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In addition to taking photography classes in college I studied drawing and painting.  My style at the time was “figurative” but looked more like abstract expressionism.  I started paintings thinking about the figure but it became abstracted.

Now with not enough time and space to do paintings, I’m trying to express my painterly sensibilities with some of the color photographs I make.  My aesthetic is now more minimalist and I am trying to capture moments in which someone like myself would see something and ponder something else.  The subject is therefore the scene a framed 2-dimensional moment in time.  I hope to have time to actually paint some of these on a large canvas but for now they are in color negative and digital form, waiting….

Camera/ Image notes:  the above images were taken with a Yashica Electro35MC and old, expired CVS brand color film I found at my uncle’s house.  They where in a dusty old case stashed away in a cool dark place and I estimate the film to be around 20 years old.  I read that people think Fuji made the CVS brand film.  The Yashica has a clouded viewfinder window and a little corrosion at the flash mount but its 40mm f2.8 Copal lens makes wonderful images.  Shutter speed is automatic and it only uses zone focusing which I am used to doing with the Leica M6 on the street.   An interesting “feature” on this camera is that the winder slips at the end of the roll so I get double or triple exposures on the last frame.  I highly recommend the Yashica Electro35MC for everyday or even travel film photography.  It is pocketable in a jacket and you can find a whole kit for around $70 on eBay.

 

I have been returning to Tokyo for decades after living here for 3+ years meeting my wife and working for many Japanese companies.  There is a slick, modern, classical, beautiful side of the city that you see in travel photos and on Instagram, but I like to look for the grittier side of cities as well.  I live in San Francisco now and when I tell people I live there when I am traveling, people comment on what a beautiful city it is.  I agree it has beauty but there is a gritty, dirty side that residents of the city deals with every day.

Now in Tokyo I have not seen people sleeping on porches of million dollar homes or people shooting up and using the sidewalk as their bathroom.  Ok, late at night maybe there are drunk people urinating in public and puking on train platforms and in trains.

So back to the topic of this blog entry.  I write this from a 24hr coffee shop (Jonathan’s) where I do my overseas conference calls as not to wake my family and relatives in the early morning hours.  On this trip I have tried to capture more of the city that is seen by the typical working family and working people.

These are parts of Tokyo that have not gentrified and still have the old shopping streets or shotengai with coffee shops and izakaya.  Ok there are some trendy “baru” restaurants popping up here and there but they are trying to look like there are old so they kind of fit in.  Above are some areas you can get off the beaten path – Akabane in Kita-Ku, and the side streets or underground around Asakusa (the old downtown or shitamachi).

 

 

Shooting film on an all-manual camera helps me slow down and think about the images I am making instead of chimping after each shot.  Also the Leica M6 is small and doesn’t cover much of my face when shooting so it really feels like I’m not behind the camera.  Finally I like the excitement of looking at a contact sheet to see what I got and then scanning them.

I enjoy surfing and just being around the ocean.  I recently have been satisfied with the way that black and white photos capture the texture of the sand and water and the light of the moment.

I finally got around to seeing the Walker Evans exhibit at San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art.  I knew of Evans images of poor farm families for the Farm Security Administration, but have seen little else.  His work capturing everyday images, or the “vernacular,” connected with me.  It is great to have the opportunity to travel the world and take photos of interesting places but there are so many interesting images the world presents to us every day.

The images above and below were shot with a Hasselblad X-Pan II with 40mm f4 lens on Fuji Pro400 film.  This was my first roll with this borrowed camera and I found it difficult to mind-compose panoramic images before lifting the camera to my face.  I suppose if you went out into nature you could capture some nice images of open spaces.  Street images might be interesting too.

I’ve always been drawn to stories whether they be in the form of books, movies or still images.  Still images for me are just a small part of a larger story, a quick moment which is subject to interpretation or creative license (for construction of reality) due to the lack of additional context.  I enjoy reading an artists own words about their work or even certain critics’ words on a work too.  In art school we were told that we could only control a small part of what observers would take away from our works.  Observers bring their own experiences, moods, bias to the viewing of your work so they make up their own story of what it is about.  The strongest work, whether photography, drawing or painting, for me is when I stand in front of it and a rush of emotions and memories flood my mind.  Examples of paintings that do this for me include the works of Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenburg and Julian Schnabel but there are so many others.  In photography, images take me to a different place, time or situation.  Black and white photos can shroud things in shadows opening the image to further interpretation and construction.