Busteni, Romania, 1939.

“What’s interesting about this picture?” my father asked. This was clearly a quiz, and I was failing. At 86 he was sharp as a tack, found these old photos much more compelling than his stomach cancer, and had no intention of leaving this world till I understood why this literally pedestrian photo struck him as monumental. He smiled as I scanned it for meaning. “You and four friends. What am I missing?” I recognized the old gentleman sitting across from me in his younger incarnation, second from the left. The eyes gave him away. And while I did inherit those eyes, his clearly saw something mine didn’t.

Until I flipped it over and read the back: 31 August, 1939. He beamed as he saw my amazement. This casual snapshot was taken just hours before Hitler attacked Poland, starting a world war that would plunge Romania into chaos. Five teens with time for a campy snapshot, with no clue how drastically life was about to change. My father would go on to survive the Nazis, the communists, the aerial bombings of both Bucharest and Ploesti, and 38 years as a top CIA operative.

This was the calm before the storm troopers.

Paul Minden, Writer

Visual, performance, and sound artist. Shoji Ueda, 1970s.

I first saw Ueda’s work in an exhibition called Japanese Photography: Today and Its Origins at the ICA in London in August 1979 and I bought the catalog. I believe Ueda’s works were originally shown in an exhibition called “Memories Without Sounds” in Tokyo in 1974, a phrase that stuck in the recesses of my consciousness.

This image and all of Ueda’s work brings to mind the novels of my favorite Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. It would be a mistake to confuse this image with the surreal, for it comes from a deeply Japanese sensibility. It suggests that the world is not as it appears, that the dimensions of reality are multifold, mysterious, and that existence itself is ephemeral. Unlike many photographs that convey a sense of time stopped and frozen, or of life in process, this image seems to exist dislocated from place and outside of time, but rather in the boundless space of memory and possibility. It is not presence that he captures, but an intangible absence, an ineffable stillness like an echo of silence. This image continues to resonate for me as much as the first time I saw it nearly 30 years ago, and it has inspired and influenced my work.

Jacki Apple, Visual, performance, and sound artist.