Milano: Italy’s northern city is a powerhouse; the country’s richest city is its center of design, finance, fashion and media, home to the headquarters of globally recognized names like Cassina and Pirelli, Armani and Prada, Domus and the Corriere della Sera. The historic landmarks dotted throughout the city’s center are awe-inspiring, from the imposing central train station to the Duomo cathedral that was five hundred years in the making. Contemporary Milano is equally obsessed with quality and detail, from the four levels of gastronomic goodness in Eataly, a mecca for Italian cuisine, to the stunning boutiques that line the avenues of the Galleria and sit along Via Montenapoleone and its surrounding streets, and the countless bars, cafes, pasticcerie and gelaterie that decorate the city’s streets.
Frankfurt am Main, a compact city with an ethnically diverse population, straddles the Main river in western Germany and is home both to Germany’s largest urban forest and one of the world’s busiest airports. The streets and plazas of its historical neighborhoods are picturesque tourist magnets — the outdoor tables and chairs of a cafe or bar seemingly occupying every other street corner — while its gleaming towers house the myriad banks and other institutions of Europe’s main financial hub.
Bob Dylan revisits his past through the recent release of a studio outtake of Not Dark Yet, a song from his 1997 album Time Out of Mind. The song is hauntingly beautiful, with its intimations of loss and mortality, the dream-like atmosphere of its arrangements and Dylan’s weathered voice. The video created for this release is something else, essentially a slide-show comprising dozens of photos, the most exquisite photos, revisiting America during the Twentieth Century, showing the haunting beauty of historical documentary photography at its best.
Susan Sontag summed it up perfectly in a line from her book On Photography:
Indeed, the most enduring triumph of photography has been its aptitude for discovering beauty in the humble, the inane, the decrepit. At the very least, the real has a pathos. And that pathos is—beauty.
Fitzroy, Melbourne’s first suburb, sits at the northern perimeter of its commercial heart — what locals call ‘The City’. The kilometre-and-a-half grid of streets situated on Wurundjeri land has a checkered history, transitioning through the decades from a genteel residential neighborhood of stately Victorian homes, when Fitzroy was conceived in 1839, to a working class area of boarding houses and small factories, a centre for immigrants — first from China, then Europe, later for arrivals from Vietnam and Africa, a mecca for students, artists and musicians, to its inevitable gentrification, becoming an expensive inner-city lifestyle hub; though public housing estates in the area ensure a diversity of residents, these days the area is defined by its many cafes, restaurants and bars, its art galleries and live music venues, and by the extensive vibrant street art, bold ornate tags and scrappy graffiti that adorn walls everywhere.
Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.
— Neil Gaiman
Windows themselves can be like short stories, inviting the imagination to enter other worlds and dreams and to travel to the far side of the universe.
Travel. Not too long ago it was a pedestrian experience; these last years it’s become impossible for many, less than pleasant and wrapped in the paperwork of pandemic-fueled bureaucracy for those who can. And still, even now, with travel can come moments of delight. For me, one of the small pleasures of arriving in a new destination has always been the anticipation of what lies behind the door of a new hotel room: the space and light; the furnishings and decor; the bathroom facilities. And then going to the window, perhaps looking over the balcony: sometimes delighted; at other times disappointed, but always gifted a new and different view.
The camera through history has often looked through windows, peering into rooms and also looking out. Recently I’ve been able to do a little bit of traveling, stay in a few hotel rooms, and with my camera look out their windows.
Since Japan was defeated in the Second World War the US military have maintained a presence in the country. Nowhere is this more evident than Okinawa, a prefecture that comprises less than one per cent of Japan’s land mass yet houses around seventy per cent of America’s Japanese military facilities.
It seems somewhat ironic then that this year — today, in fact — Okinawa celebrates the fiftieth anniverary of regaining its sovereignty, control of its lands transferred back to Japan in the Okinawa Reversion Agreement of 1971 — the transfer occurring on May 15, 1972. Something, it should be noted, that was achieved twenty years after the rest of the country. During that period Okinawa was practically a foreign nation: not only was the place governed by the Americans, the US dollar remained the prefecture’s official currency and locals needed a special travel permit to visit other parts of Japan.
