Street Level Japan

American Photo posts on Totem Pole, Patrick Tsai

2012-02-02T14:15:13Z

A couple of big articles I wrote for American Photo went up over the past week.

The first was a feature on Tokyo’s gallery scene. It focuses in particular on Totem Pole Photo Gallery, which is a place that really helped me decide to move to Tokyo in the first place. This article is pretty gung-ho about Tokyo’s photography galleries, and I’ll have a little more to say about that stance here.

The second was an interview with Patrick Tsai, who is in a very practical way the reason that I was able to stay in Japan longer than just a couple of tourist visas. For almost a year now, Patrick has been writing a blog, Talking Barnacles, which has turned into a fairly incredible project. I posted about it a long time ago, but haven’t since; the nature of writing a blog is that things disappear quickly. Sometimes that’s good, but this is case where it’s unhelpful. I guess I can’t post every week about Talking Barnacles, just to say, “hey, did you know that Pat’s still writing this really good blog?” Maybe I should though.

Female Japanese photographers - in Indiana

2012-01-31T02:35:58Z

At the same time that Yuhki Touyama’s exhibit is up at 35 Minutes, her photos will also be displayed halfway around the world in America. I have no idea if anyone in Indiana reads this blog, but her work will be part of a show of four female Japanese photographers up from February 3 to March 31 at Bloomington’s Pictura Gallery.

The four photographers are Yuhki Touyama, Tomoe Murakami, Ai Takahashi and Yuki Tawada. It will be worth a look if you’re around.

"Yu Ukai Yuhki Touyama #1" at 35 Minutes

2012-01-23T14:18:23Z

I’m excited to announce a show coming up at 35 Minutes: Yu Ukai and Yuhki Touyama’s first collaboration, just called “Exhibit #1.” Touyama and Ukai are two excellent young photographers, and if all goes well they will be holding monthly, experimental exhibits at 35 Minutes. There is an opening party on Friday, February 3rd, more information is below.

スタジオ３５分のお知らせします。若手の頭山ゆう紀さんと鵜飼悠さんが出発のコラボレーション写真展をやってます。二人はとてもいい写真家で僕はわくわくします。詳しい情報は下記です：

鵜飼悠頭山ゆう紀展 1
Yu Ukai Yuhki Touyama #1

2012年2月3日(金)〜5日(日)
金曜日18時〜21時
土・日曜日12時〜19時

Fri February 3 – Sun February 5
Fri 6-9pm
Sat, Sun 12-7pm

Nakano-ku Kamitakada 5-47-8
東京都中野区上高田5-47-8

J.E. Not Dead

2012-01-19T03:41:49Z

After a long post-earthquake hiatus, it seems like regular service has resumed at the Japan Exposures blog. They’re back with a gallery of Shintaro Sato’s new work on Tokyo Sky Tree. I’m hoping that this is not just a flash in the pan!

After Death, Part II: "Fake it until you make it"

2012-01-18T15:59:45Z

A few weeks ago I wrote a post responding to A.D. Coleman’s talk “Dinosaur Bones.” At the time, I sent it over to Coleman to see what he would think of it; I figured that he probably wasn’t going to get too many responses that engaged him, and that he might like to read what I wrote. As it turns out, he enjoyed the post, and proposed that we continue to talk about the issues brought up in “Dinosaur Bones” through a kind of loose online correspondence. I agreed, and Coleman’s first article “Letters to a Young Critic (1)” went up online a couple of days ago.

I do have a small reservation about being cast as the “young critic.” I don’t want to be treated merely as a foil for A.D. Coleman’s eminent brilliance, though I do trust that Coleman is not approaching the dialogue in that way. (The subject line of my original email to Coleman did include the words “young critic,” so I probably brought it upon myself!) A quick look back at the history of “young” correspondents does not bode particularly well: as of today, there is no Wikipedia entry for Franz Kappus, Rilke’s “Young Poet.” Jean Beaufret, the addressee of Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” has a pretty nice one though. Perhaps the greatest danger is that by “young” you will read “immature,” which has its own Kantian implications that are really not important to discuss here. You understand what I am saying.

Coleman has started out the exchange by talking concretely about the way that critics make a living. He’s shared some figures of the income he’s made over his career: roughly $20,000 in 1995 and roughly $7,000 in 2011. (I’m assuming that there is a more or less even decline between those years.) He also calculates the amount of money he’s made from the donation box on his blog, divides it by the number of posts, and comes up with a figure of $7 per post. Ouch! Of course, this is not a helpful way to examine blogging, because the form is not just limited to what Coleman says he posts online, namely “lengthy, deliberated essays, written to the same standards as the work I’ve published in print.” Blog posts can be written in 10 minutes or less, and it’s often those posts that get the most attention—for better or worse.

What’s the value of a blog post? I wouldn’t look at it strictly in terms of money. A friend of mine in San Francisco had a video Tumblr whose tagline read: “New media existentialism. Fake it until you make it.” She’s now the online video editor at The Atlantic. Is each post she made on that blog worth a fraction of her new salary? Probably not, but that activity has value as a whole, in the same way that this blog is the resume that got me a job at American Photo.

This may appear to have an only tangential relation to the problem of making a living as a photo critic, though I think it helps set the stage of online media, where bloggers can be called up directly to the big leagues without any seasoning. Still, as Daniel Campbell Blight noted in the comments of the last post, this discussion is “too general.” That’s probably true! There are a lot of concepts being tossed around here—photo criticism, photo theory, bloggers, online writing, offline writing—but I’m happy to sift through the mess and see what comes out of it.