Japan photography treasure trove

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2011, Nov 11
Japan photography treasure trove

It’s right here: photolinks.jp.

If you have some time on your hands, and want to plumb the depths of what Japanese photography has to offer, I can’t think of a better site right now than this one. It’s kind of like a Yahoo! (circa 1996) for Japanese photography; like it says in the URL, there’s just a ton of photo links here. Clicking around the top left part of the menu will take you through the different letters of the Japanese alphabet, and from there you’re off and running.

I haven’t even dug in to this material too deeply, so please let me know in the comments if you find any good stuff.

Photolinks is also on Twitter, it’s probably not such a bad idea to click randomly on the things they’re posting.

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The photography internet in Japan

I did as you said, and I got a white area where I guessed the links should be.

This was using IceWeasel, which is almost the same as Firefox. I don’t know exactly why IceWeasel didn’t like it, but yes, a look in the source of the page shows a level of ignorance of HTML that I associate with commercial Japanese websites circa 1996; it’s a wonder that any browser manages to display it.

Then I tried it with Safari. Ah, now it worked.

Well, I saw long lists of links. The huge majority were of photographers I’d never heard of, which almost certainly says more about my ignorance than anything else. I thought of looking for several photographers I did know; most weren’t there. I then thought that perhaps I should look for the kind of photographers about whom there was some degree of “buzz”, and therefore tried Watanabe Hiroshi and Nagoshi Keisuke. Watanabe was there; the link took me to his site — as of course Google would have done. (Indeed Wikipedia would have too.) Despite having exhibitions all over the place and perhaps four books in print, Nagoshi wasn’t there. By contrast, Google has heard of him.

I wish photolinks.jp well, but I don’t see myself returning.

Posted by Ari / November 12, 2011 at 5:39 am:

@microcord considering that you noted that there were photographers you hadn’t heard of before.. wouldn’t that make it a useful resource?

Anyhow, IMO it’s a great site. Thanks for the heads up.

Posted by microcord / November 12, 2011 at 3:48 pm:

Ari, you’re entirely right. Simply, the site is designed for one kind of use, while I’d misread Dan’s introduction as describing it for another kind of use. Then it didn’t work at all in my regular browser, which didn’t put me in a good mood. Plus I hadn’t been in a good mood in the first place, what with a mild headache from smoke from an adjacent table in the restaurant I was at last night, and the knowledge that the next day (today) I’d have to go to work.

So my apologies to photolinks.jp and more so to Dan for having been a party pooper (and not for the first time either).

Posted by Dan / November 13, 2011 at 5:18 am:

IceWeasel!

What’s wrong with the HTML though? It looks perfectly fine to me. It’s a hand coded site with reasonable CSS, no ugly tables like you’d expect from WYSIWYG generated stone age Japan sites.

Posted by microcord / November 13, 2011 at 7:06 am:

Gah! Well for a start, yes, it is indeed HTML. But the DOCTYPE declaration tells the browser that it’s XHTML. Which it isn’t. And that it’s strict. Which it isn’t.

Posted by Dan / November 13, 2011 at 10:40 pm:

Haha, OK, fair enough!

Posted by Dan / November 14, 2011 at 1:05 am:

and again:

IceWeasel!

just try to get it out of your head, once it’s there.

Posted by Ari / November 14, 2011 at 3:39 am:

Searched it, pretty sweet.
Have you guys heard of Itoh Meitoku? I did a search and it only came up with one book, but it looks like good work.

Posted by microcord / November 14, 2011 at 5:54 am:

Itoh Meitoku 伊藤明徳 — just a name to me, I’m afraid. But yes, this description makes his book look good indeed. And that’s only half the good news; the other half is that his book is from the Nikkor Club, so there’ll be huge numbers of copies washing around for paltry prices. (Sure enough, Yahoo Auction has them for 800 yen upwards .)

So perhaps I should buy a copy. I’ve already bought about twenty photobooks in the last month so I suppose one more will hardly be noticed.

We can even do a stupid “guy” thing: get into a bidding war! Partly because it’s the truth, partly to get you out of my way if I decide to bid, I’ll point out that the printing quality of the older Nikkor Club books isn’t that great. Though for the price, one can hardly complain.

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