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Naomi in the kenshukan, 2002

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Poking around in my camera club’s darkroom one day in 2002 I came across a box for a wide angle Fuji instant camera. Inside that box was a wide angle Fuji camera which I promptly went out and bought a 2000 yen battery and several packs of film for. Later I found out that it was a current member’s camera but he was cool with it being in my dorm room for several months. It was around this time that my Araki intake had increased. He has books of photographs of beautiful women in a landscape*. Yes those are pictures I actively try to make when I have the chance. And while living in the dorm 5 years ago the chance to make work along that theme was easy to do. The building housed many young women who were quite happy to pose for pictures (some did up on the roof sans threads but never for me).

The second picture here can’t get too much sharper which is a shame. Somewhere in my closet back in Nebraska are the black and white 35mm negs that I shot right after this picture. On this day the International Affairs had some older women with kimonos come to the dorm to let the girls dress up and I just happened to have an Imperial Japanese flag up in my dorm room. The girl here from Taiwan was cool about standing in front of it and I can not remember who was holding it up in the back. Cedric from France? He got married while he was an exchange student. I don’t know when his wife finally told her family but it was after he left for France.

*Speaking of ladies, I ran into Azusa and her boyfriend in Ueno the other night.

It is not worth the 4 bucks for the film, and the nearly 20 for development and prints to shoot 110 film all the time. Or even ever again. The camera I got at Goodwill is all messed up and for some reason the finder was way off. And yet, there is something about these grainy and dust-ridden little prints that is oddly interesting.

Just like a wily, immoral dog I got a few cameras that need fixing. My silver F2 makes a dry ratcheting sound when the lever is advanced, the black one shed it’s depth of field preview chrome button in a coffee shop in Shimokitazawa back in october. My F3 makes the bottom right corners of my pictures dark when shot with fast shutter speeds. And a little trim ring that goes around the shutter speed dial on an Pentax 67’s TTL finder popped out all 3 of the little set screws that held it on to the rest of the camera. Tape is doing the job now but looks like I will head down to Shinjuku sometime soon to get things looked over.

These are the kinds of things I end up thinking about on lazy Sunday afternoons home alone. When I am not editing negatives.