Life after wartime
World War II ended Aug. 15, 1945, when, reeling from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender to the Allied forces. Two weeks later, the U.S. Navy, gathering in the mine-filled waters of Tokyo Bay, deployed its first boat to the Japanese shore to begin the liberation of Allied prisoners of war. Among the handful of officers and guides aboard this boat was an affable, self-taught, New Jersey-born photographer named John Swope (1908-79), one of a small unit of naval photographers working under the direction of Edward Steichen.
Swope’s record of this landing and of the three weeks he spent touring camps around the country never materialized into the book he envisioned, nor was it exhibited in anything close to its entirety. Resurfacing now, however, in an excellent exhibition at the UCLA Hammer Museum -- “A Letter From Japan: The Photographs of John Swope” -- it proves a powerful and timely body of work.
Curated by Carolyn Peter, the show combines nearly 80 vintage prints with excerpts from a letter Swope wrote to his wife over the course of his visit (reproduced in full in the exhibition’s beautiful catalog), presenting the project much as Swope would have intended it to be seen. Although commissioned by the Navy, the series moves well beyond military PR and propaganda to present a complex -- if essentially optimistic -- portrait of a remarkable moment in history.
From a distance of 60 years, one can only imagine the emotional intensity of this first point of contact. For the soldiers gathered in the bay, it meant approaching the soil of an enemy they’d been trained to regard as subhuman. For the prisoners, it signaled the release from captivity, isolation, mistreatment in many cases, and uncertainty. For the Japanese, it brought defeat and subordination to an occupying power. The one thing that each party clearly had in common was exhaustion. The war had raged for years; no one was unscathed. Most, at least among the rank-and-file and the civilians that Swope concentrated on, probably wanted nothing more than to get on with life.
The photograph that records the landing -- at the Omori POW camp, near Tokyo -- is a boisterous one, depicting a crowd of mostly shirtless men surging onto a rickety pier and cheering. .
Subsequent portraits of individual soldiers are equally exuberant and characterized by a slick visual appeal that betrays Swope’s Hollywood roots. (Husband to actress Dorothy McGuire and college buddy of Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart, Swope moved and photographed in celebrity circles. His first job after moving to L.A. in 1936 was photographing for agent and producer Leland Hayward, and his first and best-known book was a sociological portrait called “Camera Over Hollywood.” Other works included in the show, from before and after the war, include intimate portraits of not only Fonda and Stewart but also Gene Tierney, Rosalind Russell, Tyrone Power, Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer, not to mention a priceless shot of the Duke of Windsor wearing nothing but a towel.)
Endearing as Swope’s affection for these soldiers is, what distinguishes the series from standard-issue boosterism is his persistent attention to the other side of the story. His job was to document the POWs, and he did so with all the patriotic flair that would have been expected. In his off time, however, he ventured beyond the camps and into the country, quietly flouting orders against fraternization to document the faces on the other side of the divide.
The curiosity stemmed in part from his having visited Japan 15 years earlier on a post-college, round-the-world trip, staying for a month with a friend and business associate of his father. Given that this friend was the founder of Nippon Electric (Swope’s father was the president of General Electric), this early visit was no doubt far more luxurious than the later one and his experience of the Japanese considerably more amicable. But it left him with a perhaps greater-than-average sensitivity to the Japanese perspective and an appreciation for the cultural value beneath the devastation.
In his letter to his wife, Swope alludes frequently to the unsettling discordance of these two impressions of Japan. Waiting in the bay, just before the first landing, he writes:
“I kept looking at the shore, trying to imagine having been there before and under such entirely different circumstances, and to be here now, as a small part of a great victorious fleet. I kept trying to imagine the Japanese on the very shore and the lives that they have been living for the past number of years and the years they have to face ahead of them.
This awareness and the relative humility with which Swope struggles with his impressions of the Japanese Other make the letter a profoundly illuminating document. Swope is a product of his time, to be sure: The letter, which the book prints largely unedited, is filled with terms and presumptions that have a racist ring to them today. Few of these, however (with the exception of the ubiquitous yet always jarring “Jap”), go unexamined. He admits to being confused by the behavior of the Japanese and being occasionally distrustful; he has trouble getting around a notion of the culture as “simple” and “backward”; and his pity for the people can come across as patronizing. In every contact with individuals, however, he appears not only ready but eager to be proved wrong.
Although the text reveals a man struggling with the limitations of his own experience, the images are considerably more confident. Swope’s attraction to the face of the proverbial common man -- a legacy part Walker Evans, part Hollywood -- trumps all cultural barriers, and the faces speak for themselves.
He photographs women and children, soldiers, guards and civilian men, in camps, in the street, at train stations and in their homes. They regard him with curiosity, scorn, politeness, warmth, generosity and indifference. They are, above all, unquestionably real people. They’re poverty-stricken, grief-stricken, malnourished, exhausted and possibly homeless, their cities literally reduced to rubble, but they’re alive, and this is the spark that Swope zeros in on. If the function of propaganda is to dehumanize the enemy, then these images began to reverse that process. Indeed, Swope’s Japanese subjects come across even more vividly than the POWs, perhaps because the tragedy of their situation overwhelmed Swope’s cinematic tendencies, perhaps simply because it left him a little more raw.
Having led what one can only imagine to have been an exceedingly comfortable life at home and having never seen combat himself -- he trained pilots in Arizona before joining Steichen in Maryland in spring 1945 -- Swope was perhaps more naive than most going into the situation. But it lends his perspective an invaluable freshness.
Contrasting the detestation he witnessed on the shore throughout his days in Japan with the bolstered security on the ships where he spent his nights, he writes: “The two worlds (one a dear, tired, burned-out land of strange and disillusioned peoples, and the other as represented by the hundreds of brightly lighted warships standing in the bay as a challenge to any threat to what we like to call our way of life, powerful, sure, and yet not so sure, and ready to try to convince our former enemy of the evil of their ways) are so diametrically opposed that to make such a sudden change so often is very disconcerting and renders any straight-line thinking on the problem most difficult.”
It is precisely Swope’s failure to achieve this “straight-line thinking” -- which is just the sort of thinking that starts wars in the first place -- that makes his “Letter From Japan” such a rich and valuable document.
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‘A Letter From Japan’
Where: UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles
When: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays; closed Mondays; ends June 4.
Price: $3 to $5
Contact: (310) 443-7000; www.hammer.ucla.edu