_valerian

Yanaka, Tokyo, April

Shimokitazawa, Tokyo, July

–> Been hitting the film development all weekend, down to 40 rolls left in 35mm, and 9 “buroni” (120, as it is called here) film. Some of the 35mm I’ve developed has been from May and June, and being several months removed from the moment of exposure is something great. It gives you a slightly more objective eye when looking at what to print- something Winogrand said was important when trying to decide if the picture was great for what it is vs. thinking it is great because of how you felt when you took it.

–> Last weekend Onishi asked if I wanted to be in a group show next August with him and Kitai Kazuo (!) to which I did say yes. “Good” he said. “Now go shoot Urayasu like you did Nagoya.” (here and here) Urayasu is a city near mine, and is the “theme” of the event. It ought to be a good place for pictures, from what little I’ve seen of it. If you have not yet been to East Tokyo (west Chiba) with a camera in hand, you are missing out. It’s like the blue collar older brother of Setagaya and Kawasaki City, all rough around the edges and with a drinking problem. Signs put up in the 1970s don’t get replaced and a typical empty lot might be litered with some sake bottles and battered faded porn mags in amongst the weeds. There is probably a rusty washer or orange plastic TV slowly disintegrating in a corner by an old tire. But there is a real practical dignity to the place too.
Walker Evans would love east Tokyo.

–> My inner Japanophile has been raging lately and I’ve been reading all media I can get my hands on. TV + Sunday night = Shoten , and what better way to spend such an night than watch a line of old men in colorful kimonos make obscure puns (warning: there is hilarity in that clip.) It’s like a Japanese version of “Who’s line is it anyway” that has been on since TV came in two colors.
Speaking of monochrome moving pictures, at Book Off I picked up this “Visual Directory” photo book of 1950s + 60s Japanese film noir movies that came with a great DVD of original movie trailers, and now I totally want to meet (and photograph!) Mari Annu in 1970:

I guess I’d like to photograph the man with the tambourine too.Next weekend: Going to check out Aya Okabe’s exhibition at Gallery Kaido, and see Onishi sensei’s seminar class show in an old house in Yanaka.

In the Spring 2006 issue of Plus Eighty One (an absolutely brilliant Japanese art/fashion/photo magazine) they have a great little bit from Araki in regard to his thoughts on digital cameras.

+81:What is your stand on digital cameras?

Araki: “Humidity and Darkness are very important elements in photography, so you have to be careful with digital cameras because they sort of kill those elements, I say.
I, too, use them, sort of recording things in everyday life for fun, though. Photography needs to be sentimental. That dry brightness that digital cameras create, that’s not sentimental at all. Colors created with three primary colors have a very simple impact, but there’s melancholy at the same time. Colors don’t turn out the way you want them to be, but that’s what’s so good about them. Perfect colors are not to be researched like that.

Digital cameras easily ignore those sorts of delicate senses and feelings of Japanese coloring. To be extreme you look at black and say, it’s red. That’s art. Creating ripples among people is what art does and it’s the destiny of art, but before all that you have to feel the ripple in yourself.
It’s not exciting because there are stupid guys that ignore that, trying to figure out how to recreate the real colors. They say “If you use this digital camera, you can take a picture in the dark”. The dark should stay dark. You can’t really see that much, and you don’t really want to see that much anyway.

This being Fall break, I had some time yesterday to go in to town and check out some photo galleries. It was around the 6th venue of the day when I found a recently published map of the galleries in and around Shinjuku and Yotsuya.

Click on the picture for a 1000px wide version:

Yesterday I stopped by:
Konica Minolta Plaza
Nikon Salon
Epson Imaging Gallery epSITE
Pentax Forum
This was a baaaad idea because if Camera Lust was an actual physical ailment I would be needing some intensive surgery to get rid of this desire for a Pentax 67II, just like the one they have in their showroom for anyone to pick up and get infected with.

Place M
Roonee
Gallery Niepce (they were closed)
Lotus Root Gallery
I had not been to the Lotus Root Gallery before, but it is going to be one of my stops from here on out. It’s located very close to Roonee, but easy to miss if you don’t know what you are looking for. Here is a map and a photo to help:

From Yotsuya I took some back roads and wormed my way towards Aoyama and then into the quiet back streets of Omotesando. It took about half an hour and the non-help of three people on the streets, but I finally found Musee F. This is one of the nicer looking galleries in Tokyo but you will need a map to find it. And you’ll also need a lack of hesitation to go into what looks like an expensive condo’s stairwell to find that it also doubles as a staircase into the basement gallery lobby.

Overall, I saw some good work (at Nikon and Lotus Root, and to an extent at Musee F) and there were some photographs that really were not the kind that interest me (Panned motorcycles going fast at Konica Minolta, and the “On-The-Set/Behind the scenes” photos of Japanese film directors at Place M). Format-wise, there was nothing that I saw that was done with 35mm film, instead all the film photos were shot with 645, a 6×7, or with a 4×5. Work digitally captured looked indeed like it had been captured digitally (1/2 the Nikon Salon and all of the pics at Konica Minolta). While the 4×5 photos from epSITE and Musee F were printed digitally, they lacked the sharp edges and that creepy dryness of work done with a DSLR. I did not list it above because it is not actually a gallery, but I did stop in the Canon showroom (next to Pentax and Epson) too. I felt my stomach churn after seeing the example A4 color prints that came out of their Bang Dang Doodle shiny new printers. It’s like someone took the most contrived and color saturated example pictures from a lens catalogue, and then bumped up the Sharpness Filter in Photoshop 200%. (This inflamed my Pentax 67II desire something fierce. (Yes, I know my regular Pentax 67 is probably good enough but I’ll leave this for another post))

So, in conculsion: I love living in Tokyo for days like yesterday. And the weather was perfect too.