Premier quality lens adapter manufacturer Rayqual have today released the manual focus lens to Fujifilm X-Pro 1 mount adapter. The following lens mounts are available:

• Leica M
• Nikon F
• Contax/Yashica
• Canon FD
• Pentax K
• Olympus OM
• M42
• Leica R
• Exakta

Adapters for autofocus lenses (Nikon FG, Pentax DA) including an aperture control ring will following in due course.

The new Fujifilm X-Pro 1 is the latest exciting addition to the growing variety of small mirrorless SLR cameras allowing flexible use of contemporary and classic lenses. While there are a wide variety of adapters on the market, Rayqual adapters are MADE IN JAPAN to the highest quality standards allowing photographers and cinematographers to reliably and precisely mount alternative lenses on their cameras.

A customer in the video/motion picture industry who tried their luck with the cheaper alternatives comments: “We already have adaptors for all our Nikon lenses and they work, it’s just that the tolerances are no good resulting in the lenses rotating which is a problem when trying use a follow focus shooting video.” The issues were resolved after switching to the equivalent Rayqual products.

You can find the Rayqual Fujifilm X-Pro 1 mount lens adapter and other Rayqual products in our web shop.

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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.

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Above photo taken with Perar 35 #003 on Leica M9

We are pleased with the response to the newly released MS Optical Super Triplet 28/4 lens and would like to give you an update on this and the 35/3.5 lens.

The 28mm Perar is seeing very good uptake and we are getting a lot of positive feedback on it. We had expected that the demand will outpace the rate of production, but in this case a shortage of iris diaphragms used for the lens’ aperture has caused a temporary hold on production. New apertures are being manufactured by a supplier and should ship from Germany to Japan later this week to let lens assembly continue so we can resume shipping our numerous pending orders. Thank you for your patience around this.

We are also seeing strong interest in the Kenko 19mm Skylight and UV filters. Unfortunately it seems that Kenko have decided to no longer produce them, so our stocks are limited. We are giving full priority to customers purchasing Perar lenses from us and hope to supply everyone with a filter who wishes to have one. If you are not purchasing a Perar lens and wanted to order the filter, we are sorry for possibly having to turn you down.

Lastly, the Super Triplet Perar 35/3.5 is continuing to attract interest from photographers to the extent that MS Optical have decided a fourth production batch of 100 lenses of the 35mm lenses. Thanks to the success of these items, we are in a position to be able to extend the production run in even relatively small quantities to ensure continued supply. I want to reemphasize that the lot quantities were never intended to imply artificial scarcity or produce a Limited Edition item at any point in time. Since nobody can foresee the uptake of such a lens and capital expenditure is an issue, the best approach is to adjust production to demand and expand as needed.

I hope this update is of use and we appreciate you spreading the word and keep generating interest in the fabulous lenses. We have customer feedback that is very explicit about how the Perar lenses has helped them achieving their photographic objective, for example by minimising gear or simply become less noticed by their subjects. We are delighted in hearing such positive reports.

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Yoshihiro Hagiwara was born in Gunma Prefecture in 1961, and since graduating from the Department of Fine Arts at Nihon University in 1985 has been a professional photographer, spending over 20 years at Mainichi Shimbun, one of Japan’s major newspapers. Pursuing his own personal photography, he won a newcomer’s prize at Photo City Sagamihara in 2001, and in 2010 won a special prize at the Higashikawa International Photo Festival. Two books of his photography have been published — the 2004 Kyokan Zanei, and Snowy in 2008. (Both books are available in the Japan Exposures bookstore.)

The photo above comes from his “Kyokan Zanei” series, which explores the various shut down and abandoned coal (and other) mines throughout Japan, which Hagiwara has been visiting and photographing for 30 years.

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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.

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We are pleased to announce the release of a 28mm version of the popular MS Optical Super Triplet Perar 3.5/35: the MS Optical Super Triplet Perar 4/28.

The lens is available for pre-order now in our web shop. Orders will be served in the order received. Please note that as usual there might be a waiting period between receiving your order and fulfilment, due to the nature of the lens.

Japan Exposures has over six years of experience of selling MS Optical products, including several hundred of Super Triplets 35mm. This includes efficient and cost-effective shipping, handling of after-sale warranty & repairs and even intra-EU shipping to save on import duty. Thank you for your continued support.

The simplest optical design that is capable of correcting all of the seven Seidel aberrations over a wide field of view is the Cooke triplet, developed by H. Dennis Taylor in 1893. It is named after the optical company in York, England, for which Taylor worked at the time, Cooke and Sons (later to become Cooke, Troughton and Sims). Taylor’s designs, despite their antiquity, are close to optimum for the aperture and field he intended, given the glass types available in his day.

