How did you get started in photography? : The consequences of my egotism. Bloody Street Photography.

11 min readDec 23, 2021

I was interviewed for an article to be published in a web magazine. This is a reconstructed version of that interview. Continuing from the previous article, I summarize the episodes right after I started my journey as an artist, and the episode where I kept punching the wall of the bathroom until I was covered in blood.

This is the last part about how I got started in photography.

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Review of last issue.

This was when I was 15 years old. This is how I thought of the process of expressing myself through photography.

The process of customizing the reality through the viewfinder in my brain, and using the camera and techniques to fix it in a photograph.

Photographic expression is the process of customizing the reality seen through the viewfinder in the brain and fixing it into a photograph using the camera and technology.

I was absorbed in this process. But as long as I was immersed in this process, I couldn’t move on to the next step. To know this, I had to overcome the painful days.

The camera would then become a hedonistic accomplice between me and the photograph.

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I was a pig feeding on a pig farm.

This was when I was 15 years old. My main source of information about photography was photography magazines. I read as many Japanese photography magazines as I could, from light to heavy, including CAPA, Monthly Photographer, Asahi Camera, Nippon Camera, Commercial Photo, and Photo Contest.

This was the time when AF cameras were gradually becoming mainstream. This was the time when the Nikon F4 and EOS1 were released. I was using a MF camera called Olympus OM1N. I had no yearning for an AF camera. The reason why I had no yearning for AF was because many magazines said that MF was the best way to learn photography from scratch. As a high school student, I was seduced by such information and longed for the Nikon F3 and Canon New F-1.

However, it was because I was using MF cameras that I was able to learn the basic techniques while overcoming various mistakes in a short period of time.

Nowadays, the first camera you touch is a digital camera. For people who look at photos, digital or analog is irrelevant. Because both are photography. However, I feel sorry for people who start photography with today’s cameras where AF is the norm and ZOOM lenses are the standard.

Also, we live in an age where a lot of information is available by searching on a smartphone. I am one of those people, but I think it is because we live in an age where anyone can speak freely and easily that it is difficult for information seekers to find the information they really need.

So maybe I was lucky to have only a limited number of photography magazines, albeit with commercial filters. Still, for my 15-year-old wallet, photography magazines were a luxury item. So I remember looking through all the magazines, including the advertisements. Moreover, I was so thorough that when I moved from one room to another, I took all the magazines I had bought with me.

Approval was easy to come by. I struggled like a rabbit caught in a trap.

Every photography magazine had a photo contest that was ranked every month. It was probably the most popular project in the paper. Even though I was frustrated with my school trip photos, I actively entered the world of photography. Making the most of my pocket money, I began to regularly enter photo contests for several magazines.

If I won the contest, there was a high probability that my photo would be published in the magazine.

This was when I was 15 years old, and as a 15 year old, I was just about ecstatic with the results. Gradually, I began to focus only on the photo contest part.

The dilemma of choosing between films.

There are three main categories of film.” Positive film,” “Negative film,” and “Black and white film.” Please do your own search for details. On top of that, there is a lineup for each type of sensitivity. In addition, there are many manufacturers and brands in each of these categories. In other words, even to choose a single black-and-white film, I would have to choose from several different types.

If it were me today, I would have repeatedly tried different types of film for different purposes. But back then, I couldn’t do that. In the end, I would choose a film based on reviews in photography magazines.

In other words, instead of judging with my own eyes and experience, I relied on the evaluations of others. I had no doubts about that at the time. Now, I would never have accepted it.

However, I have felt a strong dilemma about the quality of color negative film prints since that time. Now and then, there are professional film developing stores. However, at that time, I had never used them, even though I knew of their existence through advertisements in photography magazines. Due to economic circumstances, it was common for color negative film to be developed and printed at a nearby cheap lab. In other words, it was a fully automated photo printing process.

Nowadays, we can easily retouch our photos with our smartphones. However, with color negative film back then, it was practically impossible to express the colors as you wanted, except by printing them yourself. This is why I made extensive use of positive film, which does not need to be printed and can reflect the image as it was at the time of shooting. My favorite film was Kodachrome 64.

The fact that the SIGMA camera I use now has a color balance somewhat similar to Kodachrome is also something I have been obsessed with since that time.

I was uncomfortable with the feature pages of photography magazines.

This was around the age of 16. At the time, I didn’t have a good understanding of color temperature, even though I was using only positive film. However, at that time, I was consuming only about five films a month at most. It’s also true that it wasn’t a very important issue, since I was correcting customized images on the fly in my brain.

It was around this time that I realized that I had not been actively looking at the feature photos of photographers that make up the majority of the opening pages of photography magazines.

What I do remember is a commemorative feature photo of a person who had won the Kimura Ihei Award, the most prestigious award in Japan. I can’t remember who it was, but I think it was probably Hana Takeda or Yasuhisa Toyohara. I really wondered why this photo was so highly regarded.

I began to look closely at the featured photos to understand what I could not understand. But then, I always felt it. I couldn’t understand why this artist of photography I was looking at was so highly regarded.

