One of my favorite Youtube channels is Rambalac. It's just videos of walking through various places in Japan, from crowded streets to peaceful natural areas. No voiceover or explanations - almost every video is as if a video camera were moving around on its own and recording everything it saw (occasionally he interacts with things). Super relaxing to have on in the background, and really cool to watch to get a glimpse of everyday life there.
I live in Tokyo and wish I could see it through the eyes of someone new here again. I can see it in these videos, but when I walk through the city I'm too used to it and my brain drowns out all of these things.
So a technique I've found useful to solve this issue aside from hanging out with someone visiting is to dedicate 1 day to doing nothing but picking a place that you're very familiar with and intentionally thinking about whether you've been down that street or the next one, looking at places that I wouldn't usually look like at the corners of the roof of buildings and then just taking a moment to sit down and watch.
This has worked for me in each of the cities I've ever become too familiar with. You just tend to relax and get to where you want to go, there's no nervous energy of not knowing where you are or where you're going. Nowadays I tebd to just pop on my headphones and go to where I need and go back home again and not take in a thing unless I have a bit of a "reset"
I live here too and I get where you're coming from but I find that I can often remind myself of the things I like so much about Tokyo. Though I worry they are disappearing.
He’s been recording “walkabouts” in Tokyo since 1990, to present day. Very raw footage, but interesting to see candid Japan street life from the last 28 years
I really enjoy these photos of every day life in Tokyo. This type of photography is something I struggle with, some of my attempts are here: http://poglet.net/
Your photos feel a lot less intimate, but are none the less great. I especially like the unnamed street scene further down as well as the photo of the train window. Maybe I'm just thrilled to be reminded of my recent Isaiah vacation though. ;)
Your photos also make me want to go back even more and visit Hokkaido. It's just such a wonderful country!
Me neither. They seemed badly framed and intruisive to many of the subjects. Street photography demands some respect for privacy or at least more discreet shooting
it's actually illegal in Japan to take pictures of people or their possessions without permission. As a hobbist youre unlikely to get sued but it's one of the reasons Google Maps had to add face blurring to Street View.
I found out when some guy had some bunnies out on a Sunday is Shinjuku. I went to take pictures and was told angrily "NO PICTURES". I thought it was silly that he'd say that when we was displaying his bunnies in public but I looked up the law and found by Japanese law it's the illegal.
I can. Honestly, and this may sound jackassish, but I'm not surprised many won't connect to these photos. The point is to bring up memories and feelings from one's own life of moments with psychological imprints similar to the photos. It was all INCREDIBLY nostalgic for me. Every photo brought on a wave of powerful nostalgia.
It's very small, if not the smallest 35mm camera out there, which makes it inconspicuous. Also it only has zone-focusing, which means you have to guess how far your subject is away from you. You'd only use the viewfinder for framing and setting your exposure. However, since I also used the flash, the exposure was fixed anyways. I usually put a roll of Portra 400 in, which I pushed to 800. All that allowed me to stop down the lens quite a bit, so I knew that everything in around 1.5 to 15 meters distance would be in focus when I press the shutter. And I didn't worry about the framing, so I didn't use the viewfinder.
This gave me an instantaneous access to situations and pictures that otherwise would've been long gone after looking into the viewfinder and setting the focus and exposure. I didn't worry much about how I held the camera and just used my intuition. It really was a kind of liberating way to create images. So yeah, the camera does matter! Although I think I only paid around $100 for this one.
Those are a couple images I took in Paris that way:
I enjoy zone focusing with an Industar 50-2 on my Spotmatic. Actually, that is really the only way to enjoy using that lens because it has a fully manual, one-ring iris – on an SLR lens! Stopped down to about f/8 it was pretty easy to focus by the scale only. I did check my composition in the viewfinder, but that was about it.
I'll try shooting without using the viewfinder at all next time. Shutter speed is pretty easy to set and forget at daytime (Sunny 16 all day! ...literally)
I love Spotmatics! Sadly, the ones I inherited have light leaks.
