Seen: White Album
Who: Fumikiyo Nagamachi
Where: Photographers’ Gallery, Shinjuku
When: January 16 - 18, 2015 / 12 - 8pm
What: Handheld 8x10 street photography.Nagamachi and I have been friends for ten years now- but this was the first show he’s had since I’ve been in town. I had known for a while that he took photographs on the street with an 8x10 camera- but other than a single promotional postcard from 2001 I had not seen any other examples of his work. So it was with excitement that I headed over to Photographers’ Gallery in Shinjuku to check out his latest show.
The gallery itself is in an older narrow building with an exhibition space half as wide- and rendered impeccably white. This arrangement makes for an impressive way to experience Nagamachi’s massive prints- no matter where you turn the subjects in the pictures are larger than life. The extremely narrow depth of field of his 8x10 lens creates an interesting distortion that your eyes can’t quite make sense of at this scale.
Nagamachi told me that he uses a Tachikawa filed camera loaded with 8x10 sheets of Fuji NS160 color reversal film. The kind of control which a normal camera allows is limited with this setup- he sets the shutter speed and focus, and then cradles the rig in his arms for a hip-shot. Once a subject is within range, he snaps the shutter. In terms of picture form there’s an interesting amount of chance involved- focus, framing, and subject matter are be approximated. Control? He’s focusing the game down to the exploration a temporal element. In this way the pictures have their own quietness- decisive moments which are all found and not precisely created.
I asked if he scanned the negs for the prints- he said no, these are C-prints done in a professional darkroom in Tokyo. Apparently the newest image in the show was taken just a few weeks ago. It’s quite impressive how this entire enterprise is completed through personal time outside of a day job. Dedication towards working out an unexplainable desire (and energy) to feed a particular photographic curiosity is always something to respect.