Shinya Arimoto was born in 1971 in Osaka. He won the No.35 Taiyo award in 1997 and set up TOTEM POLE PHOTO GALLERY in 2008. Arimoto has been photographing and exhibiting work since 1994. Currently teaching photography at the Tokyo School of Visual Arts, he has supervised and lead the artist-run Totem Pole Photo Gallery since founding it in 2008.

John Sypal is an American photographer who has lived in Japan since 2004, and joined Totem Pole in 2010.

Please also see this and this special gallery with more images by Shinya Arimoto.

Japan Exposures: 私達は新宿近辺で何回か偶然に会っていますね。有元さんは毎日カメラを首から下げて撮影してるというイメージです。このやる気はどこから生まれてきますか？

We’ve randomly run into each other many times in Shinjuku over the years. My image of you is that you’re always out with your camera around your neck photographing. Where does this desire come from?

Shinya Arimoto: 都市の路上は飽きることがないです。同じ場所を歩いていても、すれ違う人は毎日違う。その一瞬一瞬を見ていたいという欲望があります。

I never get tired of the streets of the city. Even though I walk the same streets, it’s different people passing every day. I have a desire to look at each moment as it happens.

JE: それは素敵な言葉だけど、他の人達も同じことを考えるでしょう（笑）。有元さんは言葉だけではなく、実際に行動していると思います。一ヶ月に何日間「撮影」をしていますか？　大体何時から何時まで？　一日に何本ぐらいのフィルムを撮影しますか？

That’s a common sentiment about shooting on the streets but what’s different about you is that you’re really out there all the time making work. About how many days a month do you shoot? What kind of hours?

SA: 他の仕事が無ければ、基本的には毎日撮影に行きます。去年の夏などは全く仕事がなかったので、本当に毎日撮影していました。正午頃に新宿に着いて、日が暮れるまで撮影しています。なので撮影時間は季節によって変化します。
私の場合、街で出会った人に声をかけて撮影することが多いので、まず大切なのは撮りたい人と出会う事が重要です。これは偶然性の問題でもあるので、その確率を上げる為に多くの時間を〈街にいる〉ことに費やしています。

If I’m not at work, I’m going to shoot every day. When I’m not teaching, such as last summer, I was out there every single day. I arrived in Shinjuku around noon, and shot until sunset. The time I am able to photograph varies depending on the season though. In my case I often communicate with those who I photograph on the streets so it’s important that I just get out there to meet who’s out there. Depending on who I meet depends on random encounters so in order to increase my chances I need to increase the amount of time I spend out photographing in the city.

JE: 一日に何本ぐらいのフィルムを撮影しますか？　また一ヶ月間ではどのぐらいの数になるでしょうか？

How many rolls of film do you shoot a day? A month?

SA: 一日に10本撮る日もあれば、全く撮れない日もある。平均すると一ヶ月で50本ぐらいでしょうかね。

Some days it is not possible to shoot at all, other times I’ll shoot 10 rolls a day. The average is probably about 50 rolls a month.

JE: プライバシーの問題は、現在のストリートフォトグラファーにどのような影響をあたえていますか？
How do privacy concerns affect street photographers today?

SA: 社会的に見ると、プライバシーの問題は時と共に重要になってきていると感じています。
しかし個人対個人で向き合った時、その問題は社会的な問題というよりはむしろお互いの問題へと変化します。私の場合、相手に許可をもらってから撮影することが多いので、トラブルにはなりにくいようです。

From society’s standpoint privacy concerns have been growing more important over time. But when you interact with people one on one on the streets it’s less about society and more about individuals. Since I am often able to interact with my subjects and get their permission before I photograph them I personally haven’t had much trouble with privacy issues.

JE: ストリートで写真を撮ってる人にはどのような責任があると考えますか？

What responsibility does a street photographer need to keep in mind with their subjects?

SA: 撮らせていただいたからには、自分の望む作品に仕上げる事。私自身はネガティブなイメージが好きではないので、作品が観客にそのように捉えられないように注意を払っています。

When I’ve been granted the right to make the photograph I want to match in respect the desire I have to make the work as well as I can. Personally I don’t like photographs that are negative, and I take care so that I don’t catch my subject in that sort of way.

JE: 仕事についてですが、写真学校での講師の仕事以外にコマーシャルの撮影もしてますか？

In addition to teaching photography, do you do much commissioned photography as well?

SA: 20代は仕事の撮影も積極的にしていましたが、今はほとんどしていません。以前から付き合いのあるクライアントから依頼があれば行っている感じです。

When I was in my 20′s and 30′s, I did commercial work, but now not so much. If I do it’s by request from a former client from a previous relationship.

JE: I’d like to talk about your teaching experience. What do you feel is the most important part of photographic education?

