Friday 30 May 2008

Tommy Oshima - Urban Photography Japanese style...

I came across the work of Toshihiro Oshima via the latest edition of Quadrat Magazine... and having been impressed by the expressive qualities of his work I began to investigate further...

Tommy was born in Tokyo in 1960 and has apparently been taking photo's since he was 6 years old, he is always praised for his ability to transform the mundane of Tokyo street life into something mystical and mysterious....


Working almost exclusively with film he uses a mesmerizing amount of different camera's to capture his images, he quotes more than 20 on his Flickr page..!! He is also a quite prolific poster and you will see new images uploaded almost everyday...


He states that "The crystal elements of my eyes are the Looking Glass to observe the world. My mind is the Dark Room which carries the Negative film inside. Then the Photographs are the representation of the Image which is reflected through the Prism of Soul.

Photographs won't tell any truth, but only gives us the bits and elements waking up from our mind's eye.
....but then,the question is what's the "truth"? :)"........


I don't know what you think, but I always find the imagery from Japan to be much less superficial than images from the West, which tend to be much more direct and easier to 'get'.

I also see that just as much importance, if not more in certain circumstances, is put into the out of focus parts of the images.

If you have sometime to look around his Flickr stream, do take the opportunity to do so, you won't be disappointed...

Monday 19 May 2008

Timeless imagery...


Some photo's just have that timeless feel to them...

This image for example is one that makes me stop and stare, I find it completely enchanting.

When do you think it was taken, this year, 10 years ago, 20 years at a push maybe..... can you believe its from 1947 !!

The photographer was Toni Frissell born in New York in 1907 who became famous for her fashion imagery, WWII photographs and portraits of famous Americans (including amongst other the Kennedys).

She left behind a legacy of 340,000 items, (ca. 1930-69) including 270,000 black-and-white negatives, 42,000 color transparencies and 25,000 enlargement prints.

and just for info... the image above was taken at Weeki Wachee Spring, Florida, the only home of 'live mermaids'.... Apparently, you can watch these mermaids from an underwater viewing area, exactly where this photo was taken more than 60 years ago...

Wednesday 7 May 2008

David Burnett - "He's been everywhere, but only for an hour"...

I'm always on the look out for inspiration and idea's from fellow photographers around the world and I recently came across the work of David Burnett.

A photojournalist for over 35 years he is well published in Time, Fortune and ESPN Magizines. Was co-founder of Contact Press Images and has received various awards such as 'Photographer of the Year', 'World Press Photographer of the Year' and the ' Robert Capa Award' to name just a few.

Having read various interviews regarding his work, It was very interesting to hear him describe that nowadays all the photojournalists basically use the same digital SLR's with the same set of 4 lens.... and that he wanted to do something different.

What this meant was that he started photographing assignments with Holga's (a plastic camera from China), Rolleiflex TLR's (the de-facto professional camera from the 60's) and the Speed Graphic, which you see him pictured with above.

This camera, apart from being large, heavy and from the fifties, is made more unusual with the choice of lens, the Kodak Aero.

This lens was primarily used during the second world war for aerial reconnaissance. What is so special about this large format lens is that its minimum aperture is F2.5 which is almost impossible to find in a 'normal' large format collection of lenses as you need a lot of glass to get that much light in.!

This combination of minimum aperture on a 5x4 camera means that you get 'bokeh' to die for in your images and was what attracted me to his work.

Since that point I have discovered a whole underground of people using this combination. Definitely something to investigate further......

Anyway, hats off to David for daring to do something different and showing that 'digital' can't do everything after all....