Seen / exhibiting: Zuisha vol.11
Who: Me
Where: Totem Pole Photo Gallery, Shinjuku
When: Nov. 24 - 29, 2015 / 12:00 - 7:00pm
I’ve got another show up at Totem Pole this week- part of my ongoing Zuisha series. It would be disingenuous for me to run a blog on film photography and photography in Japan and not regularly show my work. I try to show at least three instalments a year, some sixty pictures total. Ideally I’d exhibit even more- forty or fifty would be preferable but difficult due to physical and economical limitations for now. If you’re interested, you can see photos from Zuisha on my portfolio site here.
Zuisha is essentially an ongoing personal collection of images of the people, places, and phenomena in my life. My workflow is consistent- I shoot, develop, and print photos in a steady fashion. I need to see what I’ve been seeing- so I don’t sit around and meditate on images or save them up- all of the photos in each show were taken since the previous exhibition. Some of these photos were taken only a few weeks ago.
Photographs do NOT“marinate” - they are what they are from the moment you make them. Furthermore, this is personal work- so it isn’t necessary to try and detach myself from the moment of taking the pictures to “objectively” edit them. In fact, it’s detrimental.
My camera is part of my life- this show is mostly pictures taken in my own neighborhood and along the channels my daily routine takes. A lot of them in every show are of my girlfriend and our time together. The pictures are a diary- so why then would any sane person think a photographer should deal with such work “objectively”?
You wouldn’t write a love letter or a diary with the most “objective” sentences you could think of, would you? Photography should be no different. If anything, you should be basing your photographs from your emotions. How you felt when taking the picture is important- because a feeling should be what spurs you to take a picture in the first place.