_valerian

It is awesome.

White Photo Boxes

These are similar to, but are not as nice looking, nor as durable as Black Photo Boxes. You get to assemble them on your own, and this is partly why they are about a third of the price of a similar sized Black Box.

Pre-Assembly:

Two minutes and a nasty paper cut later:

Using the same combination of physics (gravity) and materials (6 slabs of cardboard) as Black Photo Boxes, White Photo Boxes can also do the following:

1. Hold your photographs.

2. Open (you can put in or take out your pictures after doing this step).

3. Close (you can’t take out your pictures when it is closed).

4. Look nicer than the boxes photo paper comes in. (But not as snazzy as the Black ones)

However, White Photo Boxes also:

5. have a hinged pull-down part for easy print removal:

The Yodobashi-honten Camera building in Shinjuku has these for sale in 8×10, 10×12, 11×14, and 16×20 sizes. I’d wager that they could hold about 100 prints each. The smallest are about 1000 yen and I think the 16×20 is about 2000. The 10×12 box above was 1300 yen.
The acid-free peace of mind of Well Stored Pictures is worth the cost.

Pre-assembled these are very large sheets of cardboard, so upon purchase you’ll get a huge flat bag to take them awkwardly home on the train in.

Konica Big Mini: an entirely unnecessary and overly rambling account of an underrated camera.

The greatest thing about the Big Mini is it’s simplicity. You put the film in, it advances itself, then you point it at what you want a picture of and push the button. You will get a picture that might be better than you deserve. The lens is set at 35mm and if you want to zoom you lean forward or move your feet. It is as much camera as most people might ever need. So is an Olympus Trip 35, as you will discover after reading this interesting article.

Both my camera (on top, with the Nyaraki strap) and Ikue’s camera (with the black cat) are BM-301s, made in about 1992 or ‘93.
Mine was 3000 yen at Map Camera in Shinjuku. A functioning data back lets you set the flash , but when the wires in the back door hinge are frayed (like in mine) the camera is purely automatic, which is why it was so cheap. It was technically broken then, and after almost 3 years of daily use it is certainly beat to hell now. The front cover popped off after meeting the floor of a karaoke pub on Hachijyo Island in 2006, but it was something some black tape could fix. Despite all sorts of abuse, nothing but a dead battery has ever stopped it from making as good of photographs as I can take.

This little point and shoot works as a foil to my Leicas and to the concept that a photograph has added intrinsic value based on how much actual technical control the photographer had in making it. Lack of control is precisely what makes it interesting.

I’d argue that too many choices will hinder a photographer by allowing someone to become more concerned about what they think they could (or should) do instead of being focused on just what they readily can do, which is to shoot. How limiting and frustrating and boring it must be to sift through menus and manhandle one of those enormous DLSRs with 36 point 3D multifaceted eye controlled auto-focus, shooting 9 Frames Per Second through some flower-hooded 18-400mm f2.8 zoom shot in RAW or Medium Well or whatever and then going home to sit there in front of a screen and scroll through hundreds of images and burn back-up DVD copies of all those pictures you are never going to print? (Hah- as opposed to shooting two thousand rolls of film and exhibiting only 60 pictures total in two shows in 3 years?) Or maybe it’s that a DSLR is just another way to go about it and if you enjoy it, then by all means, keep on shooting.

If you were wondering, you can buy about 62 used Big Minis (at 8000 yen apiece) for the cost of one new Nikon D3. But if you wait a few years that figure might balance out similar to the current Big Mini Ratio (BMR is the economic term) of a single used Nikon D1 (circa 1999) which has a BMR of 3 to 1, and a few more megapixels than my mobile phone.

Anyways as a Christmas present to myself I picked up a second Konica Big Mini at Camera Box in Shinjuku last week. This one is a BM-201 and besides being silver, it also has a fully functional data-back which is going to be used to record the date. Also, it lets me know how many shots are left on a roll, information my previous one kept as a mute secret.
I don’t like how it underexposes Fuji Presto, so it is strictly a color film camera. Most color I’ve shot over the past few years has been with a Big Mini. The prints are all put into albums and a few get scanned and put into my ongoing diary.

While we are on the topic of film point and shoots, what about the Olympus Miu?