Unsurprisingly, Okinawa has a complicated historical relationship with both the US military and Japan’s central government. The prefectural government, which feels both misunderstood and taken for granted, has a fractious relationship with both. While there’s an understanding of the strategic security benefits of the island bases and the population generally feel no antipathy to their American neighbors, who have over the decades had some impact on the islands’ culture, there are mixed feelings and resentments towards their bases given concerns about environmental damage, accidents, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, aircraft noise, crowding and crime. As for Japan, which annexed the independent Kingdom in 1879, Okinawans march to the beat of their own drum, a recent survey of residents showing that some seventy percent of people identified as Okinawan more than Japanese — something unthinkable in other parts of a country that has a unwavering sense of national identity.
Amid a sea of photography books there are few that engage with the medium in an intellectually meaningful way — critical thinkers such as John Berger, Roland Barthes or Susan Sontag with their decades-old contributions to photography are notable exceptions. A more recent addition is Geoff Dyer — a wonderful writer whom I’ve only recently discovered — whose book The Ongoing Moment (2005) is an absorbing and illuminating read.
Dyer’s extended essay is an investigation of sorts that takes the reader, via a series of vignettes and ancedotes, on a meandering tour through the history of photography, bringing to life the obsessions, irritations, grievances, squabbles, affairs and of course the work, especially the work, of many notable European and American photographers.
Dyer’s chosen subjects are introduced and linked through various tropes or motifs. The book opens for instance with thoughts on a 1916 portrait of a blind woman taken in New York by Paul Strand, moving on to explain how strongly Walker Evans was influenced by this photo before drawing in thematically relevant poetry by William Wordsworth. The topic is then expanded to include a 1911 photo of a blind beggar by Lewis Hine — who happened to be an instructor of Strand’s. Next, Dyer skips over to 1968 to look at another image of a blind man in New York, this one taken by Garry Winogrand. A little later he moves on to André Kertész, describing a number of his images, including one of a blind man taken in 1955, before summing up that photographer’s grievances thus: His vision was sharp, melodic, subtle, humane, but he was treated as though he were blind.
And so it goes, this interplay of topic, time and place repeated with such motifs as solitary figures in hats, picket fences, doors, windows, roads and fruit: oranges in particular, which become the catalyst for a trip through the origins of color photography and its practitioners.
The Ongoing Moment is exhaustively researched — a quick look at the extensive end notes and bibliography tell us as much — but this thoroughly enjoyable book is worlds away from any dry academic text.
The sakura trees in Tokyo are once again enjoying their time in the sun, their delicate blossoms marking yet another year. Amid the city’s cold brutalist landscape, those pale pastel blossoms — both joyous and wistful, beautiful yet ephemeral, much like life itself — transform their surroundings like the brush strokes of a master painter bring a canvas to life; soothe us like the sweetest caresses of a loving hand; lift our spirits like the brightest of rose-colored glasses.
Home. Melbourne, Sydney, Tokyo, Osaka, Okinawa, for a few brief moments the Greek island of my ancestors, all have been and are in some sense home. Most recently, my base has been Melbourne, my original home, the city often rated the world’s most liveable. At certain times of the year it more than lives up to its reputation. When the weather is fine, the city’s glorious outdoor spaces, a kaleidoscope of greens, are pockets of paradise, and eateries across town, both big and small, serve up meals and drinks whose serious quality is tempered with a typically casual professionalism. The city’s streets provide a feast of visual stimuli. In Melbourne these last months I’ve been busy, but have found time to savor both the outdoor oases and the eateries. I’ve also managed to enjoy Melbourne’s streets and to make a series of photos of the city that has become the latest addition to my Wallpaper gallery.
With the dawn of a new year, I’ve added this blog to my site as a place for more spontaneous publishing: a place for phone snapshots and photos that don’t fit into more considered long-term projects, for photographic items of interest and interesting quotes, for unformed ideas and brief musings.
I wrote those words on this site in my very first post, Hello, two years ago to the day. Today’s post is the hundredth, a small personal milestone.
Life, it comes at you fast, as they say. The last two years have, for the most part, been truly awful: unsettling for so many people, filled with worry and stress, illness and pain, loss and grief. Two years ago, who could have known? The calendar says we’re starting a brand new slate today. Another year of history waiting to unfold, memories waiting to be made, and posts waiting to be written. Thus far, publishing my snapshots has been a creative release and scrolling through the last two years of posts has helped me revisit my past, the earlier ones especially triggering forgotten memories of a world that no longer appears to exist. It seems appropriate to keep adding to this blog, for in the words of Joan Didion, who left us only days ago:
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
Photography is by its nature a medium of record, framing and preserving fragments of the world around us: from personal milestones and historically significant events to this morning’s coffee and our latest sneakers.
