Rice Enso photograms
Can you make more artwork with rice?
Following the earthquake and tsunami of March 11th, 2011, a letter arrived in photo-artist Ed Heckerman’s inbox from a young Japanese friend, Murakami Iwauko, asking a favor: “Can you make more artwork with rice?” Following the collapse of the Fukushima reactor, many feared their rice, a daily staple, may have been irradiated. Rice is a foundation of Japanese culture, and this was a time of great fear and uncertainty.
Believing rice to be a highly symbolic subject in this context, Murakami asked eight friends to send rice to Heckerman from various locations in Japan—Niigata, Ibaraki, Akita, Fukushima, Aomori, Hokkaidō, Miyagi, and Chiba. After some rumination, the enso (the Zen circle) presented itself to the artist. Often painted with ink and brush, it is a symbol of pure potential, signifying neither negation nor affirmation.
Heckerman set about making enso photograms with the rice. He poured it from a bamboo incense container onto light-sensitive paper. Each circle was composed in a clockwise direction, the way Buddhist devotees circumambulate a stupa. The process became a kind of ritual as he recited the 100-syllable Vajrasattva mantra throughout each day-long printing session. He did this for four days and made 50 prints. It was his prayer to Japan.
These rice enso photograms appeared in KJ 83, a special issue on food.
ABOUT ED HECKERMAN
Ed Heckerman has been deeply involved with photography for over fifty years. In 1984, he received an M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts. As an adjunct, he taught at UCLA, Art Center College of Design, Claremont Graduate University, and California State University at Long Beach and Northridge campuses. He is emeritus professor of photography at Cerritos College where he taught from 2004 to 2024. Additionally, he has exhibited widely at humble addresses in both Switzerland and The United States.
In 2011 Ed Heckerman was invested as a lopon (teacher and ritual master) in the Dudjom Tersar school of Tibetan Buddhism. He teaches meditation and leads group practices at Yeshe Nyingpo in Santa Monica, California. Recently, he has embarked on teaching workshops in Deep Seeing: a meditative approach to photography.
JA