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Pandemic

Posted on March 19, 2020April 5, 2020 by basili

Reading the latest developments in this unfolding drama, it seems like we’re living in some kind of prequel to Twelve Monkeys.

Deadly pandemics have wreaked havoc and taken lives in the past: the Black Death killed some 50 million people in the 14th Century; the 1918 Spanish flu possibly many more; more recently, HIV/AIDS has taken around 30 million lives. This new COVID-19 outbreak has thankfully not been anywhere near as deadly, and with optimism we can expect that with 21st Century medical technology a cure will be found before too long.

But the certanities of a few months ago have deserted us, and here we are, worrying about family and friends, and trying to live our lives as best we can in a continually shifting landscape of closed borders and mandatory quarantines. Here in Tokyo, while schools and museums have been shuttered, things don’t look all that different on the surface, but the inordinate prevalence of face masks and hand sanitizers, relatively empty train stations and carriages, dearth of tourists and mostly deserted stores belie our new reality. It’s like some kind of virtual simulation of its true self. We don’t know how bad it will get before it gets better. We don’t know when it will get better. But as they say, the darkest hour is just before the dawn. It will get better.

Soul food

Posted on March 11, 2020March 28, 2020 by basili

The urge to create. Music. Monuments. Machines. Mathematical equations and scientific theories. Poetry and literature. Art. Photography. The compulsion to give our existence meaning and to creatively express our experiences and impressions is deeply ingrained in us, evidenced as far back as 20,000 years ago in those celebrated late Palaeolithic era cave paintings created at Lascaux in south-western France.

As we hurtle toward a cold and barren cosmos, we must accept that there is no grand design. Particles are not endowed with purpose. There is no final answer hovering in the depths of space awaiting discovery. Instead, certain special collections of particles can think and feel and reflect, and within these subjective worlds they can create purpose. And so, in our quest to fathom the human condition, the only direction to look is inward. That is the noble direction to look. It is a direction that forgoes ready-made answers and turns to the highly personal journey of constructing our own meaning. It is a direction that leads to the very heart of creative expression and the source of our most resonant narratives. Science is a powerful, exquisite tool for grasping an external reality. But within that rubric, within that understanding, everything else is the human species contemplating itself, grasping what it needs to carry on, and telling a story that reverberates into the darkness, a story carved of sound and etched into silence, a story that, at its best, stirs the soul.
— Brian Greene

Human creativity is a wonderful thing. Ballast amid the chaos. I’ve chosen photography to reflect on my world, but I used to paint and draw and there was a time I used words to contemplate my feelings, experiences and impressions. Not long ago I came upon an old notebook — a diary of sorts — that was full of poems penned by a much younger me. I’ve begun to collate the analog writings into digital book form for archival purposes and in the process have rediscovered thoughts, emotions and impressions of people and places I’d long ago encountered and in time all but forgot. For instance this poem, a portrait of a woman I knew in Sydney in 1998.

And her quiet space
her wistful face
a sadness draped
over
inner grace.
Her stillness
moves
throughout the room.
Her strength
a wall
against the gloom.
Her warmth
fragrant
summer blooms.
From a quiet place
such a tender face
upon which
melancholy
leaves a subtle trace.

Fujifilm X100V

Posted on March 5, 2020September 15, 2020 by basili

Beauty, it’s said, is in the eye of the beholder. To me, Fujifilm’s X100 series of cameras is nothing if not beautiful. It’s also said that true beauty is more than skin deep. The latest iteration, the X100V is especially so.

When the original X100 camera was released in 2011, so too was a Japanese promotional film. As far as ads go, this film — less than a couple of minutes long —is a work of art. Its implied message: this is a camera for artists, for modern-day Moriyamas and Franks.