Photography is also literally writing with light and there are photographers that are concerned more with the mood and expressiveness of their images than with any documentary aspects. Many of the lyrical images of photographic artists such as Rinko Kawauchi, Narelle Autio and Laura El-Tantawy verge on the abstract: luminous poems more than lucid documents. Sometimes it really is simply about capturing the beauty and intensity of the light.
8:57am Chatan Okinawa Waiting for the shuttle bus to Naha Airport.
2:44pm Haneda Airport Tokyo Arrived in Tokyo and caught another shuttle bus to Narita Airport.
4:04pm Narita Airport Chiba Waiting for yet another shuttle to take us to our airport hotel.
5:46pm Narita City Chiba After checking in at the hotel, headed to Narita station for some dinner.
8:45am Narita Airport Chiba Back at an all but deserted terminal to check-in for our international flight.
11:22am Narita Airport Chiba A handful of passengers get ready to board the plane. In all there are seven passengers and seven flight crew.
The bureaucracy and preparation for a trip during these times of reinforced international borders is far from a pleasant experience. Travel in times like this is best avoided. Sometimes, it can’t be. And here we are.
One of the benefits of updating my phone last year was getting an extra camera — well, two actually, but I never use the wide-angle camera; too much distortion for my liking. The so-called ‘telephoto’ though, with its 52mm equivalent view has been a lovely and often-used addition to the standard 26mm equivalent lens on the iPhone 12 Pro, which can often be a little wider than I prefer. This year’s new iPhone Pro models naturally have some camera and lens improvements; they now also have added macro photography capability. It could be tempting to update my phone for this feature, but the 52mm lens has been replaced on both Pro models with a longer, less versatile 77mm equivalent lens. Fortunately I can have my cake and eat it, as they say. Thanks to some clever engineering from the team at Lux, a recent Halide camera app update has given my iPhone — and other recent models — a similar macro capability, and I now have three very capable cameras in my pocket. And mixing it up is always good for one’s creativity.
Photos captured with Halide camera using macro mode on an iPhone 12 Pro.
The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard’s philosophical meditation on architecture, concerns itself with memories, day-dreams, poetry, imagination; all tied to the spaces that we inhabit and experience, particularly the home. A photographer’s eye is attuned to these perceptions; it also regards the play of light, the juxtaposition of shapes, the interplay of lines and the presence of objects. And its gaze looks beyond the home to all spaces we inhabit and experience, inside and out.
The beach and the sights and sounds of summer. Swimwear: vibrant daubs of color on the sun-bleached sands. Umbrellas and beach tents scattered throughout. In the water, gorgeous inflatables: rings and tubes, seats and animals. Splashes and squeals of joy. Bursts of laughter and animated voices. Music drifting from a beachside bar and the muffled roar of jet skis offshore. Not this beach. Not this summer. Not this officially decreed state of emergency.
There was a time when I loved airports; they promised excitement. I doubt they were ever exciting in themselves but for a young traveler they were portals to lands unknown and served up morsels of exotica.
Things have changed: McDonalds and Starbucks, self check-in and baggage procedures, heightened security screenings and health monitoring. Terminals nowadays are about as exotic as bus stations. Navigating them — for those that can — is a necessary chore. Few that I’ve visited have left an impression. Tokyo International Airport is one.
Haneda Airport, as it’s more commonly called, is a far more pleasant place than Narita, the city’s main gateway. For one thing it’s in the city, sitting on reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay, with convenient train, bus and monorail access. Even taxis to certain parts of the city are affordable — compared with a Narita–Shinjuku fare of around USD240.
Opened in 1931, Haneda served as Tokyo’s airport until 1978, when the newly constructed Narita became the city’s main international gateway, relegating Haneda to domestic duties. However, in 2010 a third terminal opened at Haneda, dedicated to international flights; since then both airports share the load.
Aside from its proximity to town, I like Haneda for its six-level shopping mall with restaurants that are a cut above the usual airport eateries. Then there are the three rooftop observation decks, that of Terminal 2 offering particularly good views of the runway action and the city’s skyline beyond. The stylish Japanese food court and Isetan cafe that service the departure gate lounge at Terminal 1 are a treat, and the spotless Tokyo Monorail and Keikyu line basement train stations couldn’t be more conveniently located. All of this is complemented by the polite, efficient service the Japanese are renowned for. It’s unlikely to win any architectural prizes, but Haneda is about as good as a modern airport gets.