However, at around 1925 with the rise of the Tessar lens designed by Paul Rudolph of Zeiss the Cooke triplet was starting to be relegated to cheaper lenses such as those in compact cameras, due to its simple design affording low cost manufacturing.

Mr Miyazaki of MS Optical, a small independent manufacturer of lenses and camera accessories, believes that a well-designed triplet is superior to the Tessar. Only very few lenses in history exploited the full power of the formula, such as an early version of the Leitz Elmar 90/4 with three elements. He started researching and designing his own ideal triplet lens at the highest level possible, using 21st century materials and manufacturing techniques. The result is the MS Super Triplet Perar 4/28, which has just been released. (For those wondering about the origin of the lens name, in Japanese pera-pera means thin or flimsy.)

Despite it’s deceptively simple construction of three lens elements Miyazaki was able to design a lens of not only outstanding performance, but also with a very interesting form factor and at comparatively low cost.

Here are its key features:

• Very high optical quality triplet formula lens
• Ultra compact design, weight 45g, 55g with hood
• Premium quality Tantalum glass, superior to Trium and Lanthanum glass with best refractive qualities
• Refined triplet design with two double thickness positive lenses, superior to Tessar design
• 10 blade quasi-round aperture for smooth and pleasing bokeh (Made in Germany by Otto Niemann Feinmechanik GmbH, Berlin)
• Minimum focus distance 0.8m
• ALL glass surfaces multicoated, 97% light transmission
• Vivid, real and beautiful color reproduction, high contrast high resolution images
• Unique exposed front aperture (hood accepts 19mm size filters with 0.5 pitch)
• Initial lot of 180 lenses, designed, manufactured and hand-assembled in Japan by Mr Sadoyasu Miyazaki
• Native Leica M mount

The MS Optical Super Triplet Perar 4/28 is available now in our web shop.

Just like MS Optical’s lens conversions, please be aware that this lens is slightly different in operation from “normal” mass-manufactured lenses. For example, the aperture scale rotates with the whole lens barrel when the lens is focussed and there are no aperture click stops. This is not a lens for photographers who want all their lenses to function in the same way and cannot adjust to a different way of working. This is a design for the connoisseur with an appreciation for optics and their history.

Regarding the exposed aperture: while it may appear as unusual to some people, exposed apertures are not uncommon in lens history. Aperture placement depends on the lens design and does not have to sit in the nodal point plane, only in the light path. For example, when the lens is too small i.e. distances between elements too tight and distance to the image plane too short, the aperture can/must be placed in front.

Additional note: due to a manufacturing glitch, lens name was engraved “SUPER TPIRLET as opposed to “SUPER TRIPLET”. This does not affect lens performance.

There is no other independent maker of Leica M mount lenses that offers the same level of quality and creativity as MS Optical in the world today. The Perar is not just a lens, it is a celebration of the spirit of photography.

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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.

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Harumichi Saito was born in Tokyo in 1983, and graduated from the Shakujii School for the Deaf in Tokyo in 2004. After being an Honorable Selection by photography critic Kotaro Iizawa in the Canon New Cosmos Photography competition of 2009, he returned to the competition in 2010 and was photographer Masafumi Sanai’s selection for one of four Excellence Awards handed out, for the work from which the above photo is taken.

Saito’s work focuses on people living with disabilities, but his work is not in itself a portrait of disability. As Saito himself commented at the time of his 2010 New Cosmos award, “I was never satisfied with photography that concerns disabilities. They are usually either monochrome photographs that are too austere, or the exact opposite: unnaturally cheerful and full of smiles. I never felt comfortable with this.”

Saito’s work from KANDO has been published in a new book from Akaaka Arts Publishing which is now available in the Japan Exposures bookstore. Please also see our special gallery featuring more of Saito’s KANDO work.

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Anatolia, by Hiroh Kikai ¥9,490 ¥8,490
Published in January, 2011, this book from Asakusa Portraits-famed Hiroh Kikai is the first ever substantial presentation of his considerable body of work from Turkey. It depicts Anatolia, but also points west and east, and was created during six visits (totaling 45 weeks) that Kikai made from 1994 through 2009. See this review at Microcord for more about the book.

Hana Dorobou, by Eikoh Hosoe ¥2,990 ¥2,490
Undergarment designer Yoko Kamoi (1925-1991) presented to Hosoe a series of her handmade dolls and told him, “Do with them what you want.” For Hosoe, they were more human than doll, and they seemed to take a life of their own, the scenes he eventually photographed them in seemingly situtations these dolls were getting themselves into — or so Hosoe felt, so strong was their human-like nature.