I badly wanted an X100 back then, but that beauty was flawed, and it wasn’t until the third iteration, the X100T, that I bought into the series. It served me well for a time, but the X100V has further refined the original X100 concept to achieve something remarkable. More so than any other camera, it’s a chameleon. Within its sleek compact form exist a number of cameras. It can be used in its purest analog form, with its optical viewfinder, exposure triangle and focus dials and rings to approximate the tools of Cartier-Bresson and his generation. It can be used as a modern touchscreen imaging device, the dials and buttons all but ignored. Or it can offer various blends of the two. The camera’s interactive choices are unparalleled and with a little customization it can become the camera that many different photographers want.

This blog doesn’t often touch on camera gear and I wouldn’t consider myself a gear head but I love good industrial design, and this latest version of the X100 is something far greater than the sum of its parts. As good as it looks in photographs and its specifications and design choices look on paper, it’s even better in the hand. The finishes, the ergonomics, the tolerances, the features, all perfect. It’s a highly complex technological imaging device wrapped in an elegantly simple body. It’s a seductive piece of industrial design and shooting with the X100V is nothing short of delightful. It’s quite possibly the best compact camera ever made; it is a truly beautiful camera.

On the street

Posted on February 28, 2020February 22, 2020 by basili

The photograph should be more interesting or more beautiful than what was photographed.
— Garry Winogrand

I have always loved the amateur side of photography, automatic photographs, accidental photographs with uncentered compositions, heads cut off, whatever.
— William Klein

To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place…I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.
— Elliott Erwitt

I fell in love with the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance.
— Alec Soth

Blue skies

Posted on February 21, 2020February 18, 2021 by basili

While I continue to explore the possibilities of digital polaroid photography, in a happy coincidence I read about Belgian photographer Anton Kusters‘ 2020 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize nomination. Kusters’ installation The Blue Skies Project references the Holocaust, in particular Nazi concentration camps, and was created with the help of contemporary reference books, Google Earth — and a Polaroid camera.

His use of self-processing polaroid photographs — 1078 of them to be exact — adds to the creative adaptations of the unique analog medium. More importantly, it adds a deeper dimension to his pensive, conceptual work, as the photos are apt to degrade and fade over time — much like memories of the Holocaust.

It’s a commentary on how we deal with memory. If we lock it away, it might be protected but never seen. And if we show it, it might fade and evolve into something else entirely.

I first came across Kusters’ work almost a decade ago when I saw his compelling Yakuza project. His approach to photography has since evolved from using a camera to document what interested him to expressing ideas through — as he puts it — photographic processes. The work resulting from this new approach is no less compelling and I think quite worthy of a Deutsche Börse prize.

Polaroid effects

Posted on February 5, 2020February 19, 2021 by basili

Polaroids, the original instant, shareable photography; high-tech yet lo-fi; perfect for spontaneous snapshots yet a valuable tool for professional photographers and also loved by visual artists for its creative possibilities; disposable and collectible, a fun and serious platform.

Edwin Land’s first self-developing camera appeared back in 1947 and one of the first artists to see the potential for this type of photography was the legendary photographer Ansel Adams, who soon became a consultant for the company, helping to refine the product. In the decades that followed, Polaroid cameras were used by many established artists, among them Andy Warhol, Wim Wenders, William Eggleston, Linda McCartney, Robert Mapplethorpe, Dennis Hopper and David Hockney.

Instagram, when it appeared in 2010, helped to establish the smartphone as the Polaroid camera of the digital age. With its stream of exclusively square photos, it was instant, sharable, high-tech, lo-fi, comprising shots of pet cats and cups of coffee as well as striking images with artistic merit, a platform both fun and serious.

Instagram has changed greatly in the decade since it first appeared in Apple’s App Store: there are more pet cats and artistic images than ever before, yet the original simplicity – and the fun, I think – has been lost. But there are apps, though not too many these days, that reinterpret polaroid photography for a digital medium and provide that simplicity and fun.

One of these is the InstaLab app. An alternate Android version of the app is still known by its original name, Polaroid FX, the Polaroid name licensed from the people who bought it from the company after its bankruptcy early this century. But subsequent owners have ressurected the company – both the Polaroid name and its dedication to instant analog photography – and it seems that to maintain the brand’s integrity, licencing rights are no longer being sold or renewed.

