_valerian

The photographer who shoots all the PR work for my school asked me if I wanted any film of his.
Stuff that was all in-date and fine, but that did not need because he “went digital”. I said YES PLEASE and a few days later on my desk I found 20 rolls of mostly color film in handy 35mm 10-roll plastic holders.

That Fuji Pro 400 is sweet.
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Unrelated picture of:

Yesterday I got an email from Onishi Sensei saying to check out an exhibition of a young photographer he knows over at the Nikon Salon in Shinjiku. On the same day Mika emailed my phone to invite me to the opening party of an exhibition of photographs at the Nikon Salon. Somehow I just figured that they were both taking about the same photographer but in actuality they were each talking about one of the two different twenty-something year old female photographers who are exhibiting at the Nikon Salon this week.

In the South room, Mai Tanaka has about 40 photographs displayed. Each and every one is a beautiful photograph of a beautiful young woman. Many of whom showed up at the reception, since they mostly were all photography students with Mai. Many of whom said, “it’s ok if you keep taking my pictures but Mai will get upset because I am hers “. And you can see Mai not looking too happy in the second photo from the top as she stares over Aiko’s shoulder at my crappy little digital camera’s lens. Lest you get the wrong impression, she does have a great sense of humor and despite the fact that she said it would cost me 50,000 yen for each shot of “her girls” (payable to her since she is their agent) she did so as she offered me a large piece of cake decorated with Japanese White Cake Frosting, with Japanese Very Red Strawberries on top. If you have ever been to a party in Japan with a bunch of 22 year old college girls you will expect this kind of cake to be on the table along with the cans of beer and opened-from-the-back bags of potato chips.
(WAS THERE 2L of SUNTORY OOLONG TEA and THE bottle of Coke? oh you know there was)
You can’t really tell from the pictures here, but there were about 30 young men and women in the gallery.
You can’t really see the guys because they were together at one end of the room being quiet together while the girls were getting tipsy drunk and having a noisy good time.
Mai’s work is beautiful, but personally I think it is the start of something even better. She has established her ability to be able to take visually smart (but not over the top) pictures of people, and in this was has perhaps fleshed out a certain view of her immediate surroundings. She knows how to make a good picture. Mai is a sensitive and competent photographer. She has a good working visual literacy and I am interested to see what will happen once she starts turning her camera towards people and things that she is less familiar with.

One more picture, (with apologies to Mai) a polaroid of her friend Sara:

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At the same time, Miyuki Motoki was having her (far more subdued) reception in the next gallery. The simplest description of her work would be to say the pictures of her “Grandparents on their dairy farm”. This is something that I can personally relate to since a lot of great childhood memories involve those 5 words in that order. However, I did not see any traces of Down-Home Country Aw Shucks wholesomeness or Nostalgia in her pictures. There is a tendency (at least in American culture) to proclaim Farmers as the ones with Solid Dignity, stout men and women who work the land, raise livestock, and do so in a Noble Way. Miyuki’s photographs speak of what it means to be old and to work with animals, and to die and to keep living. Any nobility in them is of the quiet type that comes from an acceptance of life that is dependent on manual labor that deals with a lot of things we (who are not farmers) don’t see. There is a stark Buddhist sense to what she has captured here, and this vein runs throughout a lot of her other work as well. I’m not talking about that Western Buddhist Zen Fetish syrupy minimalist visual sense (or ANYTHING to do with that god-awful “The Zen Of Photography” book) but rather in how they firmly deal with Life and Death. These are not pictures a Christian would make- there is no sense of salvation in a Judeo-Christian sense, and the generally accepted beauty that one might expect to see in pictures of God’s stewards of the earth is absent. “Everything’s going to be all right” ? No, with her pictures it is more like “Everything simply Is.”
These pictures operate effectively in that they are born from a sharp intellectual level of precise description (eerily captured by a digital point and shoot camera) coupled with a deeply feeling heart. The presentation of the pictures is very interesting. They are divided into sections about the room, with each image working together as almost a chapter. As you circle around the gallery Time is noticeable in the pictures. It is more of a poem than a story (photographs are visual metaphors, so the poetry comparison is apt). I think I spent the longest time at the final section of pictures.

Her poem’s “ending” is both unsettling, heart breaking, and sharply beautiful at the same time.

Both shows are up until Monday the 2nd, Shinjuku Nikon Salon, 28F Shinjuku L tower.