「有元先生」につい少し聞きたいです。写真の教育において一番大切なのはどのような事でしょうか？

SA: 「写真」とひとことで言っても、その内容は多岐にわたります。様々な写真のあり方を伝えた上で、各個人が目指すべき道を指し示す必要があると思っています。私のゼミ（写真作家専攻）ではテーマやコンセプトの設定や、自作を言葉にすることを大切にしています。技術、知識、経験、の三つの柱の中で「経験」を積むことを重要視します。

Even a though “photography” is a simple word, the content of the term is wide-ranging. In addition to lecturing about the various ways photographs are made and work, it is necessary to help students find their personal way of working that they should aim for. In my classes students need to value the setting, theme and concept of their photographs and also be able to articulate about it in their own words. To gain experience one needs to understand the three pillars of technology, knowledge and understanding.

JE: なるほど。ビジアルアーツの学生は他の学校の学生よりも積極的にストリートスナップを行っているのではないでしょうか？　現在のアート世界ではスナップ写真あるいはストリートフォトは主流ではないが、その事についてどう思いますか？

I see. I get the impression that Visual Arts students do more “street photography” than students at other schools. It seems though that “street photography” is not so popular in the Art World now though…

SA: 東京のビジュアルアーツの学生もストリートスナップしているのはごくわずかです。写真作品が美術作品と認められてゆく流れの中で、写真作品でもコンセプトを示すことが重要となっています。確かに現在のアートの世界ではストリートフォトグラフィーは少ないですが、ストリートフォトグラフィーにおいてもコンセプトを示すことが必要ではないでしょうか。

The number of students at Visual Arts shooting on the streets is negligible. As photography flows more and more into the Art realm, one’s concept has become more important. In the current world of Art there are very few street photographers- so it seems that I think that conceptualism is important now even in street photography.

JE: 有元さんの写真のConceptは何だと思いますか？

What do you feel your concept is?

SA: 「ariphoto」のシリーズのコンセプトは「路上を彷徨いながら、変遷を続ける都市のなかにプリミティブな生命の営みを探し求める。」です。私は都市も人間という生物の作った、一つの生態系だと考えています。生き物としての人間と、その住処としての都市が写真に現われるように工夫して作品をつくっています。また大きなテーマとしては「人間とはなにか？」という疑問が常にあります。かつてチベットの広大な自然の中で、その自然と闘いながら、またそこから恩恵を受けながら生きる人々を撮影してきました。そして今は東京で、その都市機能の恩恵を受けて生きる人々を撮影しています。その両者のなかに、人間としての共通項を見つけたいと思っています。

The concept of my “ariphoto” series is to “Wander the streets seeking out an unrefined or rudimentary, even primitive, kind of life among the city that is always in transition.” I believe that the human organism is of the city and it’s all part of one ecosystem. I create these photographs which formulate that the environment and habitat of man is the city. Of course there’s always the big question “What is Man?”. I have photographed people both struggling against but also benefiting from the vast nature of Tibet. Now I photograph people struggling against but again also benefiting from their environment here in Tokyo. I think that among the two, I’m interested in finding common denominators as human beings.

JE: 最近インターネットの世界ではストリートフォトが再び注目されているそうです。ストリートフォトはこれからどこに向かうべきでしょうか？。新しいことを産み出してゆくべきですか？。それとも「新しいこと」は必要ないと思いますか？

There’s been a resurgence interest, at least online, in “Street Photography”. Is there any place that “Street Photography” can or even needs to go in the future? Is there anything new that this kind of photography can do, or is “new” even important anymore?

SA: 新しい試みはもちろん必要だと思いますが、新しければそれでよいという訳でもない。過去の作品をリスペクトしながらもエピゴーネンにならないように、常に挑戦的であることが大切です。インターネットの世界では多くの人が挑戦的な作品を発表していることに期待が持てます。まだそれは萌芽のようなものかも知れませんが、その中から突出した作品が出てくることにより、今後大きな潮流になってゆくことと信じています。

I think there’s importance in attempting new things, but just because something is new doesn’t mean it’s good. Photographing while respecting the work which has been done before without becoming an inferior imitator is a very important challenge. Regarding the internet, I have an expectation that challenging photography will continue to be shared online. It might still only be something like a sprout, but I believe that from all these pictures a greater trend will follow.

JE: 「挑戦的な作品」という言葉は人によって捉え方が違うと思います。有元さんにとって「挑戦的な作品」とはどのようなものでしょうか？

How would you classify “Challenging Photography”? It seems that this could vary widely from person to person…

SA: アイディア、行動力、テクノロジーの全てにおいてです。特にインターネットの世界ではテクノロジーの進歩が目覚ましい。
例えば従来の「決定的瞬間」のような写真は、高解像度ムービーをキャプチャーする方法に変わっていくでしょう。

It concerns the idea, movement, technology, all of these things. Especially with the internet, there’s been remarkable progress with technology. For example, with “Decisive Moment” photos, they’ll probably be come to be captured through high resolution video.

JE: ですが、有元さんの撮影方法はかなり伝統的でしょう．．．。　暗室でプリントして、マットに入れて、フレームをギャラリーの壁に貼って展示している。

But you stick with some pretty traditional gear for your own photographs… Not to mention you print in the darkroom, mat your prints, and hang them on the walls of a gallery.