Tokyo. Summer. Covid waves. The Olympics. Obon. This strange brew gives the city a bittersweet flavor. Oppressive summer days are tempered by unexpected tropic-like rain storms or punctuated by days of drizzle. Police foot patrols and mobile holding cells await non-existent law-breakers. Games volunteers, flecks in the landscape in their co-ordinated synthetic uniforms. International Olympic extras hover in hotel lobbies. Non-socially-distanced lines of residents snake around entrances to vaccine centers. Trains and stations are crowded, but not in the way Tokyoites interpret the word. Restaurants close their kitchens early, yet touts on the streets spruik for late-night establishments. Delivery men and Uber Eats cyclists dash about the streets. Repeated announcements about anti-virus precautions and the incessant whirring of cicadas add eerie layers to the city’s soundtrack. Offices are closed, their businesses conducted remotely, but many more are not. Shops of all sizes have closed their doors for good; others have a thriving trade. And everywhere there are hand sanitisers, thermal imaging cameras and thermometers. And masks, and masks, and masks. In August during a resurgent pandemic, the city hosting an Olympiad, Tokyo’s contradictions are ever more heightened, the place seems ever more surreal.
Taste the Feeling. It’s the real thing. Things go better with Coke. Coke is It! These and dozens of other slogans have saturated the media through the decades to help sell the billions upon billions of bottles and cans, glasses and cups of the sugary carbonated cola drink that have been consumed since it was first developed as a tonic in 1886.
I’m not much of a Coke drinker, but walking around town the other day I kept noticing Coca-Cola delivery trucks so I started taking photos of them. Thinking about it, it’s no great surprise; there are Coke vending machines on just about every corner and of course Coke is sold in all the convenience stores — and there’s practically one of those on every corner too. Not to mention the restaurants and cafes that need restocking.
Coke is pervasive. It’s inescapable. I hadn’t noticed them before, but the delivery trucks brought to mind a recent story concerning Christiano Ronaldo, the very influential, very health conscious football superstar who very intentionally moved a couple of strategically placed promotional Coke bottles during a televised press conference, and made a point of promoting agua — water — instead. While it’s been convincingly argued that his actions weren’t responsible for Coca-Cola’s stock value simultaneously dropping $4 billion, it’s a fascinating example of the modern media and marketing dynamics that are worlds away from Coke’s catchy slogans.
The urban landscape, especially in a city like Tokyo, is a wonderland of architectural delights. Added to the scenery are temporary structures that pop up for reasons creative, practical or more often commercial. These few were recently captured in passing.
Sou Fujimoto’s Cloud Pavillion — a place for everyone — one of two identical art installations in the city, adds a surreal touch to Yoyogi Park. A temporary police booth adorned with an image of Pipo-kun, the force’s premier mascot, is set up near Harajuku Station to deal with visitors’ enquiries during the Olympic Games. On the site of the old Subaru Building in Shinjuku sits a seasonal beer garden in imitation of Germany’s Oktoberfest venues. Also in Shinjuku, under the expansive glass roof of the Sumitomo Building plaza, a monstrous inflatable starfish accompanies a massive video display looping a movie trailer for the just-released The Suicide Squad.
Visually arresting as these temporary installations are they are casualties of the ongoing pandemic; they are not getting the kind of attention they anticipated.
August. Daytime temperatures in the city routinely reach the mid to high thirties. Outside, heat radiates from pavements, buildings, car engines and the exhausts from air conditioning units; it feels hotter still. Outside the air is heavy and it seems you could melt. Unsurprisingly people seek refuge. Seek shade. Head inside, to shopping malls, department stores, indoor plazas, covered passageways. Inside, where the sun is blocked and those heat-expelling air conditioning units work their magic to chill the air, where one can recover a sense of equilibrium.
In 2014, I published Tokyo Umbrellas as a digital photo book. Though I had previous experience in book and magazine publishing, this was an experiment: my first book of photography. The book was the finishing touch on a project I’d been working on for a couple of years, framing it, giving a defining form and end to the project. In August of that year I put the book out there in PDF form — literally giving it away — and moved on.
In early 2021, while sorting through my files for my print archive, I came across Tokyo Umbrellas and, looking through it, realized it wasn’t all that good; there were good photos, and the basic concept of umbrellas shown used in the rain and sun worked well, but the book was — for want of a better word — bloated. Too many pages, too many images. With the benefit of hindsight and the experience accrued in the interim it was fairly easy to spot flaws in the work.
A benefit of digital books is that making changes is comparatively painless. So I took some time to rework my book.
