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Exodus

Posted on August 20, 2020August 23, 2020 by basili

A journey of a thousand miles, as it’s long been said, begins with a single step. These days long journeys are, for most people, no more than memories, or dreams. The world, for most of us, has become smaller. I’ve been lucky to be able to travel to just about everywhere my desire took me throughout my life without restriction. I would never have imagined that this would change. But here we are. Borders have been shuttered all around the world. Proverbial thousand mile journeys can be undertaken; actual ones, not so readily these days.

Here in Tokyo, much smaller journeys remain a ritual part of daily life: the never-ending commutes that Tokyoites make on the city’s railway arteries continue. The streams of trains and seemingly countless stations define the dynamism of this city. It can be stimulating; it can be exhausting. The longer you live it, the better you understand the tendency for commuters to doze off on trains. There comes a time when you look forward to escaping it. And so, I’m soon to embark on a journey of almost exactly a thousand miles as I pack up and head to the coastal regions of Okinawa.

Stasis

Posted on July 24, 2020August 23, 2020 by basili

This is where we are.

Makeshift job interviews conducted on a balcony; supermarket cashiers wrapped in acrylic curtains; patrons separated by plexiglass screens at bars and restaurants; store clerks taking temperature readings at boutique entrances; closed borders; everywhere face masks and bottles of sanitiser. The new normal. A twisted daily lottery of grim statistics. An underlying, persistent fear of infection and anxiety of an uncertain future. A world simulating bleak sci-fi scenarios.

This is where we are.

It’s easy to get swept up in the gloom, to feel stuck, isolated. We connect to the internet for news, for companionship, for shopping, for entertainment. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos add to their already outrageous fortunes. On our digital screens we see the world is in pain, is breaking: the environment, animal species, human populations, national economies around the globe all suffering. Politics is in a dark place with the rise of fascist tendencies, the death of humanitarianism and ethical imperatives.

This is where we are.

Life feels smaller somehow, the outside world seems rendered with a muted color palette. I wonder if this is the kind of feeling experienced by people living through war. You become fatalistic. Push down the fear and anxiety. Adjust to the new ways of doing things. Lose yourself where you can: in work, in activism, in hobbies, in passion projects, in creative pursuits, in destructive pursuits, in mindless pursuits. You grit your teeth and make the best of a bad situation; keep calm and carry on, as it were.

Traces

Posted on July 1, 2020July 2, 2020 by basili

A stroll down Hachiman Dori, past Piotr Kowalski’s vibrant Sunflower sculpture and into the neighboring Tenoha Daikanyama courtyard, to relax with a coffee among leafy trees and shrubs. A good coffee shop is an elusive thing, a perfect blend of well-made coffee and atmosphere.

This corner cafe fit the bill nicely, but just like that, it’s gone — together with the courtyard, restaurant, gift shop and co-working office space that formed the Tenoha complex. The entire site has disappeared, bulldozed to the ground, like so many places in Tokyo, to make way for a newer, bigger, more profitable construction.

At times when I look back through my archives, look through photos taken in Tokyo over the years, I often see places that I captured, stores and restaurants I frequented, and realize they no longer exist. Of these places there are no traces left. In time even their memories have faded. In the end there are only photographs. The places below that I’ve recently documented do still exist, but I wonder for how long?

Daido ongoing

Posted on June 25, 2020June 30, 2020 by basili

Daido Moriyama, 森山大道, is the ultimate street photographer. He’s been walking the streets of Tokyo with one compact camera or another in his hand for going on sixty years, snapping fragments of the city and its inhabitants from his singular perspective, both capturing and helping to shape the city’s distinctive character.

A nicely curated exhibiton of Moriyama’s mostly recent work is currently showing at the TOP Museum in Ebisu. The images in Moriyama Daido’s Tokyo: ongoing are spread over three rooms. Greeting the visitor in the first space is a large gelatin silver print of the photographer’s iconic Stray Dog, Misawa, placed by a Warhol-esque silk-screened mosaic of cloned lips, half monochrome, half in color, covering one wall like pop art wallpaper. Opposite is a series of striking oversized inky black, high contrast silk-screened portraits, grainy, some resembling pointilist artworks. The larger adjoining central space contains the bulk of the works and also groups images into tiled mosaics, three photos high, monochrome on one side of the room, color on the other. Close up images of hair, legs and signs are mixed in with frames of alleys, pedestrian crossings and other streetscapes. Here and there is the occasional portrait or reflected self-portrait. The effect of juxtaposing so many images is to give a sense of the city’s at times overwhelming kinetic energy, especially in the color photos, many of them quite lurid. A pair of square glass-topped tables frame monochrome collages, formed by layering and overlapping prints at seemingly random angles, hiding and revealing elements of each. Given the visual complexity on show in this space, there’s plenty to take in, so a small third space serves as a kind of decompression chamber. It’s cloistered, hidden by heavy curtains, and features a few black and white frames from Moriyama’s abstract mesh tights series, each incandescent with the backlighting of the digital screen it is displayed on. The atmosphere here is intimate, contemplative, personal, and despite the eroticism of the photos, is more church confessional than peep show.

