Text and images by Christoph Hammann for Japan Exposures Germany is full of Christmas fairs this time of the year. They are to be found in every larger town and even in some villages. Visually, they are an assault of colored lights, vivid vendor‘s stalls and people mingling and socializing while sipping Glühwein (mulled wine) and nibbling Lebkuchen... 

Nobuyoshi Araki’s recent Koushoku Painting show at Rathole Gallery (October 17 – December 7, 2008) featured 10 very large silver gelatin black and white prints that Araki had then painted over with various colors. Most of the photos depicted different models in various states of bondage, or “kinbaku” as it is known in Japanese.... 

The first impression you get from picking up and open Tomoko Sawada’s School Days is that while it is a standard, small sized photo book and specified as a paperback, the pages are thick cardboard pages like a children’s book. This gives the book a chunky feel, but also means that the number of pages and therefore the number of plates included... 

This ad for Fujifilm’s Fujica 35 Auto-M is from the back cover of the April, 1962 issue of Asahi Camera, and was “on sale now” as the red lettering says in the top left corner. The tag line plays up its magical quality by telling us “You don’t need to touch either the aperture ring or the shutter speed dial.” (Literally,... 

  Text and images by Christoph Hammann for Japan Exposures When I took up a new project this fall, I decided to try my hand at developing color negative film. This is supposed to be difficult and prone to developing errors. In fact, though I had bought some Fuji Pro800 rollfilm and a Naniwa Colorkit N C-41 developing kit earlier, I held them back... 

Even though Ryuichiro Suzuki has been a photographer for close to 45 years, he has until recently remained relatively unknown and unheralded, even in Japan. However, with the publication last year of Odyssey, a retrospective monograph of Suzuki’s career, as well this year’s release of Druk – both from the Japanese publishing house Heibonsha... 

This book was not planned to happen. It was created somewhat accidentally, without a concrete result in mind. In spring 2006 I went out with a then new digital camera and came up with the idea to a flash project, essentially a fancy term for a collection of photographs on a specific topic to be created within a short period of time. Evaluating the... 

An analog photograph and a digital photograph cannot be compared. It is because their images are completely different. I like to call the photographic image of the digital camera an “optical picture.” It is not easy to recognise that an analog photograph and a digital photograph are completely different images. The above words and the photo...