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A Hong Kong native living in Tokyo for the past decade, Eric has been spending the past few years shooting in China. The result of a dozen visits and over 1,500 rolls of film can be seen at the Ginza Nikon Salon in Tokyo until the 25th of November in an exhibition entitled:GOOD LUCK CHINA

The one hundred photographs are laid out in grids on each wall, their rich colors offering an vivid take on a China and it’s physical, visual culture. The effect of so many beautiful pictures becomes an immersive experience. Despite the fact that he is a visitor to mainland China, the photos eschew the typical Asian Travel Photo look, trading that genre’s often embarrassingly insular sentimentality for a more aggressive type of picture-problem solving.

Part of his solution is harnessing the unnatural lighting that his flash highlights the subjects with, an effect that at times pushes the photographs near the realm of caricature. What keeps the work from being simply a clever and ironic send up of a people is by how smartly the pictures are made, and by how tightly they are edited. Many pictures center on an individual, while others allude to the interactions between small groups of characters. The points of reference that he has created through his pictures of Chinese people in a casual public creates a less acknowledged composite of China. His selection of work also challenges the usual Western notions of inscrutable Orientialism.

Rather than looking for the usual spectacle of mass-humanity portrayed by visitors to Asia, (think of vast rooms of masked women assembling consumer goods) Eric seems to have found a rich vein of Hiromi Tsuchida’s Zokushin spirit strewn about on the streets of China.

Last night I went to the Nippon Camera office to show some recent photos to one of the editors that I know. It’s the same collection of recent 6×7 work that I’ve been showing everyone else and part of the enjoyment (and frustration) is the continuous collection of other people’s opinions on what is shown. Otani san’s take on what that might be led to my removing all of the photos from the book at home to get a better look at just how looking is the underlying thread of the selection. Another applicable word worthy of italics would be: Confrontation.

More on that for a later post. He’s also a fan of tokyo camera style and brought along his bargain bin Leica IIIg with it’s $100 lens for the site.

I first met Otani san about 2 years ago, at a shrine on New Year’s day. I snapped a photo of him and his wife looking like they had stepped out of 1905 (think Kimonos and a fedora), to which he pulled out a little Nikon with a rare lens and asked if I was Okabe’s friend John. Yes, yes I am.

Just before I left last night, and while I was enraptured by the photo book collection on the shelf in the meeting room, I picked up an Araki book to flip through. Otani asked if I had seen Araki’s “Tokyo Kinbaku” which was published somewhat recently. I said I had and he mentioned that there is shot of him singing Karaoke near the beginning.

Checked later and sure enough, there he is holding the mic. Should have noticed it earlier.

ニコンで大西先生もいたのに、惜しいことに写真撮り忘れってしまった。

あ。
いた。
写ってる。