I’ve started to write a column about Japanese photography for the La Pura Vida blog. This is exciting because I think the LPV audience should be really receptive to what’s happening in Japan. From glancing at some American photography blogs it’s possible to get the impression that everyone is shooting large format high-concept color work, which is definitely not the case here. I trust LPV to show me work that’s serious but not overburdened with meaning, and there’s a lot of work in Japan which fits that bill.

今月からはニューヨークの写真ブログ「ラー・プラ・ビダ」で月に一回の「東京手紙」という日本の写真リポートをかきます。第一目のリポートは先週発表しました。「ラー・プラ・ビダ」は、よく新鮮な、普通ではない作品を発表するブログです。この機会があって喜んでいます。このブログの目標は、日本の新鮮な作家を海外に紹介するのです。その「LPV」と一緒、上手にならないでしょうか？

I started writing this blog in March of 2009, when I really had no idea what was going on here. I still probably don’t know that much, but by now I’ve had enough experience that what I do know can be condensed and communicated in a forum like a monthly column. I’ll probably keep on posting here as before, and use the LPV space to take a step back and try to explain a little bit about the photography culture in Tokyo. We’ll see.

In the first column I featured Tatsuya Shimohira, a member of Totem Pole Photo Gallery who’s made some of the most interesting work I’ve seen recently. Here’s an image from his “Element” series which didn’t show up in the post on LPV.

© Tatsuya Shimohira

[“Spanish Night” is available for purchase at PH. / Se puede comprar “Spanish Night”  a través de PH.]

At 66, Kitai Kazuo (Kazuo Kitai) may be the oldest photographer I’ve featured on this blog yet. While he doesn’t have instant name recognition, he’s very well-respected in Japan for his black and white snapshot work: last year at Tokyo’s Metropolitan Museum of Photography, his work was given equal footing alongside Daido Moriyama, Masahisa Fukase, Hiromi Tsuchida and others. He’s also the recipient of the first (sometimes career-making) Kimura Ihee prize in 1975, which is kind of funny because he was Kimura’s friend.

Kitai has an interesting history: he was born in Manchuria, and has returned to China a number of times to photograph it. He was present at, and photographed, the 1967 Narita protests, which the government crushed, putting an end to Japan’s student movement. In the 1970s, he ran into Hiromi Tsuchida a number times in remote villages, while they were each shooting projects on rural Japan. (The story goes that Kitai would give Tsuchida a ride in his car.)

In the fall of 1977, Kitai took a trip to Spain, shot some rolls of color, and never did anything with the film. Now, 30 years later, he’s made these photos into a book published by Tosei-sha called “Spanish Night.” There’s been no effort to undo the effect of time on the negatives, and I really like how the colors turned out. It’s fun to guess what the people here were thinking. I’d imagine something along of the lines of, “what the hell is this Japanese guy doing here taking pictures of us?” I don’t sense any hesitation on Kitai’s part, though, more like the thrill of exploring a new place. This is a short book but it really hits the mark.

© Owen Stegemann

In the course of regular conversations, I sometimes take positions like: “books will never die because the experience of holding and looking at a book cannot be replaced by a screen,” or, “at some point, the stimuli we encounter online will produce a movement valuing a longer attention span,” or, “it would be great if I could live without a high-speed internet connection at my house.” I can support all of these propositions, and I do sometimes fantasize about a life “free from” technology, but lately I’ve been thinking that I’ve been away from the internet for too long, and that it’s time to come back. This may sound strange, given that I’ve done a reasonable job of updating this blog over the past year and a half, but it’s not too difficult to explain why I’ve arrived at this conclusion.

I came to Japan almost exactly two years ago, after working a desk job which required that I spend my entire day in front of a computer with an open browser. Still, almost every day I would come home from work and sit right back down in front of the computer again. Any desk jockeys will understand the unpleasant feeling of attachment to one’s computer. At times, during my longer internet voyages, I would feel that I had simply run out of new stuff to look at, but still continue to click through pages in search of something new. It’s no coincidence that my most prolific period of blogging (19 posts in July 2008) came at this time: every day, I could trawl the internet for new photographers, books, or thoughts.

