"Domicile address, name unknown, 24 or 5 years old female. The height about 1.60 meter, medium-build, round face, 12 cm long permed hair, left and right molars (lower) covered with imitation platinum ... The above, lying down on the track just before Tojo Line no. 237 train passed through, was run over and killed ..."

		"Unspoken" continues through Jan. 29 at 1015 E. Carson St., South Side. Through Saturday a strong showing by two Canadian photographers, Gaye Jackson of Toronto (an abandoned cement plant) and Diana Shearwood of Montreal (a closed grain silo), are in the Members' Gallery. Hours are noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and until 9 p.m. Thursdays. Admission to tonight's event is $10, $7 students and members; for DeGenaro, $7 and $5. Refreshments served at each event and reservations recommended. For information call 412-431-1810 or visit www.silvereye.org.

The preceding information hangs next to a photograph of its calligraphic rendition paired with a black-and-white image of a nondescript street scene. The information was taken from official records of unidentified dead, and the scene is the location where the body was found.

The work is from a series by Japanese artist Fumimasa Hosokawa, part of which forms half of the excellent exhibition "Unspoken Ground: Two Views of Japan" at Silver Eye Center for Photography. The other artist, Shinichiro Kobayashi, photographs the impact large construction projects make upon the landscape.

At 7 tonight scholar and poet David Clippinger will explore spiritual and metaphysical aspects of Japanese Haiku, literature and visual arts. On Jan. 21 Ohio collector Stephen DeGenaro will show and speak about his 19th-century postmortem tintype photographs.

The show was curated by Silver Eye exhibition coordinator Kaoru Tohara, who is Japanese.

He writes that the images "project the current environment and society in Japan. ... No judgment was made [by the photographers] and people were not recorded; however, their images discretely narrate unspoken ground."

The poetic title lingers in the mind like fragrance as one views the exhibition, planting the notion of subjects perhaps not discussed in a society thought of as reserved. If that concept is stereotypical, the scapes depicted are not; there is nothing here that would appear in a tourism brochure.

The images, in fact, have a global quality, and American viewers may easily contextualize them within our own concerns about loss of environmental purity and alienation as a by-product of modernization. But one suspects there are peculiarly Japanese readings to these works that are not so obvious.

The pairing of image and calligraphy that Hosokawa employs, for example, is reminiscent of the format of Japanese handscrolls. Added poignancy comes from a comparison to the famed 12th-century scroll "The Tale of Genji," which illustrates the life of the aristocracy and the court. The sharp contrast between the bleak lot of the commoner, anonymous in life and in death, is consistent -- from the banality of the environments in which they took their final breaths to the bureaucratic calligraphy of Hosokawa's photographs compared to the lyrical elegance of that in Genji.

The 22 photographs displayed begin with a 60-year-old male "discovered dead from disease" in 1901 and conclude with a woman of similar age who was "acting suspiciously, and was placed under the protection of the police," institutionalized, and died within the month, "due to shock from bleeding from the digestive organs" in 2000. Most difficult to read about are the abandoned newborns.

Blunt also are the 27 immense intrusions upon the land depicted by Kobayashi, such as the eerily colored pond of "Ibaraki" resembling the waste-holding pools and surrounding vegetatively dead zones of mining companies in the American West, or the white webbing that restrains a classically shaped mountain from tumbling into the road snaking along it in "Saitama."

In "Nara," a concrete retaining wall at the foot of a denuded vertical swath in a forested hill looks like a knife blade embedded in the brown earth. Such desecration of the land borders upon irreverence when one considers the sacred and aesthetic homage traditionally granted this town that is home to, among others, the venerable seventh-century Buddhist temple complex Horyu-ji.

Through methods that appear to be straightforwardly documentary, these artists raise the important question of stewardship, asking who in a period of accelerated change is responsible for the continuing welfare of the people and of the land.