Shofuso Dream is a set of twenty-five black and white digital photographs made in the spring of 2019, focusing on Japanese cultural expressions in Philadelphia. The framework of a dream integrates the large number of pictures made at Shofuso, the Japanese house and garden in Fairmont Park, with cherry blossom and Tea Ceremony (chado) images made at the Morris Arboretum.

In his stream-of-consciousness reverie, the dreamer approaches Shofuso and the perimeter wall, enters and experiences the house and chado, contemplates the stone garden, and exits by way of the pond and blossoming cherry trees. The dream ends with the symbolic closing and barring of the gate.

Shofuso is the highlight and chief focal point of Japanese cultural expression in Philadelphia. Designed by architect Junzo Yoshimura, Shofuso was built in Japan in 1953, using traditional techniques and materials. It was shipped to New York and exhibited in the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art in New York before moving to West Fairmount Park in 1958. (From http://japanphilly.org/shofuso/)

The Shofuso gardens are often cited as being among the best examples of Japanese landscape architecture in the United States. Examples of traditional Japanese crafts are displayed throughout the house. Seasonal festivals are held just outside Shofuso’s perimeter walls and on summer weekends, members of the Philadelphia chapter of Ikebana International display traditional and contemporary flower arrangements in the main house. Tea Master Drew Hanson frequently demonstrates chado, as he did at the Morris Arboretum Cherry Blossom Festival, pictured in this series.

I inherited an affinity for traditional Japanese art and crafts from my parents, who hung Japanese woodblock prints in my childhood home. They now hang in mine. For many years I displayed a black kimono embroidered with flying cranes in my apartment and high-fired unglazed stoneware cups in the Bizen tradition are among my most cherished ceramics. From objects such as these I have absorbed a set of aesthetic values known in Japanese as wabi-sabi.

Wabi-sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble…. (From www.leonardkoren.com/lkwa.html)

In my recent return to black and white images, I realize a deep affection for the solemn qualities of grayscale values, which abstract from the particulars of color, intensify the mood, and simplify and lend a timeless quality to the image. This, too, is a long-held aesthetic. As a child, I was often drawn to trees not lush green ones, but dormant, gnarly gray ones. Similarly, as a sculptor, I have been interested in form, texture, and composition, and have found color to be distracting and confusing. To sculpt, one has to understand how light falls on a form; that is precisely what monochromatic photography reveals.

For that reason, I have always favored black and white over color photography resonating more with Ansel Adams than Eliot Porter. In this series, I am particularly indebted to the work of the modernist straight (as opposed to pictorial) photographers of the mid-twentieth century Group f/64 especially Edward Westons monumental close-ups of seashells and vegetables, and Imogen Cunninghams still life and plant studies, which bring out the rich textures of their sculpture-like forms.