A good exhibition is always invigorating. In photography, as in all creative pursuits, it’s sometimes hard to maintain momentum. Moriyama himself bid farewell to photography in 1972 with his book shashin yo sayonara. His hiatus was fortunately short lived and he has since applied himself to his art: Moriyama has one hundred and fifty or so books to his name, has been exhibited dozens of times around the world and has received a handful of prestigious photography awards — and he’s still out on the streets with his camera almost every day. The 81 year old photographer is an inspiration.

Note: photography is not allowed in this exhibition; the photo above was taken in 2016 at another Moriyama exhibition in Tokyo.

Rainy day blues

Posted on June 2, 2020June 2, 2020 by basili

Tokyo, where the rainy season is fast approaching, where misty grey days will damp the air and violent deluges will blot out darkened skies. Just now it seems a bleak metaphor: the heavens crying for a world out of whack, weeping for Britain and Brazil and the idea that was America.

Tokyo, where the restrictions of lockdown lite have been officially lifted, where the department stores have raised their shutters, high school students have once again donned their uniforms and life on the sidewalks has become more animated. And yet…

Tokyo, where in a reverie I recall a hypnotic film I saw many years ago. Almost forty years old, Koyaanisqatsi seems made for our times. Pairing time-lapse and slow motion visual techniques with the pulsating music of Philip Glass, it attempts to convey how we’ve created a world out of balance; the Frankenstein story writ large.

Still lifes

Posted on May 1, 2020February 19, 2021 by basili

If you fall down the various rabbit holes of online photography forums, you‘re likely to get ulcers or develop anger management issues. Many forum contributors have very strict rules and definitions about the rights and wrongs of photography and they type out their resolute assertions in the endlessly scrollable online debates. But the thing is, aside from photojournalism and other documentary practices that strive to present truth, there are no rules in photography. It’s an art, a medium, a process whose countless practitioners show that it can be explored with all manner of tools and pushed any which way. And if you work at it, you may just end up with something worthwhile.

Ok, but my photography doesn’t always fit into neat, coherent projects, so maybe I need to roll freeform around this world, unfettered, able to photograph whatever and whenever: the sky, my feet, the coffee in my cup, the flowers I just noticed, my friends and lovers, and, because it’s all my life, surely it will make sense? Perhaps. Sometimes that works, sometimes it’s indulgent, but really it’s your choice, because you are also free to not make ‘sense’.
…
And hopefully I will carry on, and develop it, because it is worthwhile. Carry on because it matters when other things don’t seem to matter so much: the money job, the editorial assignment, the fashion shoot. Then one day it will be complete enough to believe it is finished. Made. Existing. Done. And in its own way: a contribution, and all that effort and frustration and time and money will fall away. It was worth it, because it is something real, that didn’t exist before you made it exist: a sentient work of art and power and sensitivity, that speaks of this world and your fellow human beings place within it. Isn’t that beautiful?

British photographer Paul Graham penned these thoughts for the graduating students of the Yale (MFA) Photography program in 2009, in a brief but illuminating essay, Photography is Easy, Photography is Difficult.

These pictures: more digital polaroid explorations; local street signage and other found graphic elements framed to create still life compositions; character studies of a neighborhood.

In the weeks since, my explorations have found a focus and taken shape and I’ve been able to develop a photographic series, one I expect will be organic and episodic in nature as it evolves.

Views from the ‘hood

Posted on April 21, 2020February 19, 2021 by basili

And the one nice thing about photography is it teaches you to look.

So said Saul Leiter In Tomas Leach’s 2012 film on the photographer In No Great Hurry. He also said in interview that he thought that mysterious things happen in familiar places, that there was no need to run to the other end of the world to create his art.

