Journal

Posted on

Film and Digital

I use film for my personal photos, and digital for work. Photos need emotion and somehow one of the ingredient seems to be real film emulsion. I shoot mostly women, and with women I need chemistry..

Film feels imperfect and analog. Because the medium is imperfect, I have better chance to success.. within the limits I can be limitless (as otherwise I am imperfect human and photographer). Film is organic and vulnerable to exposure. Film needs patience, and what I try to do with my images, definitely needs some too.

Since I like those things, I prefer to use film like Fomapan which is honest, grainy and further away from pixel world.

For my job however, I prefer to shoot digital. My clients often want to get the photos soon, and they seem not to mind, and often even prefer the digital look.  It’s cost effective and fast. I don’t mean to say that I would never shoot film for “job”. In fact I would love to.

But I like the separation actually, because I want my art to be personal work. When I have my film camera with me I know I am not shooting for others. And even if the people around me want to see the photos immediately, well, they can’t. A young woman I shot recently said she feels more comfortable in front of a film camera, because we can’t see the photos soon.

So finally, I shoot my personal work with the same camera I shoot my child and family with, a film camera.

Photography is thing of love for me.

Posted on

Pictures of my Son

[vc_row row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” text_align=”left” css_animation=””][vc_column][vc_column_text]Pictures from early 2017[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” text_align=”left” css_animation=””][vc_column][vc_gallery type=”image_grid” images=”23797,23791,23792,23793,23795,23796,23790,23798,23789,23808″ img_size=”medium” css_animation=”fadeIn” column_number=”0″ grayscale=”no” space_between_images=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Posted on

Liberation

I have been taking a lot of pictures of my son. “I’m tired to be your model, please take pictures of something else”, my son says.

I suppose part of my journey as a photographer is to seek meaning of a picture. Shooting own family member automatically secures some meaning to the frame, as the time spent will never return. Child will never be child again and we will all die. Even if it’s not a very good photo in photographic sense, it will still be important because it’s unique record of the time and relationship.

For me taking pictures like that also guides me to seek my relationship to the world. I am what people call me in Japanese “majime”, a serious person , sort of. I am so very interested in human. I surely hope that my intention would be visible in any pictures I take and especially pictures of women.

It seems like every line in my life is pointing to the direction of my eventual death and disappearing. I am not sure if all people in the age of 38 think about death as much as I do. But I hope that today I can live fully and be the best version of myself.

A photo should be a liberation.

Posted on

Love needs both invisible feeling and visible action.

Posted on

I took her photo

I was taking pictures in local area in Yokohama few days ago. There is my favorite photo development / old camera shop. I met this lovely lady in the old shopping street and took her photo.

Posted on

Birthday Present

My friend in Kyoto sent me a birthday present. I realized that photo books have bigger meaning if we receive them from someone.

Posted on

Ping

Artist is always alone, like submarine in deep sea. But sometimes we can make radio communications to others, and we get response, even though it may be garbled, messed up information.

But for a brief moment, we can make out the signal, separate it from the noise, hear the code that makes some sense.

To be not alone, it’s crazy dream. But isn’t it the only reason there is hope.. to get a ping back, echo from the deep

Posted on

Empty wall

I built a large acoustic panel last year to put in my room. I wanted to make it really cool, like the ones you see in studios with fancy wood grain. I wanted to put diagonal wood beams to it to give it really professional look, but my measurements failed, and I only had wood enough to make them run horizontally. Thus the whole thing ended up looking like a stupid bed that is raised against the wall. The thing is full of glass wool.

But I noticed that this contraption made a little or no difference to neither the sound recording in my room or the sound from my speakers. Its same with or without it, so I pulled it apart today to make more negative space in my room.

All my effort became nothing, and it could be argued that this was all completely meaningless endeavor. I would have better of spending that money to photo books or my favorite albums. But it’s meaningless also to spend time thinking about it now. It’s done and gone.

Isn’t art exactly like this kind of process? We have big effort do something and then it just vanishes like in thin air and we are empty again? And for sure sometimes this all feels meaningless. Are we just blind to see it?

Posted on

Finland

I want to restart my blog. I want to write free and gay, without too much editing, just for fun. The reason why I have been kept starting and quitting this blog is that I have always started to feel that this blog should be more properly written, and always on topic. But I don’t find it fun or genuine, so I stop, always.

We humans are not such linear beings. We are not supposed to make sense all the time. What I need in my life most now is a kind of pointless wandering, time. My photo needs it too. So I hope this blog would be a simple and naked reflection to my life.

I visited Finland last month with my son. Going abroad with him just two of us first time was a dream came true. For me it was perhaps the enjoyable to go through the rituals of traveling just with him this time. I explained him how jet airplanes work and why they fly so high in the sky. We checked our luggage, eat the cute lunch in the plane (yes, Finnair still include green soba buckwheat noodles in their lunch as although their lunch is completely western), breathed in Scandinavian air, and played with snow.

Finland, a country where my sweet home is. I moved to Japan ten years ago.

Why is it that we always expect our hometown to stay the same? Our lives change constantly, plate tectonics shift, world economy and geopolitical situation is in flux, this ebb and flow, moon cycle, and so on.. Nature likes to change. But when we take the journey back home, even when it’s not thousand kilometers in the sky, we expect everything be just like it was when we left, so many years ago.

Of course, it isn’t. During those years of our absence, people have been living their lives, went on and about,  gained age and some of them got sick and passed away. The scenery has changed; it doesn’t smell like it used to. Cracks have appeared on the walls that used to be the foundation of our childhood. What used to be a solid, safe roof is now slightly leaking.

My uncle’s book, “Kolme Huonetta” has a poem in it, “Prelude foreshadows the end of the composition”. Beginning of a winter has a promise of it’s end. When our plane took off from Helsinki Vantaa, somehow the thought formed in my mind, “it’s not just sad that we die”.

I bought just two things with me from Finland, Haruki Murakami’s short story collection Birthday Stories,  and Banana Yoshimoto’s Lizard. Both of them are in English, not in Japanese. There’s something in these books what makes me feel comfortable. Perhaps I haven’t changed that much.