of looking and thinking at ordinary sights.
Alan Fletcher. The Art of Looking Sideways.
Alan Fletcher was a founder of the leading design firm Pentagram and considered by many in the graphic design world to be a contemporary master. Describing himself as a ‘visual jackdaw’, Fletcher distilled a lifetime of experience and reflection into this brilliantly witty and inimitable exploration of such subjects as perception, colour, pattern, proportion, paradox, illusion, language, alphabets, words, letter, ideas, creativity, culture, style, aesthetics and value. This colossal book is a primer in visual intelligence and an exploration of the workings of the eye, the hand, the brain and the imagination. I love this book immensely, to me, it’s worth its weight in gold.
This book is also out of print but buying secondhand is a great idea!
Aside from being published by Phaidon, all three books were written by prominent designers who made a lifestyle of collecting observations. Designers have a distinctive way of observing the world in search of solutions and problems, It’s worth keeping that in mind when you consider these books. These books come at the subject of observing the everyday from a comprehensive and analytical perspective.
I will be back soon with another trio of books that inspired by journey in Super Ordinary Life.
I take a bunch of photos - almost every single sunny day.
Photos of things, placed in the sunlight and captured, just because.
I think very little and act quietly and automatically with my mood and the light guiding me. Grab stuff from various corners of our home and place where the light hits. There’s no purpose to this thing that I do, other than enjoyment.
We are thrilled to see Maki (Minimalism Tokyo) featured in the SHIBUI issue of ÅBEN’s Journal .
Click on any of the images before to head to the article and a selection of Maki’s images.
The ÅBEN journal is a celebration of craft and artists and a showcase of individuals and initiatives that they believe “ ARE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE THROUGH THOUGHTFUL, ENDURING DESIGN”.
I cannot think of a better way to begin my blogging in 2021, than to share this poem written by Kurt Vonnegut as a homage to his friend Joseph Heller. The poem was originally published in The New Yorker in May of 2005. I came across it on my favourite website: Brain Pickings.
JOE HELLER
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!
I wonder what it would be like to kick back and watch the world go by in a room that had 4 walls of safety glass. The very thought of it makes for an intriguing concept for an installation, I think.
Whatever winds up behind these commonplace translucent layers of wire and textured glass, no matter how mundane, seems to become photogenic and more interesting. I wonder why?
Send them to us in a quick email. letting us know where each pic was taken (just the city will do).
Don’t worry about perfect photography. We are more interested in what caught your attention.
Let us know how you would like to be credited. Your name, website, Instagram account etc.
Really looking forward to sharing your observations!
Email: Yasumi @ superordinarylife . com
Elisa’s Instagram account stopped my scrolling in its tracks. it is like a visual poetry recital for the washing lines of Italy.
I asked Elisa why these domestic scenes appeal to her to so much:
Elisa’s reply:
“This series of clothesline represents the sweetness and the protection of family life in the suburban area in Italy. I was born and grow up there, so it's a place to witch I'm very attached. I tried to tell the stories of the socially disadvantaged goups of people and I wanted to show the intimacy and deep love by means of those clothes hanging. This project took my heart in many ways and I hope that who looks my work gets carried away with emotions. That's only thing that matters for me. Thank you”
Follow Elisa on Instagram: @elisa_risto
