_valerian

Black Boxes for your pictures.

They do four things:

1. Hold your photographs.

2. Open (you can put in or take out your pictures after doing this step).

3. Close (you can’t take out your pictures when it is closed).

4. Look nicer than the boxes photo paper comes in.

Closed:

Open:

There is another thing they can do and that is Be Taken Places. Need to show your work to a trendy japanese photo magazine? Black Boxes are good to bring the pictures they won’t want to publish in. The Indie sticker labels with my name give it the edge of a mass marketed Punk CD album cover. You should use your own name though. And you can put the portfolio’s title on it too.

When the boxes are open, the lid gives you a great place to put the photos as they are looked at. You don’t have to worry about wet spots on a table in a coffee shop or say that the table in the coffee shop is not much bigger than the box (this is common in Tokyo) well hey there, looks like the lid protects your pictures from gravity as well as spills.

What I can’t tell you is the brand name that these have but I can say that the kinds like this that have hinged covers are better than the ones with separate lids. I get mine at the Yodobashi Camera in Shinjuku, B1 of the Camera shop, back in the corner near the registers. The 11×14 size ones are about 3800 yen each.

That is a super deep sounding title for a post where I am just going to think/type about what to do with all the prints I have now.

I started printing on 11×14 Fuji Rembrant V G2 (fiber based) paper in the fall last year. No, it was this spring because I got to liking the G2 due to printing all my nengajyo (japanese new years cards) on it in December and so what you see here is what I have printed in the past 6 months, give or take a couple dozen prints that I gave to people. To be fair, the top 1/6th of that pile are doubles/not-so-good prints.

So now what?

You might wonder, “That is several hundred dollar’s worth of paper. What’s the point? ” and I would say to that: “yeah, I am not paid to do this, I don’t have any chance at the moment to exhibit them, and I am not even a grad student”. Nylon* is not exactly calling me and asking for me to do an 8 page shoot with Scarlett Johansson but if they did I would be all like Giovanni Ribisi in Lost in Translation what with my Pentax 67s and leica and Kodak Portra NC film. It’s just that one would have to be sure and shoot everything super grainy and make sure there is enough lens flare and fill-in flash for the editors to be happy. Bonus points for shots that include a camero, an old shed, or a rusty swing set.

*WTF !? An Olsen twin on the cover? Looks like this magazine has uh evolved since I read it 2 years ago.

And what about these?

Since January I have been keeping a photo diary of nearly everyone I have met and things I have seen or done. I take my color film down to the local Fuji Color DPE and ask for a white border around the pictures. Hey here is a tip- if you want the color in your prints to look correct, ask Yodobashi to print them on Kodak paper, which is done the old way. All the fuji prints are printed digitally, which means you can see pixels and the color is all saturated even if you used the aforementioned Kodak NC Portra.
You might be suprised how my color work is so different from my black and white pictures. This has nothing to do with issues local color, it is more of a result of how I shoot with a small simple point and shoot vs. an SLR or Leica with black and white film.
Each of those albums holds 240 pictures. For the side inserts I make a color copy of a picture taken in a mirror and then in a super indie way I use one of those “old-skool” labelers to note the days between the photos in each album were taken. As you can imagine, putting photographs in albums is easier to handle than a stack of large fiber prints.

It is a lot of fun to do all that artsy “dealing with the photograph” and what it means and all, but the dealing with the actuality of the prints is one of those things . . .crap, I don’t even know. It is scary to think about it not just because of the money spent or space it all takes up, but for the way it makes me question why I am even doing what I am. “Because I need to” is what I say to it, yelling back in my mind to those doubts and emphasizing my stance through my wallet in buying more paper and chemicals. There is no tidy ending here- No moment where I figure out the balance between matters of art making and practicality, prudence and satisfaction.

What do you do? What’s the point? I know it is not just about photography- any work of creation has these problems. Thank god I am not a sculptor…

Kitasenju, Tokyo. June 2002

Pictures are not composed in as much as they are (at their best) visual solutions to what is going on in the frame. In no way am I the first to proclaim this but it is from this understanding that strong photographs can be made. How will you work with the content, and form into making something interesting? There are times where the conscious decision to push the button is not so conscious at all. Sometimes it is a suprise with what you end up with, the visual result of a physical and emotional response to something you barely had time to recognize as it happened. Maybe that is just fancy talk to describe a Happy Accident, one of those times when the Photo Gods decided to cut you a break and toss some stuff together just right as you clicked away.

