Obsession:

Again my day-job as a media services coordinator makes me smile. Today I have the distinct pleasure of purchasing a wonderfully indestructible Pelican Case for a new HD DV camera. This stuff is crazy. I want to organize everything in my life with the pluck and tuck foam inside of the Pelican case.

Imagine an architecture of pluckable foam. What would this be like? A city that is constantly being reduced to fit our bodies and objects shapes perfectly? Would we value properties by how much they’ve been shaped? Or would a new property be the only way to get a perfect fit all over again?

Hmmm. Ramblings.

While searching for cases to order I came across this image. Apparently, Pelican expects people’s digital cameras to see some serious action.

Hardcore Photo Gear Protection Baby!

*****

Tokyo:

I have the extreme pleasure of having an amazing library down the hallway from me. Inside it are mountains of great photo books that are just lying there, begging me to love them. At the moment I have Takashi Homma’s Tokyo staring back at me.

While I may not be as skilled in analyzing and writing about photographs as Jörg Colberg at Conscientious or as intune with writing about photobooks as 5B4, I think I’m going to go ahead and dive in and make today’s blog post about this beautifully detailed photo book.

My first thoughts upon looking at Homma’s work: this work seems like a more elegant, refined, calm version of Wolfgang Tillmans’ photos.  Homma seems to embrace a fundamental freshness when looking at the world of suburban and urban Tokyo.  His photographs of children take this a step further: they are distant yet within close enough conceptual proximity to the subject to not feel invasive or dismissive.

Cover

Spread - Architecture in Tokyo

His photographs of architecture in suburban and urban Tokyo also follow this nuanced, distant yet still engaged approach. The work breaks free of the typological constraints that usually inhibit photographers that document similar spaces and forms repeatedly. Somehow, Homma is able to take the everyday architectural forms that he sees throughout Tokyo and show them in a greater, wider, contextual light.

McFlurry

Finally, his work begins to step closer to the acts of inhabitation that must be taking place within Tokyo. I’m especially drawn to photographs that depict the act of consumption (both on a literal, physical level and also on a conceptual and cultural level).

*****

Anyway, I feel refreshed today and find myelf going back through images I’ve taken in the last few years and appreciating them in new ways. Perhaps, afterall, I’m finally gaining a sense of awareness and appreciation for images by not making them at the moment.

Temporary Confluence, 2007