Recently, this blog has been receiving a little bit less attention than normal, as the pull of Twitter grows stronger. It’s deceptively easy to forget that some people not only read Street Level Japan, but have opinions about what’s written here! Among the different types of responses to this blog, the most satisfying might be to receive a comment that not only disagrees with a post, but shows conclusively that it’s incorrect.

This recently happened with the work of Stephen Vaughan, a British photographer about whom I wrote a couple of posts in March. Stephen was in Japan on March 11, working on a long-term project about, of all things, the possibility of a major earthquake. Based on some second-hand information, I wrote a post expressing some disappointment that he had (allegedly) been discouraged by the earthquake, and effectively stopped shooting the project. This is absolutely not the case.

In reality, Stephen traveled to areas in Iwate to photograph the damage caused by the tsunami, as well as an evacuation center. In his own words:

The work that I made in Iwate was driven by a responsibility to bear witness to what had happened. I was totally committed to recording and documenting what I saw with as much depth and clarity as I was able. I am not a photo-journalist in the classic sense (I work with large-format cameras) and there were many other photographers making those kinds of pictures. Instead, I continued to use the visual language that I had established in the project so far, in which the emphasis is on a stilled and descriptive clarity and simplicity.

Some of Stephen’s photographs from Iwate, as well as earlier photographs from this series, can be seen on his website. In my mind, it’s still too early to consider a large body of work on the earthquake, but with time, “A Catfish Sleeps” certainly has the potential to be one of the definitive photographic documents of this disaster. I just hope that the project hasn’t ended.

Update: Stephen says: “I definitely intend to go back to Iwate and Tokyo at some stage, to continue the project. I don’t yet know what form this will take but I won’t be seeking a simple resolution to what has happened.” Also, he’s kindly allowed me to post this link to a 140-page dummy version of “A Catfish Sleeps” on Issu. Definitely worth a look.

さて、マレビトスクールのおかげで今月末からインターネットについてのレクチャーシリーズができました。この間、柿島貴志さんと一緒トークイベントをしまして、今回の講座はこのトークの繋がりです。柿島さんはもすごくいい説明書きましたけど、このブログでも少し情報を広がりたい。

講座の詳しい事はこちらですが、下記ちょっとでもはマレビトスクールのテキストです。

マレビトスクールでは日本写真研究者のダン・アビーさんを講師に迎え、写真に関わる方を対象に、インターネットを活用したコミュニケーション術と、必要な英語の知識を学ぶための、全5回の連続講座を開講します。
講座内容は主に写真家の向けに企画していますが、写真家をマネジメントしてみたい方、写真家と名乗るほどではなく写真を趣味で撮っていて、もっと自分の作品を広く見てほしいと思っている方等、講座内容に興味があればどなたでもも大歓迎です。
そして英語力のレベルは特に問いません。英語によるコミュニケーションが苦手と感じている方にこそ参加して頂きたいと思っています。

• 講師　ダン・アビー
• 日時：7/23、8/6、8/27、9/10、9/24　（いずれも土曜日)　16:00-18:00
• 会場：style355 東京都渋谷区渋谷3-5-5 HAKKAビル4Ｆ http://style355.com/
• 受講料：25，000円
• 定員　15名
• 申込先　info@style355.com

講師、Dan Abbeから。
「”Hello World”　～インターネットで世界と繋がる写真家〜」

新しく開発したプログラム言語を始めて使用する際、色々な機能はさておき、ごくシンプルに「Hello World」という挨拶をアウトプットできるか確認することが、世界のソフト開発者の間で慣習となっています。
この講座の目的もこれと似ています。
まずは受講者の皆さんに現代のインターネットの様々なツールに関する、基本的な知識を身につけてもらいます。
それによってインターネットの世界で一貫性がある（怪しくない）存在として振る舞える事を目指します。

その上で「Hello World」と挨拶する以上のことにシフトしていきたと思っています。
日本の写真家が直面している問題、すなわち海外に向かって、出来るだけ簡潔な方法で自分や作品をプレゼンテーションしていく事にチャレンジします。

その上で英語の能力は確かに重要なのですが、それだけが要因ではありません。
海外においてウェブサイト、ブログ、そしてソーシャルネットワークサービスの役割を正しく理解することが、写真家自身を誤解されることなくプレゼンテーションすることに欠かせないのです。

It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve seen a really great exhibit in Tokyo, but over the next couple of months there is a slew of excellent looking shows coming up here. I’m particularly looking forward to Onaka Koji’s exhibit of “Tokyo Candy Box” – the first time he’s shown the prints of a book which came out years ago. I also can’t wait to see the exhibit of Hirokawa Taishi’s “Still Crazy,” a project (published by Korinsha in 1994) which documented all of Japan’s nuclear power plants. I’ve seen the book in real life and it’s quite stunning, much better than the poor image I’ve posted here.