Tokyo Umbrellas has now been re-edited and redesigned. It is now leaner, comprising a more focused 42 pages that feature 33 images. Less, as it’s often said, is more. This new second edition replaces the original book. Click the video below to flick through its pages. For more information and to view and download the digital book, head to the Tokyo Umbrellas page on this site.
A day after Brazil defeated Germany in the opening round of the mens’ Olympic football tournament, the opening ceremony of the Games of the Thirty-second Olympiad got under way. You’d imagine it would be the other way round but these are strange times.
I’m ambivalent about these Tokyo 2020 Olympics, but I watched the televised ceremony, watched the fireworks, drones and digital projections, the singing and dancing, speeches and pantomimes broadcast from an all but empty stadium. It was a long kaleidoscopic spectacle in need of a cohesive vision; most of it left me cold.
This week I also watched Tokyo Olympiad, Kon Ichikawa’s rightly celebrated record of Tokyo’s 1964 Summer Olympics — games that were in a way the realization of the 1940 Tokyo Olympics that were cancelled due to war.
I have no ambivalence about the 1964 Games of the Eighteenth Olympiad. They were Tokyo’s reintroduction to international society after the devastation of the Second World War. They showcased an optimistic, advanced and determined nation literally risen from ashes — Japan amassed the third highest medal tally in 1964 and grew to become the world’s second largest economy four years later — as Ichikawa’s lyrical documentary shows a simpler time. In contrast to this year’s multimedia prime-time production, the daytime crowds in the arena in 1964 saw thousands of colored balloons and live doves released to the skies. Its competitors were students, carpenters, accountants and mechanics; there were no multi-millionaire professional athletes. The cost of the 1964 games, no doubt expensive for the time, was a fraction of 21st Century Olympic budgets. Still it covered some impressive infrastructure, a legacy that can still be seen in the city today: a monorail line to the airport, overhead highways, the shinkansen bullet train, new broadcast and communications technologies, and landmarks such as Yoyogi National Gymnasium chief among them.
The 1964 games were a boon for Japan. Tokyo 2020 — the most expensive summer Olympics in history — was also meant to help revive the country, to kickstart a moribund economy, to heal the pain inflicted by the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami in 2011, to advertise the nation to the world. But no one foresaw a global pandemic. I don’t know what the benefits or legacy of these games will be but I doubt they will match those of the 1964 Olympiad.
Look at the breadth of this city, the height of its buildings, the speed of its trains and the wealth of its people. This city that was once ash, that was then wood, fields of ash and forests of wood, that is now concrete, steel and glass, mile upon mile of concrete, steel and glass.
British writer David Peace returns to Tokyo with his latest publication, the final volume of a trilogy of historical crime novels set in post-war Tokyo that I am very much looking forward to reading. In preparation, I’ve begun re-reading the two earlier novels. It’s been a long time between drinks, as they say. The first book, Toyko Year Zero was published in 2007. Occupied City followed in 2009. Fictionalized accounts of actual murders that were committed in Japan’s Shōwa era, the two books — stylistically and formally adventurous and steeped in dark hallucinatory atmospheres — focus on Tokyo in the years immediately after the country’s surrender and occupation by the American military: 1946 and 1948 respectively. The final book in the trilogy, Tokyo Redux, concerns itself with a murder committed in 1949, but also visits the city in 1964, the apex year of the Tokyo Olympics, and 1988, during the dying days of the Emperor Hirohito and the Shōwa era.
Obviously the bleak city envisioned in Peace’s trilogy is far removed from the Tokyo I know, but Tokyo Redux appeared just weeks before my own impending return to the city, to a place that continues to grapple with the demons of a pandemic that refuses to die and whose hapless leaders struggle to balance economic and public imperatives. In this atmosphere, the book should be a stimulating companion as I reacclimatize to life in Tokyo.
It’s only been ten months, yet it feels like…maybe not a lifetime, but it certainly feels like I’ve lived a life here. New routines were formed, friendships made, regular haunts frequented, notable destinations explored, local idiosyncracies discovered, seaside locales enjoyed.
It’s been a peculiar time to be here on Okinawa, the level of social and commercial activity repeatedly recalibrated under successive states of emergency, the place for the most part devoid of tourists, unusually quiet as a result. I’m heading to Tokyo next month. I’ll be there for a while — a few weeks, possibly longer — and there’s plenty to look forward to in Tokyo, but while I’m away I’ll miss life on this island with its easy rhythms and simple pleasures, its blend of cultures, warm weather and easily accessed beaches, an absence of crowds and a wealth of luxuriant open spaces. Needless to say I have plenty of photos to tide me over until my return, and memories too. So I won’t say sayonara; rather, ja ne.
