Interesting. Kawanishi-san has anticipated my working methods. When I took these into Photo Shop in order to make them more web friendly, I found that at my threshold of jpeg quality (60) I was saving less than 100 kb per image. Meaning they're already perfectly web friendly. And big! Bigger than any photographer's work I've ever found online!
Not everyone would get excited by this, perhaps. But, to us, this stuff matters a lot. Although I like and find interesting creating web images of such scale that they can only be viewed from a "nose-to-the-photo" distance, I still feel compelled to view them fit-to-screen as well. The advantage of his method of presentation (need we even make mention of his deferral of watermark?) is that I can go from bigger than screen dimensions to fit; reversed would not really function.
If you're not yet viewing these expanded in their own respective browser tab (or Preview window), you're utterly unaware of the texture of the photos, which is how these images must be seen. I imagine printing must be quite challenging for him. (Prints often come out some degree darker than they appear on a monitor. If I were to attempt to print these without assistance they would be mostly black sheets of paper.)
What do I know about him? Ugh. Absolutely nothing. No! This information!
CV
1983 Born in Tokyo, Japan
2007 Graduated from Sophia University
1983 東京都生まれ
2007 上智大学卒業
These images are just a loose sampling of the work that he places on his blog. What is this work? Is this his main work? Does he do something else? Is he in school? What does he do for work, on a day-to-day level? I'm definitely presuming that he shoots film... does he hand meter? Does he underexpose? What does his digital process look like?
(Is that yellow image taken from a tight crop from a television? Am I completely wrong in my film assumption?)
Why does available light create such magical images, and yet has fallen almost completely out of viable commercial application?
Short answer; not my problem. (Very much not true.) Another short answer; we've got a drastic reduction in the resting level of baseline nuanced photographic appreciation of color. In other words, digital is sinking in, collectively.
Another short answer; clearly it's not completely lost. Hopefully not in my lifetime, anyway. Our kids will be looking at this stuff and thinking, "God. How could they look at a picture that isn't utterly full spectrum HDR?" (Or whatever term comes to replace the primitive, hideous technology we currently think of as HDR. I shot a boring HDR image once. It came back from the printer, who was probably bemused by my naive 32-bit depth of color, as very, very red. We were all a little unimpressed, as I recall. Now that I'm shooting film again, it's like a switch has been flipped, and I can do good work again. Or work that at least makes me happy, and sometimes proud.)
Photographers like Ryo Kawanishi tell me that I'm very much not alone.
Post script: I never even got around to writing about the date stamp. (Although I certainly included enough exclamation points for a few future posts.) Perhaps I didn't get around to it because this work, rather than this work, does not feature it so prominently. This is truly an idiosyncratic practice at this point. Even serious photographers, that I know, who are some of the most open-minded viewers you can come across and are in a position to accept or reject this compositional and data driven tool (which says things about physical tools, in effect cameras, cropping, historical positioning, etc.), seem to mostly view this technique as outside their realm of possibility. I find this puzzling. I know I came to it from a Japanese vantage point, through Araki, and then further from Ari Marcopoulos. And I certainly don't use it ubiquitously, as neither of these men do.
But the only critical discussion I've had about it has been, essentially, why is it there? Which does not work.
Don't get me wrong; I believe in questioning assumptions, and in a mandate of deliberation, and then deliberateness, steadiness. Why is it there? Sure.
The problem is; it's there. Why is it there doesn't make it not there. It's too late. Indelibly so.
So let's deal with it.
Okay? Because once we do that, we start to have more interesting things to talk about. (Even if every photographer I know personally would never dream of joining the club, even for their casual images. Or would rather do it in Photo Shop. Poorly, oftentimes. Because they've never actually done it; meaning they lack the facilities to, firstly, correctly reproduce/mimic the characteristics of an LED display, and secondly, because they've never given a moment's thought to what, literally, the decision entails. Namely: day-month-year, month-day-year [where I sometimes sit], year-month-day, or [where Kawanishi, and to my limited scope, only Kawanishi sits] day-hour-minute. Scroll down a ways to the vertical moon, on the previous post featuring Kawanishi-san's picture. Got it? Now tell me it's not something worth trying.)
Maybe that's why I never write about the date stamp. I start ranting about LEDs. You can't take me anywhere.
2 comments:
You're definitely getting me more into the LED date stamp, which I had previously unconditionally loathed. I'd be curious to see a round up of some of your favorite photos that include date stamps.
Also, when you shoot with the date stamp, do you (personally) consciously compose the shot with the date stamp in mind?
Not really. It's partially a by-product of the camera that I'm using that makes it available. (As you know, on the T4 it's an embedded feature. On my Olympus I'd have to seek out a special device to be attached to the back. Which I actually would really like to get; I've seen samples and the LED type in its stamp is incredibly charming.)
But the T4 Zoom... it's sort of half and half.
At times I utterly forget that I have it on, and it becomes a characteristic to be evaluated like every other. Other times I'm aware that I'm shooting with it, but it's hard to give it much active consideration. After all, on that camera, framing is estimated through an indirect viewfinder, and once you start zooming your crop becomes even more of an estimation.
Sometimes, though, what it signifies is an approach toward the acquisition of those shots. Sometimes it's a sign that I was shooting very loose, basically ignoring the viewfinder. Other times I try to be as methodical as I can in my framing and compositions, and trust the date-stamp to offer an implicit contradiction in that deliberateness. (Taking time and making effort, but hiding that exertion.)
So, in effect, it goes both ways in that regard.
Another factor that I've only just started to be more conscious of is whether I'm shooting vertically. In that case, it's usually preferable to have the stamp appear on the lower left side of the frame, more so than the upper right. This ends up being a very tactile consideration, though, in the act of shooting. (Holding the camera in such a way that you're releasing the shutter with your thumb. I also tend to do a lot of tabletop steadying in low light, though, and for this, vertically, the camera has to be positioned in such a way as to put the stamp in the less desirable upper right. So sometimes it happens.)
As for the round-up, that's tough! Araki's work is mostly collected in hundreds and hundreds of books, as you know. His representation online, like many of the world's most famous photographers, is pretty scant in comparison.
I can lend you his biographical documentary, Arakimentary, if you like, though. It's quite good, full of amazning images, and a soundtrack by (who else) DJ Krush.
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