SA: 暗室＝伝統的、デジタル＝挑戦的　とは違うと思います。新しいとか古いとかいう概念は、ある程度時間が経てば意味をなさなくなります。
私はこの7年間に23回新作の展示を行いました。もちろんこれは今後も続けてゆきます。手法はこそは新しいものではないが、自分にとってそれは挑戦的な試みであります。

I don’t agree with the idea that the darkroom equals “tradition” or that digital equals “challenge”. As time passes the concept of “old” or “new” has less meaning. Over the past seven years I’ve held twenty-three solo exhibitions of my work. Of course I plan on continuing with this. I’m not after a new approach, the main challenge is with myself.

JE: 写真生活や日々の撮影を継続させる為に重要な事はなんでしょうか？

What encourages you in your work to keep you going?

SA: 街に出て撮影をし、ギャラリーで定期的な発表をすることは、私にとっての日常になりつつありますので特別な思いはありません。
しばらくはこのようなスタイルにこだわってゆきたいと思っています。

The cycle of shooting out on the streets, then exhibiting the work in the gallery is what keeps me interested. By now these actions are so engrained I don’t differentiate photography as something separate from my daily life. This is the lifestyle which I’m going to continue living.

Photographing strangers in public is neither new, nor does it deserve our increased attention or respect, especially when it is obvious that the photographer has no real interest in the subject except as a means to get the next best 15 seconds of fame and bizarrely unreal looking decisive moment. What Shinya Arimoto is presenting here could not be more different. The photos show that an interaction between photographer and subject must have taken place before and during which the photographs were made. Arimoto does not steal the moment while passing a subject and never shall the two meet again; instead he engages on a fair exchange, respectful and sustainable so that an ensuing photographic encounter would not appear unreasonable to either side.

Please also see this interview with the photographer by photographer John Sypal.

Photo by Taiji Arita. Courtesy of Gallery 916.

Whenever I stumble upon, through old books or more often than not these days online, photographers of the past that were previously unknown to me, I feel a heightened sense of excitement. Excitement is of course common to the discovery of new up-and-coming photographers, but there’s an added thrill to come upon photographers who for one reason or another weren’t on my radar, yet who amassed long careers, were published, exhibited, written about at one time. It’s as if they were right under my nose but I went right when I should have gone left, or put the book back on the shelf instead of flipping one more page, leaving them to wait a bit more in obscurity.

A couple of weeks ago I clicked one more link on a web page and discovered Taiji Arita, who passed away last year at the age of 70. Arita (1940-2011) was a commercial and freelance photographer who had studied under Yasuhito Ishimoto and had worked in the 1960s at the Nippon Design Center advertising agency alongside other well-known photographers like Yutaka Takanashi and Hajime Sawatari. Arita would continue working commercially as a photographer through the 70s and 80s, but eventually turned his creative energy to painting and woodworking, moving permanently to the United States in 1991 and spending the last 20 years of his life there without returning to Japan.¹

The famed Camera Mainichi editor Shōji Yamagishi encouraged Arita’s creative photography and from 1969 – 1975 he worked on the series of family portraits that would eventually be published over 13 issues of Camera Mainichi from May 1973 to September 1974 under the title “First Born”. The photos featured his Canadian first wife Jessica, and eventually the son Cohen they had as well. Now, the extended body of this work is being shown at Gallery 916, a relatively new exhibition space for photography in Tokyo. (If you’re in the city, the exhibition runs until December 28.)

[Please see the accompanying article about Gallery 916. — Editor]

I found the exhibition at Gallery 916 a bit hard to get into initially — the large exhibition space of the gallery combined with the relative smallness of the prints certainly was detrimental here, as was the fact that the early work in the series had a bit too much hippy-dippy-ness for me. (I kept conjuring up scenes from Zabriskie Point, or closer to home, Ikko Narahara’s Celebration of Life (1972)). However, as Arita began to place his wife in more contrived setups, and particularly when their newborn son began to be included, the series started to lose its late 60s trappings, becoming less a celebration of the body and sexuality and familial-ity and more a carefully constructed exploration of a complex triumvirate, Arita the unseen member we end up feeling we know as well as his wife and son. It is those images where the pose itself — that of his family-cum-models, the props, the conceptual thought — and the messy intimacy of family, are indistinguishable.

Photo by Taiji Arita. Taken from the accompanying catalog.

The photos where the son takes center stage are especially powerful, though not without an accompanying irritation at Arita for playing on our emotions. In one photo we see the baby boy in his carriage at the edge of the frame, while the background is a barren landscape with what looks like a massive concrete “A” on fire a seemingly unsafe distance away — with only some of his mother’s winter coat visible to let us know he’s not alone. (In fact we reasonably know he’s never alone — after all his father is taking the photo.) In another he’s in his child seat, this time mother nowhere to be seen — though one has to look carefully, for Arita loves the subtle inclusion of figures through reflections and shadows — and almost completely obscured by a curtain that looks to have blown on top of him. The image is at once serene, the translucency of the curtain showing a swaddled, calm toddler, and violent, the curtain ready to strangle a trapped, defenseless boy.