It took me several years and many hard days to find an answer to this uncomfortable feeling.

A wall that I could not overcome.

Last time, I talked a little bit about myself in junior high school. Originally, I was the type of person who wanted to stand out and be noticed like an idol. However, in reality, I’m a reclusive person and I’m good at expressing my opinions to people close to me and in writing, but I’m hopelessly bad at interpersonal communication, including social networking sites. In addition, I am always afraid of jumping into new things and I am not a proactive person. Sometimes, however, I have the ability to take action, driven by some unknown force.

This was around the age of 17. I entered high school after spending a year as a ronin. In other words, my 17 years old was when I was a freshman in high school. I was a student at Niigata Prefectural Nagaoka Commercial High School. I learned after entering the school that the high school I attended had a photography club. From the very beginning of my enrollment, I wanted to join the photography club, but my heart just wouldn’t move forward.

In the end, for three years, I wanted to join the photography club, but I never opened the door. There were two reasons for this.

I entered the school after a year of wandering, and I had a feeling that my classmates looked down on me because they felt I was younger than them. I also felt that I looked down on the school’s photography club as ridiculous because I had taken a few prizes in magazine photo contests.

Thirty years have passed since then, and I don’t know how my choices have affected the rest of my life. However, I do feel that it was one of the turning points that led me to a different path.

Darkroom after all these years?

Around the age of 19, I entered a photography school in Kohoku-ku, Yokohama. In Japan, spring is also the season for higher education.

The school offered a trial enrollment for those who wished to enter the following year. It was only then that I learned that I needed to prepare a MF camera and a set of darkroom equipment before entering the school.

At that time, digital art was the talk of the town. It was a time when photography was also heading towards the digital age. It was my dream to buy a MAC upon entering the school.

I felt uncomfortable with the school’s backward-looking attitude.

A bloody toilet wall where I broke down in tears.

This was around the age of 20, when I moved to the city from living in the countryside, 300 kilometers away from Tokyo. I was anxious and dissatisfied with school, when I had my first outdoor class.

The location was a festival held once a year in downtown Tokyo. The site of the Sanja Festival. We were given two missions.

Take at least three pictures of yourself from a distance so that your face fills the screen.
Talk to a stranger and take at least three photos of their face and full body.

These are the two. The students were then required to develop the film at home before the next class and bring it as a contact print. The film was limited to black and white film. I skipped this class. I don’t remember the reason. I think I was just scared. Then I skipped the next class day.

In the meantime, I took a lot of pictures on my own, with an unfamiliar black and white film. Then I did some unfamiliar darkroom work in my new room and burned some contact prints. I think I had about 250 prints.

Then came the class. This day’s class was to choose several photos from the outdoor class and print them and bring them to class.

At the beginning of the class, they laid them out on the table one by one. As I looked at the photos, I laughed in my heart. What is the point of such a class? I thought to myself. Then it was my turn. Of course, I confidently lined up all 250 pictures and took a look at them.

When the teacher saw the pictures, he said to me, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what to do.

Yes, the next one.

My moment of confidence and the whole world looking rosy suddenly turned into a world of gray. Stunned, I put the photos away and went straight home. I thought about many things. But I don’t know anything.

I shot and printed more photos before the next class the following week, and went back to the class. I think I had more than 500 photos, including the last one. I put them all on the table again. The teacher again said a few words.

He asked me to arrange the photos in what I thought was the same category. When he saw that I was done, he re-categorized the photos himself. He pointed to one category and said.

If you can collect the same categories as this one, go for it. But you are still young. I think you should go back to the country and find a different path.

—

I don’t know what’s going on anymore.

I put the pictures away and ran into the empty bathroom. I was just so frustrated. I couldn’t even cry. I punched the wall of the bathroom until my hands were covered in blood.

—

Four months have passed since that day. I never went to school. I don’t even remember what I was doing.

Determined Street Photography.

The school regularly has a class where each student is asked to look at about 30 photos in front of all the teachers. Of course, other students are welcome to view them as well.

September. We had this class to see the results of our work during the summer. I mustered up the courage to go and watch the class.

It was there that I witnessed the rapid growth of my classmates who had enrolled with me and started learning how to operate the MF camera. Many of the students were continuing the Street Photography they had done in their first field class. And each photo brought its own uniqueness to the table.

My vision was once again filled with gray. It was clear that the work they had been doing had made a difference. And I knew that I had just spent the last few months in vain.

—

From the next day, I went to Shibuya with 10 bottles of Tri-X every day. I made it my rule not to leave until I had finished shooting 10 Tri-Xs.

I made it a rule not to leave until I had taken 10 photos, and I continued at a pace of about 100 photos a week. I continued at a pace of about 100 photos a week, and every week I asked the teacher to check the contact prints of the photos.

This was about two months after I had been working like this.

—

The meaning of the teacher’s words. The meaning of the outdoor class. Why do we need a darkroom? The world as a photographer sees it. What is the meaning of photographic expression?

The answers to all these questions came together in the days when I put everything I had into Street Photography.

This was the starting point for me as a photographer. And everything that led me to this point is the reason why I started photography.