‘The surreal dislocation of the everyday’: how Japanese photographer Akihiko Okamura captured the Troubles as never before
In 2016, the British photographer Martin Parr curated Strange and Familiar, a group show at the Barbican art gallery in London. Subtitled Britain as Revealed by International Photographers, it included work by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank as well as lesser known figures such as Edith Tudor-Hart. For me, though, by far the most strange and familiar images I encountered there were made by a Japanese photographer I had never heard of, and whose handful of small, colour prints from the early Troubles stopped me in my tracks.
His name was Akihiko Okamura and I later learned that he had travelled to Ireland in 1968, having already established a reputation as a war photographer in Vietnam. The first thing that took me by surprise was his rich colour palette: the deep reds, faded blues and ochre browns that reanimated a turbulent time for so long portrayed solely in stark monochrome. The second was his style, which tended towards quiet observation rather than frantic reportage. His photographs ranged from telling still lifes of ordinary and not-so-ordinary objects (a police riot shield and helmet resting against a wall) to portraits that resembled film stills (a lone British soldier, tense and primed as if for heroic combat, on a street corner). Okamura photographed newly delivered milk bottles arranged neatly on a sun-dappled doorstep as well as empty milk bottles resting on the window ledge of a Derry tower block, ready to be repurposed as petrol bombs and hurled at the police. His eye was caught by Loyalist youths hanging bunting for the marching season on a dusky sunlit street and young Belfast women picking their way through makeshift barricades, alert for images that undercut the obvious and the cliched.
For me, Okamura’s images were revelatory. They brought back a sense of the peculiar texture of that time living in the north of Ireland: the almost surreal dislocation of the everyday that the early, unpredictable momentum of the Troubles brought in its wake. Suddenly and unsettlingly, normality was ruptured, the ordinary upended and the unspoken rules we lived by rendered redundant.
As a visual record, his understated but profoundly resonant photographs are a dramatic contrast to the work of his more celebrated contemporaries, the likes of Gilles Peress and Don McCullin, who arrived in Northern Ireland soon afterwards and created photojournalism of the most visceral kind. While they operated in the midst of rioting and disorder, Okamura was drawn to the aftermath: flowers on a blood-stained pavement beneath a fluttering black flag; two young girls in their Sunday best, cradling handbags, standing beside an elaborate shrine to one of the first civilians killed by British soldiers on a bleak Derry street. For anyone who lived through that time, these photographs are haunting in their starkness and suggestion. They speak of innocence lost as well as foreshadowing the darker times yet to come.
The photography historian, writer and curator Pauline Vermare, who has researched Okamura’s life and work, emphasises how his pictures differ from the photojournalism of the time. “His photographs diverge greatly from that imagery,” she says. “He worked in Ireland in a style that transcends genres. His faded, soft colours contrast with the violence of the situation in which they were created. The poetry emanating from his work is not typically found in photojournalism, where the subject should be central and obvious. Here, the violence shifts to the background.”
In one striking image, a woman walks purposefully down a street accompanied by a British soldier carrying her front door. Without some knowledge of the social context, the photograph is bemusing, even oddly comic, but it was made in the immediate wake of great violence. The woman has returned to her house after several nights of intense sectarian conflict on the streets of Belfast in August 1969 that left eight people dead, hundreds wounded and caused an estimated 1,800 families to flee their homes. The front door the soldier is holding has been salvaged from her burned-out house.
There is a strange poetry to the image; the silhouette of a bird in flight, etched in stained glass just above the soldier’s head, echoes the woman’s flight from her home. Intriguingly, she reappears in another photograph, standing on a red-brick backstreet next to an older lady, who is holding several patterned teacups. Beside them, a stack of crockery sits on what looks like a much-used washing machine next to a brightly coloured packet of custard powder, the remnants of their shattered lives. The story these humble domestic items tell is writ large in the stark background: the looming silhouettes of charred and sooty terraced houses that are outlined against the pale grey Belfast sky.