Amidst so many dark, carefully crafted photos, the most affecting image for me is one of the relatively few color ones in the series, a photo of real aching and tender beauty. Jessica is outside of the house in a rustic setting, hands on the glass window, looking in on the sun-dappled room as her baby boy is caught mid-crawl, his oversized head looking away, but with an expression almost uncannily similar to his mother’s. She temporarily outside her life, outside her model-ness, her motherhood — we can’t even be sure she’s at that moment actually looking at her child, so deeply in thought she seems — gazing in on a life (her’s, his) already beginning to recede away from her.

Photo by Taiji Arita. Courtesy of Gallery 916.

The critic Kotaro Iizawa has written an excellent introduction to the exhibition which the gallery has made available on their site in both Japanese and English. Iizawa speaks to what must have been a creative relationship fraught with conflicting roles, especially as the series entered its later period:

Particularly among the later “First Born” shots are a number marked by a palpable tension, and an excessively staged look in reaction to it, to the extent that some of the images verge on the painful. Conversely, the feat of strength required to negotiate such a tightrope of emotions is perhaps the series’ greatest attraction.

According to the gallery, the original intention was to mount Arita’s own prints from the 1970s. However, they were deemed not sufficiently preserved enough for an exhibition of this size.² Instead, in an interesting twist, photographer Yoshihiko Ueda, who along with G/P Gallery director Shigeo Goto serves as Curatorial Director of 916, and who had served as an assistant to Arita in the early 80s before striking out on his own (he refers to him as “sensei” in a note in the exhibition catalog), took it upon himself to reprint the photographs that ended up in the exhibition. Ueda’s personal dedication to this task is of course admirable, but not necessarily dilemma free. He is not a hired craftsperson approaching this with a detached professionalism, but rather as a successful photographer with his own distinct vision mounting a show of the prints by his former mentor in a gallery he co-curates. “He was a photographer I loved,” writes Ueda.

Quinault is perhaps Ueda’s best known work outside of Japan, shot in the early 90s in the Quinault Rain Forest west of Seattle. It is not taking anything away from the work to describe it as one that works with limited tonal variations. His black and white portrait work that I have seen has a similar flatness to it, faces and figures barely raising themselves off the paper they’re printed on.

The prints on show at Gallery 916 do seem to have a distinctive Ueda-esque quality to them, a lovely subtlety of tonality to them where the figures, the faces, and above all the small details in the scenes are slowly discovered by the viewer over time. Not having seen the original Arita prints, nor any of the Camera Mainichi issues the work originally appeared in, I can’t comment on whether Ueda has enhanced the original work or hindered it in some way — whether, in the parlance of adaptation, Ueda has been faithful to the original, and to his sensei.

To speak to this tangling of sensei and student roles, and the intermingling of styles, it might be illustrative to look at Ueda’s series at Home that was shot from 1993-2005 and collected in the 2006 book of the same name. Spanning 13 years, from when he married actress Karen Kirishima through to the birth of their 4th child, Ueda documented his family. Document is perhaps too strong — these were family snapshots first and foremost (albeit taken by a very accomplished photographer). As Ueda writes,

The compulsive quest of my youth for total perfectionism, power and beauty was giving way to a need to engage with the uncontrollably boisterous glow of daily life, to notice, accept and above all to treasure the ordinary yet unrepeatable events before my eyes, to capture small slices of the fun.

Yoshihiko Ueda — at Home. Published in 2006 by Little More.

It was only much later that the work formed itself into a series as such and became a book only at the behest of a publisher. There certainly isn’t the edge you find in many of Arita’s photos, and yet for all of Ueda’s “boisterous glow of daily life”, it isn’t without sadness and pain. (This comes through much more in the heavily edited set of photos presented on Ueda’s site than it does in the far larger selection of photos presented in the book, it has to be said.) But it isn’t anything remotely like the contrived and artful darkness we find in Arita’s series.³

So in terms of intention and approach, Arita’s and Ueda’s two “family” series couldn’t be further apart. Nor is it a given that Ueda was in any overt way conscious of his mentor’s earlier series as he took his family snaps. But the terrain is common enough to both to make one intrigued as to how Ueda must have felt as he negotiated this re-printing of Arita’s “First Born”, no doubt with the best intentions of paying homage to his former sensei and doing the original work “justice” — another loaded term like “faithful” that implies a value judgment.

Sacrosanct notions of “original” and “faith” seem misplaced here. Rather than sifting through the messy intersections of influence and inspiration, reproduction and reworking, I prefer to view this convergence of styles, themes, and teacher-pupil roles more as a collaboration, unwitting obviously on the part of one — or perhaps both, for this balancing act could not have been easy for Ueda, who says as much when he writes that he “battled for almost two months in the darkroom with photos left by my teacher.”

In his essay Iizawa expresses regret that Arita never really went further than his “First Born” series, or pursued photography in any meaningful way in subsequent years, while at the same time wondering if “the very absence of such a follow-up offering could also be what allows this series to retain its rare brilliance.” That last bit seems overly fanciful to me, suggesting as it does that Arita spared us from being let down by ending on a high note. That he didn’t do more with photography is perhaps regrettable, but rather selfish on our part. By all accounts Arita suffered no similar regrets as he channeled his creativity into painting and woodworking, leaving his “first born” to the past as he moved on, both in the context of family — we know he remarried in 1984 — and art. Fortunately for us, this hasn’t stopped the work from being re-discovered, or discovered anew, and his former pupil Yoshihiko Ueda deserves our gratitude for his part in that.