One of the features of Okinawa’s subtropical climate is the sheer amount of rain that falls on the island throughout the year. While it’s manna to the local flora, and can make for a refreshing change from the plentiful dry, sun-drenched days that grace the place, at times Okinawa is unrecognizable from the idyllic travel posters that bear its name.
The tsuyu rainy season, which officially began early last month, is one of those times. The early rains delivered a fair soaking to the island but soon gave way to drier days. This week, though, tsuyu picked up where it left off with a vengeance. This week’s dark stormclouds brought heavy incessant downpours and with them came an oppressive humidity.
With the beaches closed under the current state of emergency, the only respite to be found was inside well sealed, air-cooled rooms.
Summer days, the light and heat of the sun filters that dull the senses. Glimpses of shimmering waters, softly floating cloud formations, graphic shadows and silhouettes drift across one’s consciousness, fragments floating out of a fervent dream.
Fashionable Hokkaido-based fishing brand South2 West8 recently collaborated on a Spring collection with über-streetwear label Supreme. Down at the other end of Japan, fashion is the last thing on the mind of Okinawa’s considerable fishing community. While you’ll struggle to see a branded fishing vest or wind breaker, it seems that along the shores and in the shallows everyone’s rocking a rod and reel. The appeal of fishing is global, and it’s so evidently popular here, embraced across genders and generations. It’s not a pursuit I ever got into but I can appreciate the appeal: the communion with nature, the meditative aspects of the activity or the chat and cameraderie — the National Health Service in Britain is prescribing it for patients with mental health issues. Then there’s the artistry: the crafting of flies and the deceptive simplicity of casting a rod that belies a long road to mastery.
A weekday getaway. South along Route 58, past Okinawa’s compact capital, Naha, past the airport, turn off at Tomigusuku. Just off the coast, Senagajima, a tiny isle by the southern end of the airport runways. The highlight here is Umikaji Terrace, a multi-level construction of tourist-focused shops, casual eateries, paths, stairways and terraces, facing out to sea with front seat views of arriving planes, bringing to mind whitewashed hillside villages in the Mediterranean. A little farther south is ASHIBINAA Okinawa Outlet Mall. An open-air two-level complex, with over a hundred stores, typically a magnet for visitors to the island; in covid-tainted 2021 it’s all but deserted on a weekday. Not far away, Chura Sun Beach, Okinawa’s largest, with white sands, green parkland, orange sunsets. A trip.
Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop. — Ansel Adams
Twelve is an arbitrary number — ten, fifteen, twenty, all are equally valid — but the idea is well worth considering. Now that we’re all more or less photographers, we each have many hundreds if not thousands of images sitting forgotten on our phones, tablets, laptops and other digital drives. How many of those are significant?
In my attempts to avoid my own potential black hole of digital images I tend to aggressively cull my photos, dispatching many to the trash can, labelling others with star-ratings, sorting and periodically copying what I consider the best of these images to external drives. This month, with time on my hands, I decided to take Adams’ words to heart, going back through my archives to select twelve significant photos from each of the last ten years — and to print them. Significant is a term that’s open to interpretation, which can and did vary as I applied it from photo to photo. Printing is an important last step in the process as it acts as extra filter while selecting images as you ask yourself: Do I really want to print this; is it worth printing?
Some years are easier than others; some are hard to whittle down to just twelve photos. Some projects deserve — and got — their very own dozen; some surprisingly don’t offer any notable photos at all. Then there’s the desire for the images — some of them, at least — to have a thematic or stylistic connection to each other. Still, this trip down memory lane is a satisfying exercise. It’s instructive in that I realize that maybe I haven’t been culling photos as aggressively as I thought. It’s interesting to see the progression of my photography through the years. It’s also nice as I look back to be reminded of my past; places, people, events, memories triggered by images of the many moments I decided to capture through a lens. The photos I selected all exist in various places online, many on the pages of this website, but it’s good in the end to have a small curated archive — 270 photos in all by the end of this year— of tangible printed images that I can easily reference and share with those close to me.
The photos here are my final selection — my significant crop — of photos taken in 2011. Ironically, I could only find half a dozen photos worth printing, but that year marked my return to serious photography and I was active for only the last few months of 2011. While they’re not photos I would necessarily rate today, it’s interesting that they all show photographic elements I still favor a decade later: urban landscapes, architectural textures, dramatic light, and interesting street compositions — a fascination with public space and people interacting with their environment.