Regardless of the name, InstaLab offers a pared-down photography experience. The photos it produces have a Polaroid aesthetic and – at least in the free tier of the app – options are limited: you open the app, frame and shoot. You can then choose to change the frame, add an effect, color filter or some text, make some basic exposure or saturation adjustments, and save a low-resolution image, ready for sharing. Once saved no further editing is possible. I’d be happier with even fewer editing options but the experience very much reminds me of the early days of Instagram. The app’s appeal to me is that its limitations and low fidelity aesthetic take the preciousness out of creating photographs but also offer challenges and opportunities to create more than snapshots. This type of photography may even get me back to using Instagram.

Eternities

Posted on January 27, 2020February 20, 2020 by basili

We have but a single moment at our disposal. Let us transform that moment into eternity.
—Nikos Kazantzakis

A new year, new paths, new dreams, new visions, new photographs. Framed moments, captured, transformed.

Happy Holiday

Posted on December 15, 2019January 26, 2020 by basili

Overnight, the Halloween pumpkins and orange signs morphed into Christmas trees, tinsel, colored baubles and glittering lights. Appearing far sooner than necessary, these too will vanish throughout the city, abruptly, on the day after Christmas, replaced by more sober, traditional decorations made of bamboo, pine and straw, to see in the new year.

The new year waits on the horizon, full of promise and surprises. For now, it remains an unwritten book, something to look forward to. It can wait. December is a time to wrap up, and to decompress, reflect, rest, and play. An eventful 2019 draws to a close; so too the first year of my post-Instagram snapshots. This blog has been for the last twelve months a virtual outlet for personal musings, without the pressure, annoyances or restrictions of Instagram and its ilk. My own place to decompress, reflect, rest and play.

And as I wrap up for the year, I look forward to publishing more snapshots in the new year. Until then, happy holidays.

What am I doing?

Posted on November 25, 2019November 25, 2019 by basili

An unseasonally wintery day, wet and icy, bleak. A perfect day to escape to the warmth and stimulation of a gallery. I visited the TOP museum to look at photos by an artist I hadn’t heard of: Eiko Yamazawa.

Osaka-born Yamazawa was a creative pioneer who had a long, somewhat unusual life for a Japanese woman of her time. Born in 1899, she studied painting before traveling alone to America in her 20s, where she took up photography. Back in Japan in the 1930s she established a successful commercial photography practice specializing in portraiture.

She returned to America after the war and, influenced by mid-century modernism and abstract art, she herself started experimenting with photography as abstract art. From colorful work with echoes of Miró and Matisse to quirky still life studies and minimalist monochrome abstractions that bring to mind the suprematist art of Kazimir Malevich, Yamazawa’s photography morphed into art, her photographs’ content became color and form.

In 1960 she shut down her commercial practice to focus on her art. She traveled and studied in the US and Europe and, at an age when most people would be easing up, she continued to hone her vision through the 1970s and 80s with her ongoing What I am doing series of photographs. She worked and exhibited well into old age and died in 1995 aged 96.

It seems that artists make wonderful photographs when adopting the camera as a tool of expression. Cartier-Bresson, David Hockney, Man Ray and Andy Warhol, to name a few, have explored the boundaries of the medium. Yamazawa’s work is no less interesting ― or inspiring.

Autumn light

Posted on November 10, 2019November 23, 2019 by basili

akibare – 秋晴れ – autumn sunshine

After the scorching summer heat and the relentless typhoon rains, the mild temperatures, blue skies and gentle sunlight of autumn are like some kind of paradise. Akibare. The days are shorter yet ideal for getting out and about. If you have a camera at hand all the better; there’s a lot of beauty in the autumn light.

Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying. How to see the world as it is, yet find light within that truth.
— Pico Iyer

I’ve been wanting to read Iyer’s latest book, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells, for some months now but his is the type of lyrical, philosophical prose that requires a certain mood. The atmosphere of the season appears to reflect the tone of this book, so this seems like a good time to engage with it.