SHAHAI
My attempts to marry up photographs and words in a satisfactory way continue to frustrate me. Some days I find myself thinking that maybe in their purest form neither has need of the other. Certainly when I try to put mini-texts up with photos as I have described in previous posts the results generally fall flat. So when I spotted a webinar run by the East Midlands branch of the RPS on the subject of Photography and Haiku I was onto it like a shot – as were 250 other attendees.* I am clearly not on my own.
The session was led by Alan Summers and Karen Hoy who themselves offer many haiku/haiga/tanka courses via their website Call Of The Page. Alan opened with the historical basis for modern experiments with photographs and haiku – which is the Japanese haiga. He translated ‘haiga’ as ‘playful painting’ and set out its three main characteristics as: a painting or drawing; with a haiku; in calligraphic script, like this one below.
Hakuin. Wren The haiku translation is: “it looks/like a nightingale/but it’s a wren” (Hakuin is making fun of his own limited artistic abilities.)
The characteristic that I have noted mostly of these haiga is a kind of informality. It perhaps would not be correct to say that they are dashed off, but, as I know from a Japanese calligraphy course that I once attended, too much thought is frowned upon. You take the brush and you dive in. The haiku itself and brush painting are both traditional Japanese forms, of course, and this juxtaposition of the two in a haiga seems to have had no equivalent anywhere in the world.
The modern, photographic version of the haiga is known as ‘shahai’. Alan suggested that the digital equivalent of the traditional three constituents here would be: photo; haiku text; font. So it’s a photograph onto which a haiku is superimposed in a digital font. His advice was not to try to replicate the photo with the words but to find a more oblique relationship where each might heighten the impact of the other. You can find examples here and here (this second one contains photos and paintings but it is only the former I am talking about). I am not putting any examples up in this post because of what I am going to say next but it is worth looking at the links to get an idea of how these shahai look.
Now, I can see that there is a superficial resemblance between the traditional Japanese version and the modern photographic one but I am not sure that it stands up to scrutiny as a kind of artistic lineage. Firstly a photograph and a painting are two different things. All that they really have in common is that they are visual representations of the world in some sort of a frame. Secondly, a digital font is not the equivalent of calligraphy. Calligraphy is a great art, very personal, and takes years to master. A font is yours with a click of the mouse. And lastly I suspect that the modern western haiku does no more than mimic its classical Japanese equivalent. I am not an expert but I have taken an interest in haiku for many years and had one or two published. My understanding of the traditional Japanese form is that it was highly circumscribed by its 5/7/5 syllabic form, its use of cutting words, and its seasonal references. The modern western equivalent is much more free-form and the commentaries that I have read suggest to me that there is no real agreement about what is and is not permissible these days.
So I would say that the Shahai is a modern digital invention. I would also say that it rarely works very well. When I look at a haiga such as that below I see an ease of expression expression which contrasts markedly with the stiffness of the modern shahai equivalent.
Winter Sky: Ion Codrescu/Elsa Colligan. A more modern example. The lettering and artwork seem to be as one. There is no sense of stress between them - to my eye anyway.
The 26 letters of our alphabet in digital form have a kind of rigidity and the digital images have some sort of assertiveness which seem to work against one another both visually and imaginatively - irrespective of how good or bad the haiku or photo is. The traditional Japanese haiga have both art and calligraphy in brushwork – and I have read that the ideograms are often difficult to decipher and so their contribution is as much visual as language-based. I can imagine how something photographic might work with scratchings on a negative, or handwriting on a print perhaps. But for me the digital version doesn’t really make it. It leaves too little to the imagination.
Obviously, I’ve got to have a go though. What about this?
I was trying to get at the idea that life has tough moments for all beings. I think it helps that the image is black and white so the text is a little less obtrusive and can sit in its own space over to the left without taking over the picture
I’d say that the purpose of both haiku and photography is the same. They help us to focus on what is actually going on from moment to moment rather than what we think is going on. Perhaps a really good haiga or shahai can double that effect but I think it would take quite a bit of practice.
*I really dislike this word “attendee”. The ending “ee”on a noun conventionally denotes a passive sense in a noun: for example a “payee” is someone who receives a payment. The active meaning is denoted by “er”. The payer pays the payee. So someone who attends an event is, or should be, an attender not an attendee. Language changes of course but that does not mean it is a free-for-all. And don’t get me started on the current vogue for “multiple” instead of “many”.