A Map of the East

“The East is not much less than half the world, an infinity of an infinity of objects and vantages, every single one complex with meanings. . . .” writes artist Leo Rubinfien in “A Map of the East,” the just-published book of his Asian photographs. “It is for this reason that you cannot begin from trying to describe, to merely describe, but must attempt to evoke, always evoke.”

What Rubinfien has sought to evoke in his images is what he reluctantly calls “innocence.” “It is a dangerous word to use,” he acknowledges, “but the quality is very real to Westerners who love that part of the world, and I think it is evident in the pictures.”

But it is also, he cautions, clearly a view that is imposed by the West on the East. “In making these pictures, I learned to what extent innocence is not an actual attribute of the place. It is part of our Western mythology, of our consciousness, which we fill with an Asia we imagine.”

The Asia of Rubinfien’s imagination that is excerpted here comprises 107 photographs of Japan, China, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, Vietnam and India. The pictures, he admits, chart the Far East only in an intuitive way. “This is a map drawn by the heart, not with the ruler,” he says. Still, the “map” is authentic and it can be used to explore the continent that faces us across the Pacific.

In the afterword to the book, Donald Richie, an authority on Japan, writes: “The photographs . . . bring into being a poetic (world) which did not exist before, the photographer’s experience of Asia. Yet this continent is in direct correspondence, one to one, with that East which is really there.”

Rubinfien, who spent his youth in Japan, is an MFA graduate of Yale University. “A Map of the East” was published last week by David R. Godine, Publisher, and on Friday, 30 of the photographs went on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.