_{1. This period of Arita’s career is covered in a recently-published book entitled PURE – Taiji Arita in California: Life and Work.}

_{2. Incidentally, the “First Born” portfolio of 68 photographs is owned by Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, Japan, as part of their permanent collection.}

_{3. I think an argument — and further investigation — could be made about the difference in tone having something to do with Arita’s first wife being a Canadian, an “other”, whereas Ueda’s wife is not only Japanese, but a well-known actress at that.}

Gallery 916 — even the entrance feels spacious.

The other day I was surfing online and I came across a new to me photography gallery just by chance. I was intrigued because one, it had earlier this year staged a Ralph Gibson exhibition, and two, I noticed that Yoshihiko Ueda, who is a well-established photographer both commercially and artistically, was serving as co-curator along with Shigeo Goto, a figure I’m familiar with through the G/P Gallery in Ebisu where he serves as Chief Director as well as a previous association with Gallery Punctum Photo+Graphix Tokyo(sadly no longer open). Seeing as their upcoming exhibition was work by a Japanese photographer I had not previously heard of, it seemed the opportune time to tick off two boxes in one shot.

Gallery 916 — The building exterior. Look for the shell.

Opening its doors in February of this year, Gallery 916 is in the district of Tokyo called Hamamatsuchō, an area not normally associated with galleries. The space is on the 5th floor of a big warehouse-y building, and were it not for a small sign for the gallery near the entrance to the building, I would have assumed I was in the wrong place. It’s quite common in places like San Francisco or New York to have galleries in these kind of industrial warehouse-type spaces, but not all that common here in Tokyo.¹ The gallery space itself is huge — 600-square-meters apparently — leading me to wonder if it isn’t now the largest photography gallery in Tokyo.

Though admittedly it’s not a place most would consider warm and intimate, especially on the cold and rainy day I visited, the gallery felt heartwarming somehow, knowing that such a large and relatively unadorned, unpretentious space was being given over to photography.

Gallery 916 — The building entrance, with hard to spot gallery sign.

In size it felt like one of Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography’s exhibition spaces, but sans the obligatory museum shop, coat check, silent black-suited watchers making sure you don’t touch anything, and most importantly, any admission charge, much more relaxing.

Exhibitions held at the gallery so far have been one-artist shows running between six to eight weeks in duration. Both the Gibson and Arita exhibitions have been accompanied by substantial exhibition catalogs normally not seen from galleries², and in its catalogs and on its clean, well-designed website, English translations of critical essays and biographical information are given equal footing with the Japanese. (Well-translated English it should be noted, which is far from a given in Japan). [Both the Ralph Gibson and Taiji Arata exhibition catalogs are available in the Japan Exposures Bookstore.]

Of course such a large space does not come without its challenges, number one I’m sure being to remain a financially viable concern for its backers. But there are challenges for the Ueda/Goto curating team as well.

Gallery 916 — The main room.

On view when I visited was a series of photos by the relatively obscure Taiji Arita from the late 60s/early 70s, for whom Ueda once served as an assistant. The prints were not large, and it felt a struggle sometimes for the photos not to be completely dominated by the space. No doubt the curators are aware that a space this large will not be appropriate for just any work, and care will be needed to select photography that works best in the space. Alternatively, perhaps occasionally the space will need to be changed — closing off the two spaces in the back that lead off the main hall, for example — for some exhibits.

[See our accompanying review of the Taiji Arita "First Born" exhibition being held at Gallery 916. — Editor]

Gallery 916 — Lots of room to play with.

In its first year, two of the five exhibitions were of Ueda’s work. This may well be part of the arrangement, for all I know. But certainly from the neutral’s perspective, one will hope that this is more a gallery served by Ueda’s creative vision rather than the other way around.

That said, having co-curators of Ueda and Goto’s standing, approaching the gallery from the differing perspectives of photographer and curator respectively, leaves what appears to be have been an excellent start in good stead. It remains to be seen what will come in 2013, but I for one am looking forward to it.

_{1. The Kiyosumi Gallery Complex, which houses Taka Ishii, Hiromi Yoshii and ShugoArts, among others, is an obvious exception.}

_{2. The old Min Gallery and the current Zen Foto Gallery being two worthy exceptions that come to mind.}

“What is
On the other side
In the forest
draped in uncertainty
I am alone,
gazing in admiration”

– Masako Miyazaki

When presenting and discussing Japanese Photography I often wonder whether myself and everyone else share our definition of what Japanese Photography is (or is not). Whether there is even a need to ask for a definition or leave it open to everyone to substitute their own. Still, sooner or later someone might ask “what do you like about Japanese photography?” or “what do you think is different in Japanese Photography?”. Then you would have to ask back, what the person means by Japanese Photography at the first place. Is it a signature style or technique? Probably not. Or simply a Japanese photographer, or a photograph taken in the country of Japan? Possibly, but that’s not all. Could a non-Japanese person produce Japanese Photography at all, or a Japanese person be unable to do so? Probably yes. There are no obvious answers, only clues. I have been looking for such clues for a while and even though my answer is not complete, I feel that gathering traces is a legitimate way to approach it.

