Since this is the second time I’m showing off free photo loot on my blog I can say it is a repeated theme, although admittedly not nearly as repetitive as I’d like.
A while (year?) ago a friend told me she was given some photo paper from another friend and would I want some of it? Sure. The contents of two heavy bags brought back from Ginza looked like this nerdily laid out on my floor:
That funky panorama Fuji paper ought to be fun. Mistubishi Photographic paper Gekko? Supposedly that stuff goes for some High Prices on yahoo auctions in Japan. A sharp eye will notice the now several-years out of date Fujifilm logos on the green boxes and even the average eye ought to be able to see how most of the envelopes have aged just a bit.
Closer inspection reveals. . . .?
A Sakuraya price tag! I haven’t been in a Sakuraya since 2001 or 2002. What year did they close for good? I remember three in Shinjuku… the one near Studio Alta, the other one that is now the Uniqlo near the west exit, and another smaller one near Lucky Camera and that huge furniture store on the east side of the station. Wasn’t there one in Shibuya too? Methinks I even had their point card back in the day…
Despite the suggestions in Japanese and English on each of these envelopes and boxes, it is most likely that this paper was not stored in a cool and dry place. How this will effect (affect?) the prints I have no idea but it certainly will be worth mixing up a batch of chemistry to enjoy seeing what the results will be.
How can you do a Friday night?
This is how I did a (last) Friday night.
First stop by Roonee and take is some unexpectedly fine monochromatic fiber based photographs by Yasuo Habuta:
After leaving Roonee take a shortcut down a narrow street with some steps and in about 3 minutes end up at the greatest little photo gallery (Totem Pole) in Tokyo.
Emi Fukuyama currently has another killer show up here until the 23rd. More monochrome fiber prints.
Next you can stop in at one of the Freshness Burgers on Shinjuku-dori (why they got 2 within 5 blocks of each other and my part of Chiba has none??) for a Beans Burger. It is my favorite of the vegetable burgers at this chain.
Then after you’ve paid over 800 yen for a bean burger, small fries, and a tiny glass of 7-up, get on over to 3rd District Gallery before they close.
Holy crap.
It’s even better than I had imagined, or was told. I knew Yamauchi is terribly underrated when it comes to Japanese Photography- but what I didn’t realize until this show is that he is most likely the greatest street photographer in Tokyo today. (when it comes to Kansai Mr. Abe has Osaka on lockdown)
So after three tight shows composed of actual Darkroom Printed Paper Photos where does a fellow head next? If you’ve got a stack of negaive files to work through at home AND figure you can skip a few meals between leaving the Yamauchi show and next payday, you hoof it on over to the Shinjuku Yodobashi Camera darkroom floor (the fifth floor in the Camera Building) for another 50 sheets of paper:
So how can you spend a Saturday?
In the darkroom making prints and rocking out to Billie Jean.
My to-myself christmas present was a lens, so it made sense to make my to-myself birthday present 350 sheets of my favorite photo paper. Luckily enough my birthday (五月三日、ゴミの日) falls in the middle of a weeklong stretch of Japanese national holidays in the first week of May. Three of those 5 days were spent in my darkroom catching up on my printing.
I’ve got things down to where I can get a decent enough print off of one or two test strips (usually 2cm x 10cm) with my set chemistry and paper. This means cranking out thirty 11×14 fiber prints in a five hour print session is possible with the right concentration and in my case, the correct mix of hardcore gangster rap, Girl Talk, and Junior Brown. In between bouts of Eminem various Winogrand-themed MP3s farmed from youtube popped up on my ipod and his MIT talk in 1974 was a fantastic bit of philosophy to take in every day I was printing.
This past burst of print production has resulted in a stack of pictures taller than a roll of film. The heft to all of this is remarkable.
I’ve still got about 30 sheets of paper left for one more print session this Saturday, but I still have another 100 or so pictures that need to get made before I can feel satisfied.
One thing I don’t plan on doing is scanning all of these to upload them to the internet. I’m not interested in degrading these images to small blog-worthy jpegs, but I am interested in the difference it is to share photos of these photos. It is more interesting for these to be prints instead of data, although in this case the data is of the prints and not the images.
More “scans” from the weekend. Putting stuff here and then coming across it online between the time of posting and the next darkroom session helps with the decision of what to print since it gives me time to get used to the pictures in a round-a-bout sort of way. (how’s that for a single sentence.)
Working out in the streets in winter doesn’t make for very interesting images when how everyone is bundled up in jackets and masks.
I’m fairly certain that only the first of these will end up as a standard 11×14 print.