As for Japanese photographers- the variety is so wide it’s hard to suggest one particular book or photographer. I am partial to the Phaidon published Araki (Self Life Death) for the articles and reproductions of his early work.

For me this quote separates the photographs (even very nice ones) of things you might see if you visited there, from the mood, impression and details you might get from living there. Barthes wants these photos not to idealize the place but to give him a sense of a second life in that place, a path not taken.

i still think we’re blurring the lines of what you wish to say with how you wish to say it. And this goes much further than photographing a specific place, it just so happens that photographing a space is what surfaced the issue.

if you think about styles of photography as different forms of poetry you see there are different approaches to saying something and even eastern and western approaches to poetry styles. i think a set of photographs at its best is a visual poem (not a photo essay!!) And thus you need to look at both the ‘technique’ and the ‘message’.

it’s not easy, but it is possible to weigh and measure the different ‘techniques’, maybe someday just ‘art’ settings, to convey visual information. But for me, i’m a bit of a message-maniac, i don’t favour anyone one technique and my book case would evidence that, i do find that i favour work that attempts to achieve something, i like it more than just the perfection of a technique, i want to see technique applied to actually message something. And i don’t mean literally say something, for example the book that’s typically next in line for me after Sobol’s is Roger Ballin’s Shadow Chamber, it delivers drama, but no ‘real’ real storyline.

going back to Sobol, i think his mission was to lay some claim of entitlement to Tokyo, when you read this in the first couple of pages it’s like an immediate story-arc in the book before you see the first page. Sure it’s that archetypal travel-diary story-line and of course his technique is as recognisable as the structure of a haiku. And it’s an effort served up in the same way that loads of moody efforts are served up: Tri-X style, but at least it seems to have some narrative, some point, some internal drama, some universal conflict of ‘man against his environment’

in the end we’re likely all going to agree we like or don’t like the same ‘calibre’ of photography, there seems to be a natural migration of tastes as you digest more and more photography. i do also think we as photographers may be very literate with regards to ‘techniques’, but i think as a generalisation, we as photographers find it very difficult to discuss what a collection of photographs actually accomplishes above and beyond technique: basically we’re very illiterate to photographic messaging.

You know, the more i think about this, the more i think all the photographs I’ve ever taken were pretty pointless.

On a positive note, John, what Japanese photographer’s book would you recommend to me? Thanks in advance for the suggestion.

However I think it’s a good example of what Dirk was trying to get across- It’s playing into already pre-set expectations albeit for a far narrower demographic: Western Photography Enthusiasts. Instead of the Pagodas and Kimonos and rows of vending machines that almost everyone already knows about, “I Tokyo” mimics the overly done Moriyama look with it’s harshly textured urban details, women and stray cats that most people into photography recognize as “tough”. But it’s the same look and subject matter that everyone into photography in Japan has known about and grown familiar with since the 1960s.

I understand that he won an award in Europe for his work, but such pictures are in such abundance in Japan that it’s again like showing pictures of a cobblestone street to an Englishman. Place M, a gallery in Shinjuku seems to almost exclusively deal in this aesthetic and it’s something that many photographers in Japan are influenced by. Olympus even offers an “Art” setting which grants the user an Instant Moriyama with one simple click on their new digital camera. Check this out here. I think a lot of people confuse a particular and easy to emulate “Look” with “Instant Meaning and Authenticity”. It’s style over substance. (Whereas Winogrand was all about Form vs. Content!)

It’s not that Sobol is a poor photographer or that his book is bad. I liked the book, but it falls into a long line of a very particular and sanctified aesthetic of “street photography” which can’t seem to get out of Moriyama’s shadow of Tri-X. The fact that it has “I” and “Tokyo” in it’s title smacks of an attempt to capture some of that edgy Araki magic.

That said, there are countless books by Japanese photographers of Europe (with cobblestone streets aplenty) so it certainly goes both ways.

With or without a camera, for the most part people really only want to see what they already expect .