Ueda Shoji, “雲のうつくしい日に.” July 1 – July 31 @ 72 Gallery, Kyobashi.

Onaka Koji, “Tokyo Candy Box.” July 8 – August 6 @ Emon Photo Gallery, Ebisu. Recommended!

Tokyo Art Book Fair a.k.a. Zine’s Mate. July 16 – 18 @ 3331 Arts Chiyoda, Yushima.

Jean-Louis Tornato, “Between II, Bad dreams.” July 18 – 31 @ Place M, Shinjuku.

Hirokawa Taishi, “Still Crazy: Nuclear Power Plans As Seen in Japanese Landscapes.” July 26 – August 11 @ Pore Pore Za, Higashi Nakano. Crazy high recommendation!!

And something to look ahead to for late summer and fall…

Hiroo Kikai, “Tokyo Portrait.” August 13 – October 2 @ Syabi, Ebisu.

Hatakeyama Naoya, “Natural Stories.” October 1 – December 4, also at Syabi.

Pierfrancesco Celada was in Japan a couple of months ago working on a long-term project about Japanese cities. This video is the result of some time he spent at Magnum’s New York office. It may tend a little towards the “sad Japan” angle, but it’s only showing a small segment of Pierfrancesco’s work. It’s sometimes hard to find sensible work made about Japan by foreign photographers, but Pierfrancesco has a good attitude about Japan, and I’m sure that the final project won’t be full of despair. He’s actually held back some of his best shots from this video.

BONUS PIERFRANCESCO CELADA VIDEO:

Here he is interviewed on the streets of Osaka by a Japanese TV show. (Skip to about 1:00) Pierfrancesco plays a very good straight man to the hosts.

John posted some nice photos of an exhibit called “The Beach,” by Reiichi Murakami. On his recommendation I went and checked it out, and I enjoyed it. I think it might be the pinnacle of Japanese amateur photography: while it goes off in a few different directions, Murakami spent 10 years putting it together, and the overall quality really comes through.

Still, a funny thing happened in the gallery, where Murakami’s show was being displayed next to some (“breathtaking” I assume) photos of nature:

No one else was looking at Murakami’s work, except for one guy…

…using the exhibition space as a place to sit down and flip through a catalog! Oh well.

In his post, John highlighted group photos. I liked Murakami’s solo portraits:

It’s just about three months on from the earthquake and tsunami, which means that the situation in Tohoku is now well outside of the Western news cycle. Things here in Tokyo also appear to be normal, but this is not a city where you can overhear people’s feelings walking down the street. Everyone knows that things won’t be the same again.

There are a couple of new things to report about the ROLLS TOHOKU project, which I still think has provided some of the best images to come out of this disaster. For one thing, there’s an entirely new set of images online, taken about two months after the tsunami hit. The site is also a bit more user-friendly now; images load much faster and you can use the arrow keys to flip through the slideshows.

Finally, there’s some exciting news for people in Europe, which is that the entire ROLLS project will be exhibited this summer at Fotografiska, Stockholm’s photography museum. The dates are July 7 – August 28. The exhibit is coordinated by Marc Feustel, who also wrote an article about ROLLS which you can read in the recent edition of Foam. or on his blog.

I’ve found myself praising Araki for bringing his own life as close to photography as possible. I don’t think Araki’s photos break too much ground aesthetically, but there’s so much of his life in his photos—maybe even his entire life! Photography is like breathing for him. Just look at how much he’s enjoying himself here:

Araki’s musical equivalent might be Jonathan Richman, who’s not trying to reinvent the wheel, but who expresses himself clearly and naturally when he’s performing. He and Araki both got started around the same time, and are still going strong today.

You may have seen the trailer for the film “How to Make a Book With Steidl,” which looks like essential viewing for people interested in photobooks. (Despite being posted on some “major” blogs, the trailer only has 10,000 views, which I guess says something about the overall popularity of the field.) I haven’t seen the movie yet, but last week I went with Tosei-sha’s Takahashi Kunihiro to watch him make Deguchi Kozue’s book “緑絽” (Ryokuro), or loosely translated, “Green Gauze.” Takahashi-san uses a couple of different printing companies, but this time a small group of us piled into his van and drove to Tokyo’s Toppan Insatsu (凸版印刷), one of the largest printing presses in Japan.

