_valerian

The other day at a Nikon Gallery photo show (by the lovely Riho Araki) I met an editor of PHaT PHOTO, a photography magazine based here in Tokyo. The magazine is aimed at a hip and graphically literate 15 to 30 crowd, with ads in it for prosumer blah Canon digital Kiss SLRs and also for the Nikon F6. The photography within is usually color, often graphic in a visual sense, and always technically flawless. Have you seen my pictures? They are not like that at all. However I asked Ando san, the editor, if I might be able to stop by with some of my black and white, mish-mash, somewhat sloppy photos and not only was she nice enough to say yes on Saturday, but she actually let me come by and show them to her tonight.
For all the non-scanning and non-posting of the photographs I have not been printing to show you here, I have instead been steadily (in spurts) working on building up a collection of near enough exhibition quality 11×14 sized fiber prints to have on hand. And bring them I did. Perhaps too many.
An hour and a half later (no that’s solid photo showing time since I talked a lot) I was not exactly asked to have a full 8 page spread of my work, but since I did not go in there hoping for that, I did not mind how things turned out at all. I was told that the staff members can’t speak english and wouldn’t it be great if I could maybe teach english conversation classes? and this would be fine with me since the more people I can meet and talk with about photography, the better. That part will work for me and they don’t mind the fact that I won’t charge for casual english conversation classes.
A problem I have now that I have a lot of work, mostly decent, that I like. But should it all be shown at once? I am thinking no. And it needs to be cut down better too. Editing is something I need to work on. “What are you trying to say?” is something I am often asked, and “Interesting” is something else hear a lot, or see written (like in the Document Nippon Competition’s “Try again next time” letter I got a few weeks ago) and I still am not sure how to deal with this yet. I know I am interested in my pictures, and I know I think that the pictures are about photography. I had hoped that the work alone would not need me to verbally back it up but what this means is that this process of learning and working must continue.
Good thing I made a bunch of business cards that say “Photographer” on them today.