Saul Leiter lived in the same apartment building on 10th Street in New York’s Lower East Side — later to become the East Village — for some sixty years, and true to his word, much of his extensive body of work was created within walking distance of his apartment.

I haven’t lived anyplace anywhere near that long, yet it’s surprisingly quick and easy to turn a blind eye to our most familiar surroundings, to become desensitized to our immediate environment, to see through things. Losing mobility, even in Tokyo’s lockdown lite situation, for all its inconveniences has a way of restoring one’s vision. Everything old may not be new again, but one develops a new appreciation of the old neighborhood streets, sees the effect of changing weather on its vistas, notices picturesque elements in the landscape.

These images resulted from a number of recent walks around the neighborhood, visiting the supermarket, stretching my limbs and — despite being masked up and just a little bit anxious — getting some air and respite from being cooped up inside, and with my camera, looking at the neighborhood with fresh eyes.

Sofa sessions

Posted on April 14, 2020April 13, 2020 by basili

Looking out windows and looking into screens, engaging with the world vicariously from our sofas. This is where we are, but the internet has proven itself a wonderful resource during these times when most of us find ourselves in some kind of enforced isolation. Among other things, I’ve been dipping into a series of videotaped interviews with photographers.

Martin Parr — renowned British photographer, prodigious producer and collector of photobooks, member and former president of Magnum Photos — sits down with other photographers at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, for some casual chats focused on his guests’ work and careers.

The conversations on his sofa — the sofa sessions — are relaxed and make for easy viewing, Parr’s encyclopedic knowledge of the medium and insight into his guests’ work ensuring he deftly guides the discussions throughout the twenty or so minutes allotted to each session. The filmed chats are engaging, but for better context and understanding I would like to see some photos from the projects, books or exhibitions that are being discussed.

Still, it’s good to have another addition to the recorded history of photography. Parr is however approaching this project at a leisurely pace; he’s only filmed a dozen sessions since the first one a year ago. Most recently, this chat earlier this month with Alec Soth.

Sofa Sessions: Conversations with Martin Parr – Alec Soth Copyright The Martin Parr Foundation 2020

Confinement

Posted on April 6, 2020February 19, 2021 by basili

The cool thing about photography on the streets is that it’s a jazz improvisation. The photographer sets out on a visual exploration of a chosen environment, has some ideas – perhaps about how to use the light or perspective and framing choices – but doesn’t know where this exploration will lead. The photographs that are made are the result of an interplay between the photographer, the camera, the surrounding elements and some serendipity. When all the right notes are hit and it all comes together, the experience and the resulting photos are magical.

This is how I like to approach photographing on the streets and other public spaces, reacting to and working with the changing scenes that unfold before me, aiming for a little magic.

But there’s another approach: to focus on a single scene, treat it as a studio of sorts, explore its visual possibilities through space and time. A few years ago, the photographer and writer Teju Cole, on his Instagram feed, published a series of frames of a bus stop (somewhere in Europe if I remember rightly). Each day he added a photo taken from a new angle or distance, showing a facade of the structure or else a small detail. Banal as the subject was, the images as a series worked as a kind of mediation on that particular structure and on seeing in general.

These photos were taken during three visits to Tokyo’s Shibuya station, in a section of the concourse connecting the Shibuya Mark City complex. The colorful mural visible in some of the photos is Taro Okamoto’s 1969 masterpiece Myth of Tomorrow.

This focused, more studied approach – perhaps a necessity in these times of confinement – can also yield interesting results in a single session and a more confined space, say a kitchen.

Impermanence

Posted on March 28, 2020September 15, 2020 by basili

Transience and impermanence are hallmarks of life, from the changing elements of the seasons to the changing seasons of our own lives. Nothing lasts forever; it all fades away. This is the pathos of life, the mono no aware.

物の哀れ

Mono-no aware: the ephemeral nature of beauty – the quietly elated, bittersweet feeling of having been witness to the dazzling circus of life – knowing that none of it can last. It’s basically about being both saddened and appreciative of transience – and also about the relationship between life and death. In Japan, there are four very distinct seasons, and you really become aware of life and mortality and transience. You become aware of how significant those moments are.
— David Buchler / Fiona Macdonald

The most celebrated example of a natural phenomenon rich in mono no aware is the spectacle of cherry blossoms.
— The Book of Life