The nice people from SoulAgency, a new German agency representing unknown artists, and their affiliated Vorn Magazine are featuring about two dozens of my photos from the Pair Work and Tokyo Special Magic series. Needless to say I am delighted to be represented by someone!
The agency is not completely live until the beginning of next year, and the web site is also still being worked at (including English translations). But it is accessible already, so please have a little browse there.
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When I went to Germany on my own this time, I expected and intended to try a lot more of Euro street photography. It has been said, by a in this respect and others completely unreliable German source, that taking photos of people in public is much more difficult than in Japan. This comment makes sense to some degree. Apart from receiving a, shall we say, veiled threat from what I can only think of as a Russian yakuza in Japan, there is little or nobody bothering to challenge the street photographer in Japan.
Since we know that Germans like to challenge things and people, I expected a lot more suspicion and resistance. And while for family reasons I did not find as much time for taking pictures as I would have liked to, I did some just to get a feel for shooting in a “foreign” environment.
Rather unsurprisingly, it is pretty similar to shooting in Japan. Naturally, the subject matter is different, and in my personal opinion far less exciting than in Japan, but that’s a different issue. I felt surprised being able to speak freely to people, in the case they joked about me photographing them, or in one case asking me what I am doing this for (I replied I am visiting from far away).
This little series was taken more or less haphazardly when I accompanied my mother to a doctor’s appointment at 8 or so in the morning. The location is a shopping centre area in what in Japan would be called new town, or housing development elsewhere, built in the 1960s. This area has never been of much interest to me, and this hasn’t changed. As youths we tried to avoid it because the social structure of the area was rather different from our backgrounds in the traditional town. We spent little time there, or with others from that area.
Unfortunately I had only the roll of film available, that was in the camera at the time, but it was enough to get into the groove and be able to compare. Don’t know what to make of the photos. I wish I would have had more film, and the market itself was not of such a great interest to me, but the only thing that was going on there at that time of day.
As for the girl in the wheelchair, I had no hesitation taking a photo of her, as she is part of the scene there like the others. We had a brief conversation, and it turned out that she was visiting from Heidelberg and had difficulties getting around in this unknown city. I replied that I have the same problem, which seemed to surprise her for some reason.
Photo by Greg Miller
Greg Miller, a large format photographer who I have discovered just recently, has published a new series called Band Camp. It was mainly after seeing Miller’s work that I decided to try out large format photography for myself, albeit on the more modest size of 4×5″ instead of his 8×10″. The properties of that format are promising enough for me to spend some time and money to try and see things for myself. And boy, time and money it takes. Little is as it was, with 35mm or even medium format.
Die Zeit
Yesterday I open a long ignored issue of the really excellent and under-appreciated (by me) German weekly newspaper Die Zeit and one sentence in the centre of the page jumps right into my eye.
…the orientation of character towards rationality hampers spiritual experiences.
The nice thing about recognising a true answer to a question one is having is the fact, that afterwards you realise that you actually knew it yourself beforehand and it just could not be articulated. Then your destiny prints it in a newspaper for all to see.
Some notable things:
– cars stop at zebra crossings
– all shop assistants wish “a nice day”
– it rains on most days
– it is 20 degrees colder than Japan
– it is extremely difficult to get decent photo supplies in Niedersachsen (“Lower Saxony”, postcode 3xxxx); mentioning sheet film creates blank gazes
– the photo fair was a bunch of old geezers with mostly Leica and Rollei stuff talking to each other; all I bought was a Polaroid 545 holder at a decent price
– many wind power generators
– beer very tasty!
– many nice cars
Counting the days till our return to Japan, which I started missing a little bit…
Weighing 1.6kg and containing only the film to let you to take a maximum of 20 photos. This is a clue to my next project which I will start during my stay back home in Germany from tomorrow…
See you soon!
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Water trough, Fusebententoukai temple
You know you’re selling out when you post photos of Japanese temple scenes. In this case I just could not resist, not least because I am getting more and more satisfied how tones come out in Fuji Presto 400 in Xtol 1:2, even in contrasty scenes like this. I realised that by mistake I did two inversions per 30 seconds instead of my usual one. Somehow it must have been beneficial, so I will always do two inversions from now on. The compressed image got a little too much contrast, the negative looks really beautiful indeed.
Photo taken in a really very nice temple in Akebono Park, not too far from home, which is, unbelievably, also part of Kashiwa (if you follow the link, a glimpse of the usual Kashiwa madness awaits).