Drive north along Route 58 past isolated resort hotels and villages and you eventually reach Cape Hedo, the northernmost point of Okinawa island. A visit here is a to-do list item on many tourists’ itineraries; the Point has expansive views of the South China Sea to the west and the Pacific Ocean to the east. To the south, lies the lush green hilly topography of the island. The rugged clifftop landscape has been tamed somewhat with simple tourist amenities, paths and fencing, but the natural beauty of the national park it lies within and the power of the sea below the cliffs are nonetheless revitalising.
What I want to talk about today is a certain kind of time and sequencing of images that shapes the way time is experienced within photographic books and I’m kind of calling this Real Time vs. Storytime.
Photographer Alec Soth has started a series of YouTube presentations that combine his professed love of teaching and an attempt to show books — and share his love of books — online. His approach is a digital show and tell as he takes viewers through various books from his extensive library, flicking through them to show links and similarities and variations on his chosen theme. The books in his hands are filmed from above while he’s inset as a talking head facing the camera in the corner of the screen. Not exactly exciting cinema, yet engrossing due to his knowledgeable enthusiasm for the photography he’s showing and the wonderful variety of his eclectic library. Soth humbly describes his sessions as rambling talks, and he may meander at times, but preparation goes into each session. He assembles the books he shows beforehand and has at least a sketched out narrative, so there’s a nice flow to his talks. So far, he’s given fascinating insights into photo albums, the use of images with text, and the work of William Eggleston and Kim Kardashian among others. The session linked to here, from which I’ve taken the quote above, is about expanding on Cartier-Bresson’s single decisive moment to show images that Soth describes as increments of momentary observation or stutters or flickers in time.
In a previous post I linked to a YouTube video in which Martin Parr talks to Alec Soth in one of his Sofa Sessions. Parr’s sessions are likeable enough, but in terms of the art of photography, these sessions by Alec Soth are so much better.
Real Time vs. Storytime – a talk by Alec Soth Copyright Alec Soth / Little Brown Mushroom 2021
A walk, an exploration, a camera. A record. A type of cartography.
The idea was to walk along the coast of Chatan, the town I curently call home. And, while walking, to look around and to photograph scenes that catch my eye, frames that capture the character of the place. Chatan has six coastal districts, each with its own character, that border a total of some ten kilometers of the island’s central west coast. A series of walks then, starting with the subject of this post, Kitamae, the town’s southernmost district.
The idea was that once I covered Chatan’s other five coastal districts, the combined images would become a photographic record of a place in time. The resulting photo essay — Coastal explorations — is a topographic map of sorts.
A series of walks, explorations, a camera. A record. A type of cartography.
Jazz. How do you picture it? For me, the music is visualized in the stark black and white Jazz Loft photos of jamming musicians, taken in New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Eugene Smith; or else it’s the striking duotone tinted images and funky graphics of dozens of mid-century Blue Note record sleeves also created in New York at around the same time by Reid Miles. Iconic: it’s an oft-used, often misused word, but it’s the perfect description of Miles’ work for Blue Note. As art director, he designed the covers — based on photos by Blue Note co-founder Francis Wolff, or at times his own — for hundreds of classic jazz recordings, and in doing so defined not only the look of Blue Note but also the look of jazz.
Borrowing Miles’ visual look, I decided to play with a few photos taken at some of my favorite local cafes and bars, processing them to give them a Blue Note vibe.
We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. — George Bernard Shaw
Play. A fundamental activity that kids totally get; get lost in; find focus; tap creativity; forge friendships; spark joy. Play is the realm of youth. It’s a tonic, a source of a lightness of being. For grown-ups play is more complicated. It’s often transformed into competition; it’s driven by goals; bound by rules. And tied up with money. The focus, creativity, friendships and joy are still all there, yet something — the purity, maybe, the spontaneity — is lost.
Still, it’s March. Here, at least, the winter lockdowns are over. It’s great to be outside. It’s Spring. It’s the perfect time to once again start to play.
Photography is fascinating, not only because it’s a seductive pursuit that engages with something elemental within us as it stops time and preserves memories, it also has a rich history populated with many photographers with fascinating histories of their own. There are plenty of resources available that illuminate the lives and works of those who have helped define the history of the medium.
My latest discovery is a series of beautifully written profiles of legendary photographers of the Twentieth Century. The author, Peter Silverton, has an intriguingly sparse online presence: an abandoned twitter account, a handful of years-old blog posts about books on Elvis, and details of a handful of his own published books — including one on Elvis.
