street – Thought Factory

The figure of the tourist

January 19, 2025

The cultural frame I had of Japan when I visited as a tourist was that of 1990s Japan layered over a vague history of 1960s street photography. In the Australian imagination Tokyo was a place of sophistication and wealth, good taste and cultural authenticity, a postmodern culture, and a reputation for deferential hospitality. A fantasy land of good old fashioned Orientalism.

I was aware that Japan’s economy had never regained the growth of the pre-l980s boom years, and that after the asset bubble burst in the 1980s, there was the three “lost decades”. The images of Japan that spring to mind are of the bustling, neon-splashed streets of Tokyo and Osaka, towering walls of steel and glass, teeming pedestrians on the footpath along with green mountains and cherry blossoms and Zen temples and tea houses. Oh, and the Japan of Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh and Frank Lloyd Wright.

I didn’t know about Japan’s image factory: the post-1995 otaku culture and the gaming subculture of the 1990s. I wasn’t aware of Japan’s embrace of peak tourism with the low yen; an emerging unease amongst Japanese of the over- tourism with their rolling suitcases (36 million in 2024); the demographic collapse, the disappearing, somewhat unsustainable, countryside villages, traditionalism as a culture industry, the izakaya bars, and the multitude of the guest workers looking after the tourists. Japan grows poorer and more existentially uneasy whilst China is the new hegemon.

Adelaide, street

Street photography: a note

July 29, 2024

A note on street photography, which emerges from my experience of photographing on the streets of Tokyo in Japan and looking at Meg Hewitt’s fascinating book Tokyo is Yours. The latter stand out in a photography world dominated by Facebook and Instagram, the primary online sharing platforms for photographers today, with their infinite supply of images that passes before us on our screens to disappears, be quickly forgotten, with more content appearing. Only the last image matters. All else is forgotten.

Street photography has simple roots: take a camera, walk around the city, see stuff, photograph it. People have been doing that since photography began there is written history (an Euro-American one); a canon (eg., Charles Traub, Sylvia Plachy, Daido Moriyama, Lee Friedlander, Henry Wessel, Elliott Erwitt, Joel Meyerowitz etc); and a current ethos of outsiders and misfits with its sense of alienation, isolation, and voyeurism, which it is held is best conveyed from an outsider’s perspective. Though currently undergoing a resurgence in contemporary photography, with its strong online street photo community with its own collective/website (and its In-Public Flickr page and online exhibitions), street photography is seen as outmoded and old fashioned by the art institution.

I am engaged in a long term, low key street photography project with its plain material based on walking Adelaide in South Australia. So my photography is a part of the street photography tradition in Australia:

However, the problem I have with the self-understanding of street photography is the over-reaching or imperial sense of itself. Thus Nick Turpin, who established In-Public, the first international collective of street photographers, observed that street photography doesn’t need defining because “it is, in fact, just photography in it simplest form, so much so that it is all the other forms of photography that need defining to separate them from that basic urge to respond to a scene with a camera that is .… Street Photography. It is the Prime Mover, the evolutionary inheritance of all photography.” It is overreach as street photography has generally been understood in positivist terms as a transparent mirror of life that shows how things are in reality.

film, Japan, street, Tokyo

photographing on the streets in Japan

April 11, 2024

Prior to going on the Basho and the Kumano Kodo pilgrim walks I decided to spend some time in the early morning walking the streets in Japan (initially the lively lanes in Shinjuku, Tokyo, then Morioka and Sendai) to make photographs. This was one way to cross the cultural barriers. A photographic layer of this photographic walking was using an old Leica M4 rangefinder and black and white film (Kodak Tmax 400) to supplement the much more versatile digital Sony A7R 111 camera. This connection to modernity’s technologically archaic past helped me to feel at “home” in the global mega city whilst avoiding being the free-floating, postmodern tourist.

I wanted to connect to, or link up with, the postwar Japanese black and white film street photography in the late twentieth century: — eg., Shōmei Tōmatsu, Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira — with its candid, spontaneous sunappu images that was broadened by Ishiuchi Miyako and Takeda Hana, and continued with Yasuhisa Toyohara and Ohnishi Mitsugu in the 1980s. My images are a very marginal relationship to this tradition. The classic practitioners, such as Daido Moriyama, and Shōmei Tōmatsu lived in Shinjuku, viewed photography as a way of life, saw themselves either as vagabonds wandering the city streets aimlessly or as stray dogs hunting in the dark alleys of Shinjuku,and produced the short-lived left-wing magazine Provoke (1968–1969).

Though photography has a long historical connection to the city I was only a tourist staying in Shinjuku for 5 days aimlessly wandering amongst its maze of obscure lanes, bars and eating places.