Since that sudden and unexpected encounter with his work in 2016, Okamura has remained a figure of fascination to me, albeit an elusive one. Alongside Vermare and the Japanese photo historian Masako Toda, and in tandem with the Photo Museum Ireland, I have helped curate an exhibition of his Irish work, The Memories of Others, which opens in Dublin on 11 April. The event will also coincide with the launch of a photobook and a short film of the same name, directed by Vermare and Marc Lesser. Together they are testament to a singular and mysterious photographer who, following his first visit to Ireland in 1968, returned there the following year and made it his adopted homeland. He lived there quietly with his second wife, Kakuko, and their four children until his death, aged 56, in 1985.
Like other aspects of his restless life, Okamura’s initial reasons for visiting Ireland are mysterious, but they included a deep fascination with the assassinated US president, John F Kennedy, whose ancestral roots were there, as well as his abiding interest in, and identification with, anti-colonialist struggles. Okamura first arrived in Dublin in 1968, aged 38, and immediately noted down his initial and less than favourable impressions: “Stormy weather. The sky was dark, almost black. A swirling wind whipped the freezing rain against my cheeks… To my eyes, accustomed as they were to the scorching sun, and the endless green jungles of south-east Asia, the winter landscape of Ireland when I saw it for the first time looked like nothing but a large cold black lump of soil.”
By then, having taken up photography relatively late, aged 34, Okamura had established a reputation for himself through his fearless reportage from the Vietnam war. In 1965, Life magazine had published a dramatic picture essay by him alongside a detailed account of how he had infiltrated territory controlled by the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam before been captured and held as a prisoner of war for 53 days. During his captivity, he had somehow managed to gain an interview with their second-in-command which, when it was published, led to him being banned from entering South Vietnam for five years.
“After years of covering war atrocities, Ireland was a haven for him,” writes Vermare in her illuminating essay The Strange Passenger on the Belfast Express, which is included in the new photobook. “As he had wanted it, their four children were raised in Ireland, first near Dublin, then Avoca, in Wicklow County. The Okamuras were one of the very few Japanese families that had settled in Ireland at that time.”
Throughout his 16 years in Ireland, Okamura continued to work as a photojournalist, covering conflicts in Biafra and Ethiopia and working regularly for NGOs and other humanitarian organisations. On 8 March 1985, he became ill while travelling from Ireland to Japan and died from sepsis two weeks afterwards. “Okamura’s death came as a huge shock to many in Japan,” Toda notes in her detailed biographical essay The Path to Ireland. “The funeral ceremony held in Aoyama Funeral Hall in Tokyo was packed with mourners.” Soon after, the film-maker Osamu Takahashi paid tribute to Okamura’s “extraordinarily warm character [which] allowed him to dive into battle wherever he wanted and emerge completely unscathed”.
During his time in Ireland, Okamura photographed everyday life in the south of the island – landscapes, market towns, people loitering at train stations, his fellow passengers on the Dublin to Belfast express – but it is his work from the north of Ireland during an uncertain time that resonates most powerfully. The horror he experienced in Vietnam had altered not just his approach, but his consciousness, transforming him into a quiet, but acute, observer of the disrupted everyday at the very beginning of a conflict that would last for 30 years.
In all of this, Okamura himself remains an elusive presence. The new photobook of his Irish work includes an essay by his daughter Kusi pointedly entitled How to Find a Ghost. She begins by recalling his absence from her childhood (he died when she was just nine), before alluding to his “invisible” presence as a photographer of the Troubles – “never seen, never spoken to, never heard”. As if to confirm her fleeting impressions of him, Photo Museum Ireland has been unable to find one person in Derry or Belfast who remembers him from that time, which is odd when you consider he may well have been the first Japanese person that anyone in a then monocultural Northern Ireland would have encountered in the flesh. Yet he moved among them with his camera, leaving no trace other than his photographs.
There exists a single photograph of Okamura from that time. In it, he is standing amid a small crowd of people next to the activist and MP Bernadette Devlin during a lull in the sustained street battles between rioters and police during the Battle of the Bogside in Derry in August 1969. He looks at ease, but engaged, as if taking in her every word. He looks like he belongs there.
Akihiko Okamura: The Memories of Others is at Photo Museum Ireland, Dublin, 11 April-6 July. An accompanying book will be published by Atelier EXB and Prestel in September