Masako Miyazaki’s book The Other Side, published in late 2011 by Tosei-sha, offers such a clue. Not too unlike Manabu Someya’s Nirai (incidentally also published by Tosei-sha), I very much enjoyed looking at this book as it felt like being taken by the hand onto a journey into different places. That is not just physical locations, but places in the mind. Studying the images closely, they were taken in a variety of locations. There are images of Japan and elsewhere (I suspect the Mediterranean and/or Central Europe). Despite that variety, the image content, texture and style allowed them to be presented together while maintaining a common theme between them. Location or subject is not what strings them together.

On a depictive level, a commonality between the images soon becomes apparent: the square black and white images almost all seem to be focussed on the very remote distance, irrespective of whether the near distance contains a subject of interest. Additionally, a very close distance object is often obscuring our view slightly – a wall, high-grown grass, a tree, bushy vegetation or similar. We are often peering over or around those obstructions with a sense of safety as if guarding us from the scene from waist level (presumably due to the use of a medium format camera with waist level finder), like a child who stumbled upon a scene accidentally while running after a ball or a butterfly. Now we find ourselves slightly outside our comfort zone, exactly on the thin line of being equally thrilled and curious to move further while at the same time frightened and wanting to go back to familiar grounds. Here we stand still now, hearing only our own breath and the sounds of nature, frozen in time by our minds and in turn by the capture of the photograph. We have become one with the scene, with the environment, except that unlike the trees or bushes around us we have a gaze into the scene and our view is set on the horizon, the infinite distance.

Few people appear in Miyazaki’s photographs and if they do then they are largely coincidental and visually insignificant. These are introvert photographs, but not of self-importance or exhibitionism. A wanderer in a foreign place is strolling across the landscape with a hint of melancholy. The scene is alive yet abandoned, as if everyone just left to go home for lunch or dinner time a short moment ago. We are still out here, perhaps nobody is expecting us to go home or we just want to enter slightly into the lapse of time and be “too late”, that is not return home on time. Not too late for anyone to worry about us or to scold us, yet enjoying once again finding ourselves on the border between what we should or shouldn’t do.

Towards the end of the book the nature of the images changes slightly. We are now in motion, gazing out of a moving train or car. Are we leaving a place we enjoyed so much as described above? In the final pages we are indoors, the same low level views towards or out of windows and doors. A peek into the living room, over the window sill seeing the roofs of opposite buildings, or inside a shop, church or boutique. Have we returned home from a summer vacation in the countryside back into the hometown, perhaps? The feeling is once more on the middle ground of being saddened by our timely return, yet inside ourselves treasuring the experience of the weeks we roamed on our own on The Other Side.

Miyazaki’s photographs represent just some of the things that Japanese Photography are for me; a quiet yet strong undercurrent of expression that does not present itself to the viewer too easily and besides sensitivity requires patience. At the same time there is an element of child-like honesty and innocence that make the images more than simple documents of localities; we are being offered access to someone else’s inner self as a companion or visitor, just close enough to share some personal time together and not too close to offend or invade the privacy of our host.

Please also see a special gallery with more images from Miyazaki’s book.

Signed copies of The Other Side are available for purchase in the Japan Exposures Bookstore.

Miyazaki’s photographs represent just some of the things that Japanese Photography are for me; a quiet yet strong undercurrent of expression that does not present itself to the viewer too easily and besides sensitivity requires patience. At the same time there is an element of child-like honesty and innocence that make the images more than simple documents of localities; we are being offered access to someone else’s inner self as a companion or visitor, just close enough to share some personal time together and not too close to offend or invade the privacy of our host.

The above work is taken from Miyazaki’s series The Other Side, which was published in a book from Tosei-sha in late 2011, available as signed copies in the Japan Exposures bookstore.

Mandala Zukan (曼陀羅図鑑), by Yoshiichi Hara
Published by Banseisha, 1988
Softcover, 21cm x 21cm, approx. 610 pages, 300 photos.
Original price: ¥5,800

Yoshiichi Hara was born in 1948 in Tokyo. He attended the Chiyoda Photography Vocational School but dropped out. He first exhibited his photography in 1973. In 1978 he self-published his first book, Fubaika. Those are the basic facts and I have to admit I know little beyond them.

I do know that much of his book oeuvre has the word “stripper” in the title and he has published various “stripper guide” books. I have never looked at them beyond their covers (honest!), so I have no idea if these are straight commercial jobs or not, but their covers would seem to indicate they are. I had seen a couple of recent and decidedly non-commercial books of his at the Japanese publisher Sokyusha, but paid them very little mind for the longest time, sad to say. It was only after someone in Europe contacted me about purchasing some of Hara’s out-of-print books did I become intrigued to look a bit further. (You can find said recent books here and here.)

