While most of the best photography ever produced still exists unseen in private albums, sometimes we get lucky and a few of those pictures find their way to the internet. This is a photo of Yuna taken in the early 1980s.
Love those silver pipes, that tree, and her with this shadow-black dog. The dog is so inky that it melds in with it’s own shadow which makes it look like it was cut from something else and either placed in, or maybe cut out and the black is what remains from underneath.
That little real shadow in the left corner is a nice touch.
The other day a friend gave me his grandfather’s old Canon Demi half frame camera. This camera is corroded, the advance lever does not go back in place very quickly, and the lens is clouded with fungus. In other words, it is the perfect machine to shoot the roll of Rainbow 7 film that has been in my fridge for several months. Now if it would just stop raining…
I do really dig the meter (still works!) and the exposure system: Match an arrow with the needle by rotating the biggest grooved ring around the lens. That’s all you need!
So how about this “Tokyo Gratzy”?
Before heading to the Mikiko Hara talk on Friday I met Mika for a bite to eat. She had just come from Horiuchi Color with several sheets of 120 negatives (reversal film) that she shot on vacation with (of) her friend Yuki in Okinawa the week before. Like always, the pictures were beautiful. Hopefully she’ll put some of them up on her site soon…
Recently she shot Araki for an article in a magazine. I have yet to see the picture but it is probably great.
There seems to be a surge of Showa-era themed street photography books in the Japanese Photography sections of bookstores as of late. It’s as if ever couple of months a stack of negatives find their way to a publisher who is fine with adding another good old showa photo book to the shelves. Most of these are heavy on lower quality reproductions laden with additional “memories” text, with the layout being geared less about a moving collection of Pictures than simply a grouping of black and white photos taken around the same time in roughly the same area.
This book, “Tokyo Downtown 1930” by Kineo Kuwabara is an good collection of mostly excellent photographs of parts of Tokyo in the 1930s. The editing sometimes wanders into the realm of “(insert local town name here) in 1940/50/60″ with captions like “This was back before you saw cars on the streets”. But what separates this book from most of the other Tokyo street books is the overall photographic quality of Kuwabara’s work. Even though there are a few filler photos, the “hits” just sing. Too bad most of the best photos had to be printed across the gutter.
