(via tokyo-camera-style)
Leica M7 (“Japan Limited” edition) with 35mm f2 Summicron lens and Leicavit
August 17th 2014 marked the sixth anniversary of Tokyo Camera Style.
This Leica M7 was the very first entry on this blog on August 17, 2008.
All but two of the entries from August 2008 were made at a group photo festival/event that I was invited to join in Urayasu, Chiba. This particular camera belongs to an amateur photographer Takeo Akiyama, who was also exhibiting pictures there. He was born in eastern Tokyo in 1937 and took up photography when he was 15. After working mornings at his father’s restaurant he would spend afternoons walking around the city with his camera. An absolute amateur at heart, he built up a vast collection of street snaps of Tokyo as the city transformed itself over the latter half of the 20th century.
The driving force for his photography has never been a need to meet a deadline or please an editor but simply for the pure enjoyment of taking his time and creating photographs from the real world around him. (He self published a book of his pictures in 2011 that I’ll be featuring on the site soon.) His approach is, in my opinion, is the ultimate purpose of a personal camera and sums perfectly of what I enjoy about making this blog enjoyable to so many people around the world.
This blog started out as simply being a collection of gear- real stuff found on the streets used by real people- but has blossomed into a fuller picture of what the unique Japanese photography scene can be with posts about photobooks, exhibitions, and other events.
Thank you for all of your interest and support for the past six years. I honestly never expected this to be anything more than a series of pictures for my own enjoyment and so to see it mature and further my own experiences in Japan the way it has is something I find both exciting and extremely humbling.
Stay tuned for more Tokyo Camera Style in the years to come- there’s still a lot more to see!