Mandala Zukan is a thick, square-shaped book, containing exactly 300 black and white photographs. Most of the photographs are in a square format, with “sloppy borders” to emphasize that we are seeing them full-frame, without cropping. They fill most of the right-hand page, giving them a sense of scale that is nicely counterweighted by the subject matter itself, which is rarely grand. On the left-hand page, there’s an almost completely empty page except for a simple caption denoting the number of the photograph, the city and district where the photograph was taken (in Japanese only), and the year the photo was taken.

The subject matter is all over the place, but never feels scattershot or give the impression that Hara doesn’t know what he’s doing. We always feel he is in control, that there is a vision he is trying to put forth but it is up to us to decide what that is. There are some images that might repel, and a few that could upset those with delicate sensibilities, but again one never gets the sense that Hara is shocking for shock’s sake. When I met Hara in person recently, he mentioned that the late Kiyoshi Suzuki was a friend of his, and that they had exhibited together. Like Suzuki’s books, Hara’s have that same feeling where the thread from photo to photo is often thin and hard to see, but always strong and firm.

There are a lot of portraits, people posing for the camera a la those we find in Arbus or Suda, projecting a sense of self that can’t help but be undermined by the camera. Vulnerability is everywhere. There are more than a few children or young people scattered throughout the book, and by contrast they almost seem self-assured. One feels the urge to protect them, shield them from the harsh world of the main of the book — but not to protect them, but to prop ourselves up, give ourselves some hope.

The book’s design plays off the contrasts between a formal, clear-cut structure (one caption page/one photo, exactly 300 photos) and the vague, polyphonic subject matter, the candid, messy nature of the photos. The cover presents a constructionist motif, yet the book’s spine has the title angling over it in a diagonal, and Hara has handwritten his name and the letters that correspond to the Chinese characters. As well, one appreciates the little touches like different colored end papers, or small snippets of what seems like Hara’s diary randomly printed on the inside fold of the dustcover.

More importantly, the book is very well edited, and it’s obvious great care has been placed on how the images are sequenced, how they might resonate off of each other. A visual motif we subconsciously took in in one photo, might come back to the fore via another photograph several pages later. If there are occasionally visual puns, they are subtle, and don’t pull us out of our reverie.

What follows is a short (and silent) slide show that I hope will give you an idea of the book even as it can never really be more than that. (To view the video larger, click on the “Vimeo” mark in the bottom right hand corner of the video.) This is a book whose weight, physically (for a softcover book, it is quite heavy at over 600 pages) and of course emotionally, needs to be experienced in full, first hand. Reasonably priced used copies do come up once in a while — if you would like us to try to obtain a copy for you, please get in touch.

Reflecting on an special event held on a Sunday in the mid 1960s photographer Takao Niikura writes in the afterword of his book Dizzy Noon that:

“This was a chance to enter into the “other world” just for a day, a world surrounded by a two-meter, twenty centimeter tall barbed wire fence. I grasped my camera, together with seven or eight rolls of color film, which in those days was still something of a rarity, and set out.”

The world which Niikura was allowed to entered that spring day was the US Naval Air Facility Atsugi, an hour southwest of Tokyo. An airdrome built in 1938 to serve as base for fighter aircraft tasked with defending Tokyo from American bombers, it was on this runway that General Douglas MacArthur first set foot on Japanese mainland after the end of hostilities. While many Japanese photographers spent the post-war era exploring the shadow of Americanization that crept over their homeland through a foreign military presence, Niikura’s slim and charming collection eschews broad emotional depth to simply focus in on the cross cultural happenings of one particular afternoon; “Friendship Day”, the annual open house and Airshow held on base at Atsugi on May 9th, 1965.

The book opens up directly and literally from the base gate. With one arm on the wheel of his pale blue Volkswagen beetle an American man in aviator sunglasses looks out the window while an MP looks off into the background. The Japanese national flag billows above. Once inside we’re treated to a strange land- Niikura spends a frame of a pre-war wooden building- possibly barracks or an administration building. One wonders if the beginnings of the short lived “Atsugi Revolt” in the days following the Japanese surrender were planned in one of these buildings. As Niikura makes his way deeper into the facility we’re consistently shown his interest in the kitschy oriental decor he encounters. A “traditional” Japanese style bridge spans an small and quite empty concrete pond in a grassy spot near a parking lot. Over a pay phone hangs a large watercolor of the Great Buddha in Kamakura while a sailor, with cigarette in hand, waits behind his comrade. Vivid red Shinto tore gates appear here and there in the backgrounds.

