Funny how one thing leads to another, isn’t it?  Over the summer I was reading a biography of Joseph Campbell the renowned American mythologist.  Who should turn up in these pages but Daisetz Suzuki, the Buddhist scholar and at his side his secretary, a young woman named Mihoko Okamura.  She seemed an interesting figure so I looked her up and came to the potters Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada. She helped them to translate essays by Soetsu Yanagi about craftsmanship and the nature of beauty, published under the title The Unknown Craftsman.*  Right up my street: so I found a copy on the net – and a good job I did.  It’s a kind of creative manifesto for the common man and a rare counterbalance to the cult of the Artist Genius.

I have never understood why I seem unable to appreciate the works of high culture that are so venerated.  When I hear a full orchestral symphony I feel only confusion.  When I look at the paintings of the old masters my head spins unpleasantly.  When I try to read the Great Novels my eyelids begin to droop within minutes (Moby Dick, anyone?). I find it all too much, as though I were being pummelled.  That is not to say that I don’t appreciate beauty.  It’s just that I find it hard to perceive it in such works.

If you have ever felt the same then Soetsu Yanagi may be your man. He lived from 1889 to 1961 and seems to have been to some extent the William Morris of Japan, founding the Japanese craft movement and the Japan Folkcraft Museum in Tokyo.**  He was a great and almost lifelong friend of Bernard Leach – whose ideas and style he influenced greatly.

His ideas, and consequently his essays, are deeply immersed in Buddhist notions of beauty.  While he does not deny the genius of the Great Artist he finds the work of such figures to be personality-based and therefore limited – anything signed is suspect.   In Buddhist terms it is dualistic; it is a direct pursuit of beauty and that must therefore include ugliness. Beauty cannot exist without ugliness just as up cannot exist without down.  One of the words he uses to describe this kind of work is “eventful”.

The alternative is the work of the unknown craftsman.  Back in the day when the hand-crafted object was the norm, the craftsman had to work quickly and unselfconsciously.  He was creating objects for use within a tradition: concepts of beauty and ugliness were not in his mind.  In Buddhist terms this is non-dualistic or “eventless”.  One example to which Yanagi refers constantly is that of sixteenth century Korean Ido tea-bowl. 

Produced on a large-scale in their day and cheap as chips then, these are  uncalculated and straightforward, their beauty lying, says Yanagi, in their very ordinariness.  Many other examples are given in the illustrations which form the first 90 pages of the book. In Yanagi’s words these are objects which are “born and not made”.

It is not easy to transfer these ideas to the modern world (he was writing these essays before and just after the second world war).  Even then machine-made products had taken over in the West and Japan was not so far behind.  The advent of mass production and the profit motive signalled the end of grace and feeling in the production of everyday goods. In his view it is the designer who has inherited this responsibility.  Maybe that accounts for the popularity of shops such as Habitat, Ikea and Muji today whose products seem to have emerged from some similar ethic even though they are all machine-made.

 I know that not everyone gets their rocks off on these kind of ideas.  (When one of my daughters saw me reading this book she rolled her eyes and mimicked falling asleep.  See what I have to contend with?)  When I was studying photographic history I, too, found most theoretical approaches induced a mental state bordering on catatonia.  But for me this book took some previously fuzzy suspicion and really snapped it into focus.  Why do I so like a mass-produced glass bowl in our kitchen which is chipped and scarred and which I can’t even remember buying?  And why have I always hung onto a couple of small wooden boxes that I remember lying around in my grandparents’ house fifty or sixty years ago.  I think they might even be somebody’s school woodwork projects.

Obviously, I try to apply these ideas to photography but it’s not easy.  A photograph is not the result of craft these days and is not in any way the equivalent of these hand-produced objects from the past.  I did however once go to a small photograph exhibition given by a local photo club.  Just at the entrance to this exhibition was a table with photographs made on simple digital cameras by young children at a nearby primary school.  They took my breath away with the directness of their seeing.  The children had clearly made no attempt to produce beautiful photographs as we all had in the main exhibition.  They just pointed the camera at whatever interested them and clicked: “good” and “bad” were of no concern to them.  The results really were on another level.

It’s quite possible for an adult to do this but it takes practice.  You are simply trying to see without responding as you habitually do.  We look and we consider things to be beautiful, or ordinary or unusual or whatever yet there is a space between the looking and the labelling and we can expand that space if we practise.  Here is Yanagi’s advice.

“First, put aside the desire to judge immediately; acquire the habit of just looking. Second do not treat the object as an object for the intellect. Third, just be ready to receive passively, without interposing yourself. If you can void your mind of all intellectualisation, like a clear mirror that simply reflects, all the better. This nonconceptualisation……….. may seem to represent a negative attitude but from it springs the true ability to contact things directly and positively.”

* The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight Into Beauty.  Soetsu Yanagi. Kodansha Publishing, 1972. I’ve just noticed that Penguin also published “The Beauty Of Everyday Things” by Yanagi in 2019 though I don’t know how much overlap there is between the two.

** There is an interesting longterm project afoot to collect and restore a film archive documenting these years of the Japanese folk craft movement and Leach’s involvement: http://mingeifilm.martygrossfilms.com/