Hana Kinbaku, by Nobuyoshi Araki, ¥7,990 ¥5,990
Published in conjunction with his exhibition at Taka Ishii Gallery (Tokyo) in 2008, this 150-plus full color catalogue brings together two of Araki’s well-known obsessions, flowers and bondage scenes.

Kazuo Kitai in China, 1973, by Kazuo Kitai, ¥2,590 ¥1,990
Kitai, who was born in Anshan, Manchuria in 1944, returned to China in 1973 at the behest of the noted Japanese photographer Ihei Kimura, who assembled a group of photographers to travel the country for two weeks with him. The photos that Kitai took on this trip, which he intended to publish as a book but never did, are now collected in this special publication from Tokyo gallery Zen Foto Gallery.

Lime Works, by Naoya Hatakeyama, ¥4,290 ¥3,590
A much-needed reprint of Hatakeyama’s seminal 1996 Lime Works.

Cell, by Taiji Matsue, ¥4,990 ¥4,490
This book from 2008 by Taiji Matsue features tiny pieces (or “cells” if you will) of larger photos blown up many times over, rendering each photo both abstract and concrete at the same time.

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Eikoh Hosoe season at BLD Gallery in Ginza

That bubble has long since burst but it still retains its hoity toity air, and to be honest I’ve never felt entirely comfortable there, though I often go there and used to find it a fertile ground for shooting as well, back in the days when I actually took photos. It also happens to be a good place to take in photos, featuring a few good galleries in the area, and it used to be a camera fetishists dream with several used camera shops.

BLD Gallery is one of the newer spaces, going back just three or four years I believe. It’s on the eighth floor of a building that houses a Zara brand shop on the first floor, but fortunately the entrance to the elevator is on the side so I don’t feel so self-conscious about my rather less than foppish attire. Their shows feature established artists, particularly Daido Moriyama, but also including Toshio Shibata, Takuma Nakahira, Masato Seto, and Michael Kenna, and although they are not exlusively a photography gallery, that is what they exhibit in the main.

One thing about BLD is that their shows are always extremely well-presented. Whoever is curating their exhibits definitely seems to make the best of the space, which is one large-ish room and an awkward smaller room off to the side, in addition to a small bookstore/merchandise area. The Shibata show I saw there last Fall was simply exquisite, with large 40×50 inch prints deftly mixed in with 40 or so smaller pieces.

Currently on view is the first of a five-show Eikoh Hosoe retrospective which will run until May. The first installment features work from Kamaitachi, shot in 1965 and first exhibited in 1968, and collected in the 1969 limited edition photo book of the same name. Thankfully due to the republication of this book in 2009 by Aperture in the US and Seigensha here in Japan, more people have become familiar with this work, although sure enough some of the images have become iconic over the years.

In 1965 Hosoe accompanied Tatsumi Hijikata, who along with Kazuo Ohno basically founded the post-WWII Butoh dance movement — to Yamagata prefecture where Hosoe spent his youth (Hijikata himself was from Akita, the prefecture north of Yamagata).

From Kamaitachi, by Eikoh Hosoe

The work is playful and irreverent, a departure from the dark brooding portraits of Yukio Mishima in Barakei, and perhaps my favorite part of Hosoe’s extensive oeuvre. There is a free-wheeling sense to the work — like much of what was being produced in Japan at the time (think Provoke) but yet in some of the portraits and landscapes, a classicism as well.

What’s particularly special about this BLD exhibit is that they are showing the same prints from when Hosoe first showed the work in March, 1968, under the title “An Extremely Tragic Comedy”, exhibited where else but in Ginza, at the Nikon Salon (still operating today in Ginza, in a newer location as both showroom and gallery space). That is to say, the very same pieces of paper that hung on the Nikon Salon walls 44 years ago. Not knowing this at first I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on — why the prints had this strange discoloration around the edges (due to the oxidation of the silver into silver ions), as well as these peeling circular labels with numbers on them that were affixed to the bottom corner of each print. (This .pdf from the Eastman House is a nicely thorough guide to gelatin silver print conditions.)

Having seen a few years ago some plantinum prints from Barakei that had been done by Hosoe and his son, I thought initially that these prints were a result of some vintage printing process, but the fact that they were just simply vintage was not a let down but in fact extremely interesting from a visual point of view, and fit in perfectly with the work and the emotional connection I was having as I walked around the room. And I found it refreshing that Hosoe could see the emotional value of these messy, deteriorated prints rather than getting hung up on pristine and prissy print quality.

One of my photos, taken in the Ginza in 2004

(Update: January 30, 2012) You can see some examples of the prints via a few pictures from BLD Gallery’s Twitter feed: here, here, and here.

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