While Shomei Tomatsu may have been ironic or even malicious in his representation of foreign servicemen, Niikura captures his Americans with a sense of bemusement. Here we a smartly dressed officer caught in awkward pose- a sandwich in one hand with a camera around his neck. Later we discover a pot-bellied Army Sargent squinting ahead while his jeep sits covered in young Japanese children. In between all the soldiers and aircraft and Jeeps and tanks Niikura keeps a steady lens on his countrymen. Japanese fathers with wives and children, all dressed in their Sunday best, cooly meander in and out of the frame. The youngest of the children obviously enjoy the chance to poke, prod, and climb on all the spotlessly clean military hardware. Little boys laugh as they sit on the wing of a jet trainer while on other pages young men snap photos with their Nikons. Visitors line up for a chance to walk through cargo plane. In one somewhat dark frame a very young brother and sister grasp the

“The message of this book is situated in the faces and bodies of the adult Japanese visitors in contrast to their American ‘guests’.”

propeller of a Boeing B-50, the upgraded version of the B-29, the very bomber which reduced much of urban Japan to smoldering ash twenty years before. Self assured, broad shouldered, and grinning, American men, women, and children drink 7-up and munch from bags of popcorn.

The message of this book is situated in the faces and bodies of the adult Japanese visitors in contrast to their American “guests”. Perhaps no image sums this up better than the one of a father interacting with an American pilot in his flight suit (“Rus” is written on his helmet). The pilot wields the leverage in the encounter with his index finger raised as to make a point. Certainly a language barrier was at work but the father, with his son’s arm hanging on his own, listens on with his hands drawn up before him. It’s by no means a confrontational scene but the contrast in confidence is marked by the body language shown. Page after page we see Japanese visitors with hands together, an expression of reservation? No one ever really looks comfortable, not when trying to order fifteen cent hamburgers at a window in English, and certainly not when partaking in a square dance with Americans in their Roy Rodgers Western Dress shirts. Younger Japanese women group together in threes and twos as they look apprehensively at the photographer. Indeed, the only young Japanese woman we find smiling is one arm in arm with her sailor boyfriend. Often we find Japanese men standing huddled together with arms crossed looking out at the spectacle before them. All the while brand new F-4 Phantoms, soon to see action in Vietnam, sit glistening off in the distance.

In the following 45 years Niikura went on to become a professional photographer and in 2010 published Dizzy Noon through Tokyo-based publisher, Sokyusha. A rather well put together little photobook, it is slim, with thirty six color images printed on a firm paper stock. It fits perfectly in your hands, just slightly taller than it is wide. The effectively simple layout respects the integrity of his 35mm frames with vertical images siting at the edge of the pages and horizontal ones centered. The book concludes with a thoughtful closing from the photographer in Japanese and English.

While enjoyable, this is a somewhat a peculiar book to find an audience for. Perhaps it is too particular to that single day it pictures to make much sense outside of its context to an international audience. On the other hand, it is charming and often entertaining. Maybe the best audience would be the Americans appearing in these photographs. I’d like to think that through the internet someone stationed at Atsugi in the mid 1960′s will come across this article and buy a copy. After all these years, they’ll be able to see how they and their home away from home appeared through a Japanese lens. I think they’d be interested in what they find.

Dizzy Noon is available in the Japan Exposures bookstore.

Photography is all about the engagement with your subject (or absence thereof). Period. Most often life becomes the most fulfilling when engaging with those around you. Relations, friends, companions, strangers, outsiders, freaks. Diane Arbus was known for the merciless depiction of her subjects, but you cannot deny her honest engagement with them.

Wheelchairs are an eye-catching photographic subject, but let us resist the temptation to be misled down the disabled = different people path. What if these are simply Harumichi Saito’s circle of friends and not some protagonists in a photographic project? Almost all of the photos in the gallery show people in them, and if you bother spending the time you realise that these are not just grabshots of interesting compositions or scenes with a person with only one leg that attract attention. There is engagement, and it is genuine interest, a dialog from behind the camera, with a sense of normality and mutual trust. It makes you wonder why anyone bothers seeking cold and impartial objectivity, except for purely selfish reasons.

The above work is taken from Saito’s series KANDO, which has now been published in a new book from Akaaka Arts Publishing, available in the Japan Exposures bookstore.

Our friend Shintaro Sato, born and raised in East Tokyo where the tower is located, has followed and documented the construction of the tower over the last few years. Initially he was simply documenting the progress of construction, but later Sato changed his approach to creating panaromics, often from slightly elevated positions like in his Tokyo Twilight Zone work. This work has now been collected into the book Risen in the East, published this month.

Sato succeeds in showing us the many views in the city that now incorporate the structure in the landscape. East Tokyo, the heart of the old Edo, was often seen as slightly neglected and lagging in terms of development. The tower was seen as an opportunity to support this wide area. As the images show, you can now be in the east and Sky Tree will always be with you, like a beacon that sends out strength and self-confidence, no matter whether you are playing football, enjoy your cherry blossom viewing or boat races, as some of the photos show.

Naturally, the tower project was conceived to manifest a symbol of the power and ingenuity of Japan, especially in light of rapid developments in neighbouring China. One cannot help to notice the other side of the coin: in the same week that Tokyo Sky Tree reached its full height as the tallest tower structure in the world, the country that was so eager to show its potency to us was struck by a monumental natural disaster with many consequences, as if to say “the higher you are flying, the deeper you shall fall”. It seems at least to me, that the view towards the tower has become more meaningful since. It is now more about us, the viewers on the ground, and less about the people who planned and executed this amazing feat of creating this man-made structure. All in all, a conundrum that seems typically Japanese.