© tsi7

After getting to Japan, I got a job teaching English. This is a standard job for Americans in Japan, and I’m still doing it now. I teach in a couple of different public junior high schools, which, coming from my desk job, has been a real breath of fresh air—liberation from the computer at last! I feel lucky that I’ve been able to teach my group of kids, rather than bored businessmen. It’s been great to be around my students; I’ve probably learned just as much about Japanese culture from them as they have about English from me. Also, it ought to go without saying, but 13-year-olds are hilarious people to be around. So teaching has been a good thing to do after escaping the office.

I’m starting to realize, though, what it means that I haven’t had such a close, daily connection to the internet. Of course there are days when it’s painful to be in front of the computer non-stop, but there are also days (or hours, or perhaps just a few minutes) when you slip into some sort of groove, and find yourself stumbling upon three really fantastic photographers all at once, and they’re all in different parts of the world, and they couldn’t possibly be aware of each other (could they?), but you can see a connection between them, and it relates to your own preoccupations of that moment. That’s what I feel I’ve missed, I’m sure I have missed them because I’m not really “around” online all that much.

© chillhiro

So, this year I’m going to pony up and get a phone with a proper data plan. I ride a train for about an hour to work every day, and I think I can put in some time looking through more work, using Twitter more regularly, and just being a bit more aware of what’s happening online. I’ve got a few other things planned for 2011, but I’ll keep them under wraps for now. It should be a big year though, so hang around and watch me make some things happen!

(Photos in this post: work I found while trawling Flickr for the first time in a long while.)

• Hamburger Eyes did a workshop in New York City, this really professional videosums up what happened. It seems Dave and Ray took some West Coast energy and made good things happen in New York. I’m really happy to see them getting the chance to shine on a big stage. 
• John Sypal’s Tokyo Camera Style is also getting a huge boost, through a monthly feature in Nippon Camera Magazine. Damn, John.
• Something very cool from Google Street View.
• A short but impassioned plea to look seriously at the photography on eBay.

Things are coming together. Look for more to come “early next year.” (Link to secret project #1)

Here’s an excerpt of a very long interview with Borges done in 1966, in his office at the National Library in Buenos Aires. If you are allergic to reading, I could just say that Borges once wrote something to the effect of, “I sometimes wonder why philosophers always take such pains to write long books, when their arguments could be condensed into a few pages.”

This is not directly about photography, but it’s not so hard to connect the dots, right?

INTERVIEWER

You have said that your own work has moved from, in the early times, expression, to, in the later times, allusion.

BORGES

Yes.

INTERVIEWER

What do you mean by allusion?

BORGES

Look, I mean to say this: When I began writing, I thought that everything should be defined by the writer. For example, to say “the moon” was strictly forbidden; that one had to find an adjective, an epithet for the moon. (Of course, I’m simplifying things. I know it because many times I have written “la luna,” but this is a kind of symbol of what I was doing.) Well, I thought everything had to be defined and that no common turns of phrase should be used. I would never have said, “So-and-so came in and sat down,” because that was far too simple and far too easy. I thought I had to find out some fancy way of saying it. Now I find out that those things are generally annoyances to the reader. But I think the whole root of the matter lies in the fact that when a writer is young he feels somehow that what he is going to say is rather silly or obvious or commonplace, and then he tries to hide it under baroque ornament, under words taken from the seventeenth-century writers; or, if not, and he sets out to be modern, then he does the contrary: He’s inventing words all the time, or alluding to airplanes, railway trains, or the telegraph and telephone because he’s doing his best to be modern. Then as time goes on, one feels that one’s ideas, good or bad, should be plainly expressed, because if you have an idea you must try to get that idea or that feeling or that mood into the mind of the reader. If, at the same time, you are trying to be, let’s say, Sir Thomas Browne or Ezra Pound, then it can’t be done. So that I think a writer always begins by being too complicated: He’s playing at several games at the same time. He wants to convey a peculiar mood; at the same time he must be a contemporary and if not a contemporary, then he’s a reactionary and a classic. As to the vocabulary, the first thing a young writer, at least in this country, sets out to do is to show his readers that he possesses a dictionary, that he knows all the synonyms; so we get, for example, in one line, red, then we get scarlet, then we get other different words, more or less, for the same color: purple.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve worked, then, toward a kind of classical prose?

