TRUE: Two Tuesdays ago I went to Ootoya for some food and on the first bite (of a mouthfull of lettuce) I bit my tongue so hard the blood did not stop for 15 minutes.
TRUER: Last Tuesday I went back to the same shop and ordered the same thing. Coming out of the mens room I was super sure that my camera strap was secure on my left shoulder. A sudden “vppp” sound followed by the kind of sound that can be only described as “a mechanical camera falling 4 feet and landing on it’s top” quickly assured me that it was not secure anywhere but on the floor. The dope photo illustration* makes things look way worse and far more 8-bit Nintendo-Tetris colored than they really are. The rangefinder is a little off but other than that it looks fine.
I was ever so slightly disappointed** that I did not at least get a Character Scuff on the top plate out of the deal but waxed pinewood floors tend to be kinder to breakables than their stony concrete cousins.
Looks like a trip to Ginza’s Leica service center is in order for this week. I’ll have to take that spectacled, lab coated, and smiling technician up on his promise for the free Leica check-up that he mentioned the last time I was there.
* not my eyes or mouth. Thank you google. The inset photo is courtesy of a 6th grader who took it with my camera.
** a joke!
Last night at a bookshop in Matsudo I picked up, flipped through, and promptly went to the register with the latest issue of Phat Photo.
This issue’s theme is “Photographers in their twenties”, and opens with pictures of some brilliant albums Araki made when he was 25 years old. Then, a few pages later (and this is why I slapped down 750 yen at the counter) one is treated to an enviable* and beautiful 8 page spread of the photography of Chicagrapher Brian Ulrich.
I’ve been keeping up with his blog and the whole mid-west photo scene via the internet (and for a little bit while I was in Nebraksa), all the while thinking that this is something that Young Japanese Photographers need to know about. And now they will. The ones who buy the magazine at least. Which is pretty much the same group of folks that “Young Japanese Photographers” as a title encompasses. My Japanese is not near as good as I know it better be by now but overall the article and interview was pretty good. I’d like to say something special about his work, but if you head on over to Brian’s blog you will get a far more comprehensive and articulate overview of his photography and philosophy than I would be able to say here in this entry.
A few pages after Brian’s article are several more pages of other up-and-coming 20-something Japanese photographer’s self portraits which are reinforced with letters to the readers. Letters that are a lot like the self portraits- super slick, laced with Japanese Irony (sitting in the woods with a foam frog hat and a pentax 67) and All The Rage in terms of photo style. Shin Suzuki also got a page in there.
Phat Photo is a tremendously popular photo magazine for younger photographers. If I had to imagine the demographic of it’s audience I’d guess that it serves the young photographer market in the way that nothing in the states comes even close to doing. Look Look is fairly damn close in a few ways, but Phat Photo is really like if the interns at Nylon and Aperture got together, came across a shit-load of money and then made one of the best looking photo magazines out there. It would cover the latest in the contemporary photo world, review cameras and then have a few pages with fashion suggestions as for what to wear from the actual photo shoots all through one’s trendy gallery exhibition reception party. It is not something I go home with regularly, but if you had to get just one make it this issue for Brian’s work.
* I took a load of photos to their office last year in hopes of getting some work published but instead was asked to teach the staff English Conversation ( I said I’d do it for free), and to keep on trying with my pictures. We never did get together for the english learning.
It took a cold, rainy weekend and another bottle of HC-110 but gosh-darnit I finished developing the rest of my film. Between saturday and sunday I did some 80 rolls of Fuji Presto 400. And I restored the balance by bulk rolling another 80 to be shot over the next few months. To be fair, the plateau of negative files above is not entirely constructed of my most recent work; only about three-fifths of it is. The top half are all the negs that done been shot the all the time I went back to Nebraska since 2004. Still have not printed any of those, and I’ve not yet printed more than 15 pictures from the rest of this stack. Any of those are located in the bottom 10% of that phat pile atop that phat photo book. The last sheet is #1350, with #1 being the first roll done after moving back to Japan in 2004. If anyone here besides me cared about the dates, the bottom sheet (#1116 (time works upwards)) holds 36 frames of film taken on Augusts 5th 2006 in Kyoto.
The only negative thing about all this is the increasing cost of black and white fiber paper. But tomorrow is payday and I am ready to plow through all this as soon as possible.