Silverton has, over the last few years, also used his literary skills to craft the perceptive and engaging portraits of photographic masters such as Walker Evans — You could almost say that it’s Walker Evans’ world and we only get to look at it; Annie Leibovitz — She captures wealth and power — from the inside, with the love, admiration and wit of a favoured courtier, a court jester even; Diane Arbus — She lived the life she photographed, hanging out on Manhattan’s social fringes, having sex on the back seat of Greyhound buses with strangers; Eugene Smith — Paid to photograph Pittsburgh for three weeks, he took three years on the job, amassing 21,000 negatives and getting beaten up by the very workers he sought to heroise; and William Klein — He won his first camera, a Rolleiflex, playing poker.
The profiles of these photographers and over two dozen more who helped shape the art and craft of the medium can be read on the United Nations of Photography website.
A quarter of the land on Okinawa’s main island houses American military bases, 32 of them, and there are more than 30,000 US military personnel living on the island, many with migrated families.
This presence doesn’t go unnoticed. Where I‘m living, in Chatan, tacos are as commonplace as sushi, and there seem to be burgers and steaks on menus everywhere. The patrons at nearby restaurant tables are as likely to be American as Japanese. The local Irish pub screens American football matches and plenty of places play nothing but American rock music. At times it can feel like there’s a glitch in the matrix.
Yet it’s in the skies that the presence is most imposing, where fighter planes’ thunderous roars routinely echo above as pilots perform their aerial training drills, flights of raven colored helicopters make their rounds, blades thwacking insistently, and huge military transporters disappear with a low rumble behind tower blocks on their descent to land.
Coming of Age Day — 成人の日 seijin no hi — the annual celebration of, and by, Japanese who have reached the legal age of adulthood, marking their newly found independence and responsibilities. The second Monday in January, this year was an outlier.
Unsurprisingly, the pandemic that is playing havoc around the world with most people’s lives has managed to upend the seijinshiki celebrations, with events around the country cancelled or dramatically altered. Locally, groups gathered briefly and took photos in the village in a relatively low-key affair. I read that Yokohama was one city that did go ahead with a series of modified ceremonies for thousands of attendees, with the theme of ‘budding flowers’.
This year is also unique in that it’s the last that 20-year-old men and women in Japan will be recognized as coming of age. As of 2022, citizens who turn 18 will no longer be minors, they will be officially regarded as adults. It’s they who will be the budding flowers that don exotic furisode, evocative hakama or sharp suits, attend local government ceremonies, party into the night and celebrate their new status.
Last month Ben Sandofsky, a developer at LUX Optics, published an informative article on the new camera software enhancements that were recently released for the iPhones 12 Pro and Pro Max.
As we dug deeper into ProRAW, we realized it wasn’t just about making RAW more powerful. It’s about making RAW approachable. ProRAW could very well change how everyone shoots and edits photos, beginners and experts alike.
Sandofsky’s article is a great primer — technical yet accessible — on digital photography in general and RAW photography in particular. Not surprising, considering Lux Optics is the company behind one of the finest iPhone photography apps on the market: Halide, a manual camera that has seamlessly incorporated ProRAW technology.
As the author says early in his piece: Grab a coffee, because this is a long read.
Photos captured with Halide camera and ProRAW+ using the 52mm equivalent lens on an iPhone 12 Pro.
The child was not observing; he was at rest in the very centre of the universe, a part of things, unaware of endings and beginnings, still in unison with the primordial nature of creation, letting all light and phenomena pour through.
Peter Matthiessen, reflecting on a memory of his young son communing with nature and illustrating the Zen spirit that comes so easily to young children.
More than this, maybe the most wonderful thing about kids is that they represent the future. They have their entire lives ahead of them, each with an uncharted journey full of the dramas and joys of life to look forward to. And as a group, they will one day shape our world in their image. That’s no bad thing; the various messes we’ve created have taken us down a dark road. Last year alone was an unforgettable SOS distress signal. Our ship really does need saving. Now it’s a new year, with the latest installment of their stories — and ours — yet to be written. A new year always feels like a good place to wipe the slate clean, to take a fresh approach, tackle new challenges, rearrange priorities, make those resolutions; to look to the future and dare to be optimistic.
There’s a new world comin’, and it’s just around the bend. There’s a new world’s comin’, this one’s coming to an end. There’s a new voice callin’, you can hear it if you try. And it’s growin’ stronger, with every day that passes by. There’s a brand new mornin’, rising clear and sweet and free. There’s a new day dawnin’, that belongs to you and me.
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