Took the Toden-Arakawa line from Machiya to Oji and then walked southernly towards and through Komagome into Yanaka today.
The playground in the park on the hill next to Oji station was amazing. It’s like a bunch of adults went ahead and constructed the park according to the wishes of actual 5 year olds. Castle themed? Yes. Concrete animals including a life sized elephant for climbing on? Sure. A locomotive? Why not?
It was a perfect spot for young parents and kids.
It was a perfect spot for Hip Fashion people on a location shoot:
It was a perfect spot for shooting with a long zoom from the safety of the shadows with a DSLR:
To be fair though I don’t think he was aiming at anyone but the women in the ridiculously uncool outfits who were giggly about being models.
And then for the rest of the day (several hours) I kept my digital camera in the bag and my Leica in hand with the strap around my wrist. The only exceptions were for two Tokyo Camera Style encounters and the GRD did come out again in Nezu after seeing these fellows on Street Paint duty:
I’ve posted 10 photos to my portfolio site under the title: 駄洒落 (a pun)
The title and selection of images is tentative but the fact that all were taken since the 1st of January on no more than 3 different occasions is something I’m excited by. A while ago I whined about making Useless/Worthless Photos and while the differences may be slight, these new pictures and their complexities are pushing me further along. This is the point of it all- not trying to get somewhere but to keep heading that direction.
Started off today by meeting my pal Kajioka at his exhibition at Epsite in Shinjuku. His photos of Tokyo (at left) and his wife (at right) worked together extremely well. Well worth checking out if you are in Shinjuku between now and Feb. 4th.
Then I headed down the street to the Tokyo Gov’t building.
At 4:30 Onishi sensei gave a gallery critique of a group show of Sato Shintaro’s 4×5 seminar class. This is going to be a much longer post later this week but for now I’ll share some photos of two of his students in front of their work:
And one more young woman who wasn’t a student and didn’t mind posing twice for me.
Comments Off
Tonight I had some business with Nippon Camera and the small room where the meeting with an editor took place had three walls with bookshelves full of Japanese photobooks. There are some treasures in there if you look hard enough.
One to bring home from a bookshop would be Nagano Shigeichi’s book 1960.
(more…)