Here is my answer: The Miu (at the right) is a sharp little camera, with a lens that for color portraits seems cold and clinical when compared to prints from a Big Mini. (That is an entirely lame thing to say-Eds)
Color portraits is what the (my) Big Mini excels at. All of these and these were taken with my Big Mini. It’s not that there is some technical specification that a small point and shoot has that makes it good for portraits. It cannot create a narrow depth of field to “separate the subject from distracting backgrounds” and it doesn’t even have integrated facial recognition technology or that creepy programing that recognizes smiles. However it does have a strange little character about itself that apparently is disarming. Taped up, it does not look threatening in the least and I’ve had little trouble getting in people’s faces with it. The less “real” it looks, the better I guess. It is the perfect conversation camera, small and innocuous, cute and unobjectionable.
Plus, when shooting Japanese photo-literate people, you have the added bonus of hearing “Oh- just like Hiromix (or Araki)” when you pull it out of your camera bag.

If you are in the market for a little film an point and shoot, the Big Mini is (in Japan) easy to find, and far cheaper than a Ricoh GR, Minolta TC-1, Fuji Klasse, or Contax T3.

Elsewhere:

– The Big Mini is featured on this blog with a very similar photo (in terms of camera positioning) to the picture above. Araki is referenced.

– Konica is a good resource for more information. You can see the first Big Mini and the final Big Mini F

– Another picture of a BM-301 and some more information in Japanese.

Yesterday I had a chance to go to Syabi for the afternoon. Each Fall, Canon sponsors a massive photographic exhibition that is composed of entries to their contest, called the New Cosmos of Photography. Each year more people submit portfolios/handmade books to Canon. For 2006 1,505 people did. This year, 1,277. Looking through the catalogue, it seems that most people submit portfolios consisting of anywhere from 7 to 850 individual photographs. I’d guess that a number between 40 to 100 would be the average though. If you are wondering what 6 judges going through all that work looks like, click on this.
This year’s exhibition was held in the basement of the museum, which allowed for a different kind of layout than I had seen before. I honestly don’t have much to say about the six winners’ work. Every year Araki nominates a similar (to his) kind of pictures and Mr. Moriyama always goes with a porfolio laden with black and white grit. Of the six, Daisuke Nakashima’s “Soshitsu-metronome” stood out as a body of photographs with heart. On the other hand, I really could not get with Yuuki Aoyama’s blurry/narrow focal plane schoolgirl leg pictures.

However– the winners’ photography is not the reason to go to this show every year. In addition to the 6 major porfolios, you are able to get to peruse through 27 photobooks created by the Honorable Mention crowd. The books were the submissions to the contest and are all handmade, one of a kind creations. Each sits on it’s own shelf, with photographs from each portfolio hung on the wall over that photographer’s “station”. For me, the best work of the New Cosmos show is within these books. Granted, not all are amazing, and maybe only about half are really good. But there are a few GREAT ones that make it worth the time it takes to look. In particular I keep thinking about Sun Woo Yan’s portfolio: “Chewing Gum”. I met him earlier this year at his exhibition and the guy’s work is intense. It is one thing to play around with a camera in Kabukicho for fun, but hot-damn he is on the inside of that world and his resulting pictures are not anything anyone else could have taken. Gritty black and white is both All The Rage, and a technique that can cover up an unfeeling eye by making things at least look dramatic, but Sun Woo’s pictures of his life are wrought with both gusto and sensitivity. This balance is not easily faked in photography.
As a side note, his was one of (at least) three other portfolios where the photographer was makin’ portraits of his girl while biblically “knowing” her.
I was also a fan of the pictures by Hiroyuki Sato, Masahiro Ito, and Tetsuomi Sukeda. Check out Sukeda’s site to see photographs of his previous solo shows.

The New Cosmos is a chance to see so many portfolios of young Japanese photographers who get it. I spend a lot of time looking at Western portfolio sites online (not on Flickr) and try to keep up with all of the interesting blogs on photography as well. I also spend a lot of time in bookstores looking through the imported foreign photography books. The prevailing mood seems to be that one needs to “tell a story” through a photograph, or really make it Of something. It’s like everything needs to be static, and “deadpan” or Overly Conceptual to be taken seriously as Art. Why is that the only way to go about it? To me, the best thing about Japanese photography is that the motives (often) rely less on trying to make some big social statement, and instead are fueled by a continuous and photographically beautiful search for self. The individual pictures are less concerned with being OF something, and instead (as they build upon another) are more about something.
Photographs, when taken purely for oneself, are born from distinct and personal experiences with the world. This is not selfish. It is a way of dealing with one’s existence. I don’t see why someone might want to dismiss this kind of work on grounds that it is frivolous and shallow simply because strongly deals with the life of the photographer who made it. This kind of photography has a strength that is rooted in the joy of the immediacy of the medium.

The show is up until Nov. 11th and is FREE so if you are in Tokyo you ought to stop on by.