Ginza
Ricoh GR1v
Photographer: Tomona Hayashi
If you’ve followed this blog for a while you probably know I’m a huge fan of Hayashi’s photographs- we first met back in 2011 at TPPG when she was still a student of Shinya Arimoto. She is a member of 3rd District Gallery in Shinjuku and has a few shows there a year- Here’s some photos of her self-made photo(copy)book at a show there in March. Shots from her last show, The End of Qi, got some mad love on tumblr. More on Hayashi on Tokyo Camera Style here.
This was the second time we ran into each other in somewhere that wasn’t the Shinjuku-Yotsuya photo gallery walk- Soon after I moved into Tokyo last July I took a quick walk over to Ueno’s Yodobashi Camera and there on the corner saw Tomona out with her Konica Hexar. Since it wasn’t going to be more than a quick errand I left both my phone and GRD at home, hence no proof of that encounter on this blog. Oh well. There’s a straight-up Showa-era kissaten coffee shop a few blocks over that we had coffee at. It’s the kind that you can still find all over Osaka but is rarer in Tokyo. I made the mistake of using that venue as a meet-up spot a few years ago with an editor and a photographer for a project we were planning- We got a seat and I was asked in a whisper- “Why’d you choose this place? This is the kind of shop that Yakuza frequent.” Looking around, yep. They were right. It’s not really a place to snap with abandon but the atmosphere is pretty good.