BORGES

Yes, I do my best now. Whenever I find an out-of-the-way word, that is to say, a word that may be used by the Spanish classics or a word used in the slums of Buenos Aires, I mean, a word that is different from the others, then I strike it out, and I use a common word. I remember that Stevenson wrote that in a well-written page all the words should look the same way. If you write an uncouth word or an astonishing or an archaic word, then the rule is broken; and what is far more important, the attention of the reader is distracted by the word. One should be able to read smoothly in it even if you’re writing metaphysics or philosophy or whatever.

With some regularity, Google Street View art comes through my internet. As far as Street View and photography are concerned, I don’t think there’s any real use in discussing seriously whether Street View work “is” photography or “isn’t” photography. Photography is a pretty wide medium (as Friedlander once said), so there is no point in trying to nail this down right now; after ten years or so we’ll be able to observe how much (or little) this kind of imagery and photography have converged.

But for the sake of argument, let’s look at Doug Rickard’s new book as photography. Much like Peter Funch’s boring work of last year, all I take away from this work is that it’s the result of a time-intensive technical process. I imagine long hours spent in front of the computer, combing through Street View images to filter them based on their coincidence with the photographer’s own aesthetic sensibility. There is nothing “wrong” with this (could be nothing wrong with it!), but like Funch’s images it just strikes me as phenomenally boring – what could Rickard really have learned from this procedure? And what is the audience supposed to take away from it? He knew basically what he wanted from the start, and got it. As it is, I already spend enough time in front of the computer; I’m not interested in the distillation of someone else’s computer time in photobook form.

• Japan Exposures’ latest gallery features Nobuto Osakabe, who takes photos of crowds of Japanese people, much like Hiromi Tsuchida’s “Counting Grains of Sand.” There are a few weak images but it’s definitely worth a look.
• Tokyoite Thomas Orand’s new blog features black and white photos, and some more text compared to his color blog.
• Juan Rulfo, the author of the canonical Mexican novel Pedro Páramo, was also a pretty good photographer in his own right. Who knew?
• Tokyo Compression is a book by Michael Wolf, in which he photographs people stuffed into Tokyo trains. I want to take a look at the book before passing real judgment, but it seems like it might well veer into “Tokyo (and, by extension, Japan) is a ‘soulless’/‘miserable’ place.” Big ups to this German guy not only linking to SLJ, but for taking Der Spiegel to task for jumping on (crowding into??) the “sad Japan” train—it calls the people “modern slaves”!

Art comedy!! Enjoy:

Koyuki Tayama (田山湖雪) is a photography graduate student at Tokyo Zokei University, home to fellow Tumblr user and Street Level Japan alumnus Lee Kan-kyo. I met Tayama in “real life,” so it was to strange to ask her if she knew this graphic design grad student at her university whose blog I had found through a friend living in San Francisco. But yeah, she knows Lee, and reports that he is “thin.”

I thought Lee’s photographs were worth blogging because he seems to be getting himself into interesting locations (outside of Tokyo) and making basically decent photographs. Tayama’s photographs are sort of the opposite; the places she’s in aren’t made to look all that interesting in themselves, but she makes something photographic out of them. I’m curious to see what direction her work will go from here.