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Don’t know why I did not get it sooner, but there was something disturbing (just dumb?) about my visit to the Ginza Leica shop on Saturday. The store design is great- looks like the kind of place you might see profiled in the magazine Surface. And of course what they carry, luxury hand-made eye wateringly expensive German cameras, are beautiful. The staff that I talked to were reserved but not stuck up and friendly enough. Actually it was the clerk (Personal Shopping assistant?) who was about my age that gave me a brochure explaining the photo exhibition that was upstairs in the Leica Gallery. The previous Leica Gallery was a large square room with white walls and a wood floor. A classic kind of Photo Gallery. The new one is much more cramped and has tables for looking through a photo book collection that is avalible for viewing.
The problem that arises is the same that you might have in coffee shops that also want to try to show art- you can’t get close enough to the work without putting your lower midsection near someone’s head. I don’t like that when I am the one sitting and so you just kind of have to keep your distance. The work shown were less than a dozen photographs by Sebastiao Salgado. Like the photos he is famous for, they were of poor people doing poor, difficult work in biblically epic and beautifuly made photographs. I like Salgado’s work, and it is important. But my how the context changes when it is shown in the new gallery. Downstairs you can special order your M7 with black paint and silver controls and hey go crazy, for an extra 200 bucks get that ostrich leather and for a few hundred more get the matching ever-ready case. Need a lens? A new 28mm will run you another 2 grand at least.
What kind of pictures can be taken with a Leica? Go on upstairs and see.
Wow look at the tones and detail and resolution in Salgado’s prints. Look how hard those people are working. All those brown people really have poor lives. Well, I think I will hit starbucks down the street and then go with my wife to the Vuitton shop for a new purse.

What I am trying to say is that while as strong as Salgado’s work is, it is difficult for it to compete with a several million dollar 3D commercial while it is hung in a wide hallway that leads to the repair counter. Those laboring Indians in stip mines become these little salesmen for a camera company.

Either that or Salgado and Leica really wanted to do a mind-blowing post-moderninst photography exhibition.

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Re-reading that, it I noticed how strange it is of me to all of the sudden start being concerned over the ethics of the pictures and context that I was describing, since I usually interpret photographs based on photo-form, AND that my first exhibition here in Tokyo was at the Nikon salon…