However if this shot was a blessing, then I did not hold up my half of the bargain by under exposing the picture so badly. What you see here is an image from a scan of a grey workprint that was shoved through photoshop into what you see here on your screen. Beyond that though it is what the picture is showing that interests me.

There are 7 people, including the child, in this photograph. Two, the older woman to the left and the man on the right are of roughtly the same size and pose in the picture plane. The other two main figures, the young couple with the stroller repeat each other’s form as well, even going so far as to lock arms together with one on top of the other. This does not look like the easiest way to pilot a stroller so perhaps the father is trying to help at this moment. He looks away while the mother looks directly at the camera. Their child however looks past the wheelchair, which is the other wheeled type of chair that people get pushed around in during their life (only while in a much older or frail condition), to the left of the frame. The stroller and the wheelchair are visually locked together (this effect is amplified by the two white painted lines connecting at an angle on the street behind them), and the older woman pushes her chair with only one hand. Out from the empty seat protrudes the handle of an umbrella. It follows parallel to the angle of her arm from the wheelchair handles, and the curve of the end of it acts as a symbolic reflection to what her other hand is doing, which is pulling. Or at least guiding. Does that hand coming in off the side belong to the person for whom that chair is for? A wheelchair to used to move people who cannot walk well on their own. Here the possible occupant is walking on their own, albeit with some guidence. I can’t say for sure if the young boy getting to look at the person that we would all like to see.

Sometimes a good photograph is about what you can’t see, all the while being an object (the photograph) that is about the pleasure of seeing. But in this case I think what we can see is pleasure enough. Pictures can’t tell stories the way we all wish they did but sometimes what they imply is more than enough.

1. Turn the Page, Metallica
Play count: 27 times
This (epic!) song starts out about being in a tour bus “East of Omaha” and then when people call James a girl behind his back in a truck stop cafe I am guessing that he is in Nebraska. But maybe he (in the song) was in Iowa at the time because when Metallica came to the Beef State they only played in Omaha. So maybe that first part is about during the drive from Des Moines to Omaha. That has to be it because it’s not like Metallica ever hit the cities of Grand Island or Ord when they drive through the state. But have you seen the video for this song? Oh man it is awesome. It is about a stripper and her daughter and parts of what he says in the song match up to what is on screen. But not the parts where she gets beat up by a client while her daughter watched. This is a good song to have playing while driving through Nebraska, but probably not at strip clubs.
So it is a late night road song and a re-make of an older one right? Whatever. I say this is an A.

2. 空耳ばかり, UA
Play count: 2 times
I think the title means “all open ears”. The first time I heard of UA was also when I saw her at Fuji Rock in 1999. This is off the album “Ametora” and I only bought it used at Book-off because it was really cheap and reminded me of a girl. Needless to say nothing ever worked out and I guess 2 times was enough for this song. This is the kind of song you would have on in the background at a cool Tokyo apartment party as the evening passes and all the food has been eaten. But no one ever comes to my place for anything, so: C.

3. Root Down The Beastie Boys
Play count: 3 times.
If my iTunes kept track of all the times I listened to this song over the past few years instead of from when I put this album onto my computer the count would be more than I care to guess. Cripes I must have listened to this song at least 5 times a day from about 1999 to 2004 after which my Beastie Boys listening declined. Not sure why. How about that bass line? A.

4. Revelation D12
Play count: None
As much as I listened to the Beastie Boys over the years I know that I have listened to Eminem every day from 2000 to today. As much as I admire his ability I could not get down with D12. Until that is, I heard that “Git Up Now” song and I bought both their albums, at first only to hear more of Eminem’s fantastic delivery. This Rap Listening is a suprise to most people because I look like a guy who really likes Radiohead and not rap. Or is that so? Actually, in another way I DO look like that kind of guy who likes rap and was called out on it by a Black friend who countered one of my enthusiastic talks on Jurassic 5 with “Wait, you are not one of those white guys who was in to Nirvana in High School and now likes underground hip hop?”. Yes I am. . Not that D12 is underground or anything.
Oh man the end of this song (having listened to it all the way for the 1st time) is a parody of Pink Floyd’s Wall song. HA! It has Eminem talking like a school master! But the rest of the song is not as good as the good parts of “Pimp Like Me” so B.

I was going to do 5 but I am bored with this now. I can’t write about music.