Takahashi-san has made a name for himself as a master black and white printer: he’s been doing it for 20 years, and his trademark move is blending the black and gray inks himself. For this book, he used a black ink containing 60% red and 40% blue, and a gray ink with 5 different colors that I’ve completely forgotten. I say “the black had 60% red and 40% blue,” but I’m not really sure what that means technically. Obviously the ink looks black, but I don’t know if we’re talking about blue “hues” or “pigments” here.

Deguchi’s book has 50 images on 100 pages, so the goal for this day was for her to sign off on 7 sheets, each containing 4 images. Deguchi and Takahashi would then go back the next day to finish up the rest. In the photo above, Deguchi and Takahashi are reviewing a test sheet, literally hot off the press, with the print operators. If there are any adjustments to be made, the operators will come back about 15 minutes later with the next version.

The pensive-looking Italian gentleman in the right of this photo is Pierfrancesco Celada, who was here working on a long-term project on Japanese cities. His site is worth visiting, he has a very good eye.

I didn’t realize this, but to make something appear brighter on the page, you actually add black to it. Say that you have something that’s 10% white and 90% black. The difference between the two is 80%. If you double the black, then you have 20% and 180%, which makes for a much bigger difference. There’s actually more black there, but the eye perceives it as being more white. This is all according to Takahashi-san at least, the numbers sound a bit sketchy but I think that perhaps the percentage shouldn’t be taken too literally.

The workstation on the factory floor. Here’s a video showing the printing machine whirring up and sending the sheets through. As it got going, the head of the department said to me, “man, I never get tired of watching this…”

With this machine, you can bump up the ink levels, limiting the affected area to only a certain part of the sheet. The control isn’t pixel-level, of course.

The black knobs here correspond to the levels that were set on the machine above.

These are the plates for the black and gray ink. They’re flexible, so that they can grab the ink, then roll it on to a rubber roller, which in turn rolls it on to the paper.

That’s Deguchi-san on the left, and Tomomi Matsutani on the right. Matsutani-san is a young photographer who has published a couple of interesting zines, and helped run Onaka Koji’s Gallery Kaido during 2010.

Takahashi-san looks like he’s having a miserable time here, but that’s not the case at all. The whole day was stress-free, and even though there’s a lot of downtime waiting for the revisions to come back, there was good banter back and forth between everyone to keep things interesting.

The man in his element.

Here is the full text of a Craigslist job ad posted the other day. The italics are mine:

Adult video actresses needed (Tokyo)

Amature or professional female models/actresses are needed in Tokyo area for contract film work. Foreigners or Japanese are both welcome.

Our production company prides itself on standing out from an existing, saturated market here in Tokyo.

We are influenced highly by the works of Nobuyoshi Araki.

Requirements:

– Be over the legal age of 18.

– A simple resume , (importantly) photo and valid ID are needed. (ID only at initial meeting, resume or photo can be emailed)

– Motivation and interest to be involved in this sort of work.

– Last but not least, there are no requirements apart from wanting to have fun whilst getting paid.
We hope that there is a potential for a long working relationship between both parties involved.

The area around Tokyo’s Shinjuku station might have the highest concentration of photography galleries in the city. Still, Third District Gallery might be in the most interesting spot of all, located as it is on the fourth floor of a narrow building, directly above this shop:

Haruto Hoshi (星玄人) has been holding a series of exhibitions at this gallery for a while, each titled “Street photo exhibition” #1, 2, 3 and so on. I’ve always picked up his flyers while visiting other shows, but this is the first one that I’ve seen.

As in other countries, there’s a tradition in Japan of taking a camera into the “underbelly” (or whatever) of a big city, and flashing away. Just because someone’s done it before doesn’t mean it can’t be done again, though, and there are a few reasons why I think Hoshi’s work isn’t just imitation.

In the first place, he’s not only wandering around looking for interesting people to flash. It seems clear that in some of the pictures, like the one below, he has a connection to the people he’s shooting. This makes everything more interesting; aside from drawing out a different character of the subjects, it makes me more curious about Hoshi as a person, and why he’s taking these pictures.

Aside from this, I think he’s edited his pictures well to bring out more of the scenery. It’s a simple comment but I like the aesthetic of shooting things a little bit wide; it’s nice to see more of what’s happening. The flash often picks up interesting textures, and I have the feeling that Hoshi is looking for that just as much as for interesting people.

The light intersecting with this man’s eye is from Hoshi’s camera—it’s not glare from a light in the gallery.

She’s posing with a cardboard cutout, possibly of herself.