Old Japan

I've come across two sites, one on Flickr and one other that concern themselves with old Japanese photography. The photography itself is fantastic both artistically and as cultural documents. They inspire me to continue my series on the exotic. I will have the space to do this, soon. I have been constrained lately, but I think that is going to change.

I often question myself about why I want to spend time making photographs. It is expensive and time consuming. I haven't any desire to make money, to do commercial work. I vacillate between feeling like a hobbyist, a shutterbug (you know, the fellow from the '50s with the pipe and the cardigan sweater talking about f-stops and film speed) and an exploiter or opportunist, or even a pornographer. Photography, more than any other visual art, forces such questions on you. In answering them, I either feel silly or sleazy.


And yet I am compelled to pick up cameras. They are fetishes, in part, lovely machines of modernism made with precision so that we might record and shape (deform) the world. I hold them, put the viewfinder to my eye, change lenses and look again. It is strange and intimate and fascinates me. Click. Snap. But what am I trying to say?


When I look at photos like this, I begin to think that way, too. Do these images effect me in the way the photographer intended? Did he have a conscious intention when he went through all the labor of making them? Surely there was something driving him.


One of my favorite commercial photographers, Mark Tucker, has put up a blog that I discovered yesterday. He has a discussion going about the morality and ethics of photography. People have a lot of opinions about it. They seem much more certain than I.

None of this, though, is what I set out to write this morning. I thought to explore my silly desires. Next time, maybe.