If you're not going to use the viewfinder, it'd probably be a lot easier to use something wider than 50mm. Besides the greater depth of field making zone-focusing a lot easier, there's literally "more room" for error in your (somewhat accidental) framing. Makes things easier. But I might be biased here, as 35mm is my favorite focal length on any camera!
I prefer 35 for general shooting and 50-58 for taking pictures of people. I have one 40mm and it is a nice compromise. I’m going to try some viewfinderless shooting with my Spotmatic today - watch this space ;-)
Japan's got some pretty strong privacy laws. Strong to the point that it's not permissible to take pictures of random people without their consent and especially not OK to publish them publicly. None of these people look particularly happy about some person taking pictures of them and it sure doesn't seem like the were trying to be subtle. [1]
Furthermore, the faux olde timey look is far past its prime.
I see tiny kids walking down narrow (I would call dangerous due to traffic) streets. See them crossing sidewalks. As a parent of a one year old I find this scary and fascinating.
Traffic in residential Tokyo streets is also super slow, because drivers are well aware that they're full of kids, grannies, cats, etc. And you're pretty much automatically at fault if you hit a pedestrian.
US cities would be middle class and family oriented if middle class and family oriented people chose to live in them. There’s nothing natural or inevitable about suburbia.
It's immensely unfortunate that there's still this ingrained mindset that in order to live a proper middle-class life you have to settle in the middle of suburbia hell where there's nothing around for miles. Though it doesn't help that the entire system is built to subsidize and encourage islands of suburbia separated by long stretches of highway.
Japan's centralization of population, strong public transit systems and city design is something that vastly appeals to me.
Can't blame American families for choosing suburbia. US cities are a mess -- too many crazies, needles and trash everywhere, traffic congestion and poor public transit, expensive housing, and so forth.
And there's no political will anywhere in the USA, suburban or urban areas, to change any of this.
US cities are a mess because middle class families abandoned them for the newly built suburbs in a coordinated, subsidized, and regulated movement.
Individual families were not expected to walk out into the fields and personally make them habitable. They certainly weren’t turned away by policies designed to preserve the status quo, compensate/empower those adversely affected by a proposed change, etc.
Highway construction, planning codes, development and mortgage finance, public debt, subsidized infrastructure, etc. were all assembled and optimized to make it as easy as possible for suburbia to happen precisely as it did.
That was a choice. We could make the same choice about urbanism. (Imagine an Interstate Highway System-level investment in urban subways). We don’t.
We’re funding mass transit at a fraction of the rate necessary, and I don’t see that changing - along as governments are considered incompetent and taxes are considered evil.
Tokyo's public transit system is overrated IMO. Sure, trains and subways cover a lot of ground and are usually on time, but most of the lines are well over 100% crowdedness during rush hour:
I wouldn't want to do this daily and thus wouldn't accept work in the business center of Tokyo. But here's why Japanese way of living and commuting still makes more sense to me than the equivalent in the US:
* Japan has a very open zoning law. There's nothing stopping developers building residential buildings of different pricing levels right next to businesses. This more often allows people to move close to their work.
* partly thanks to the first reason, Tokyo is quite a bit less centralized than, say, NY. You can also see this clearly in its skyline. I found that even during rush hours it's usually no problem for me to arrive where I need on time - on those lines that can get completely full the frequency of connections tends to be very high, so you can just wait in line for the next one. And yes, queueing for a train actually works in Japan.
* Even when taking a crowded train I still feel more relaxed than a similar situation in Europe or the US - mainly because Japanese are just more considerate. People are always filling up empty spaces, move with the flow and give space when needed - you just ask nicely and otherwise do what you can on your part to make things work together. There's also no smells and no noises. I think I could get used even to rush hour - just put on head phones and move like everyone else, don't rush, calculate additional time so you don't have to.
Don't get me wrong, their system is far from perfect - it's just that among the alternatives I find it one of the better ones. The problem I have there is more with work culture and education, but there's hope for betterment lately at least for the former.
I have a small press dedicated to photographers like that, the website is in Spanish but the zines don't have any text: http://contrafotografia.com/tienda
You'll want to look into any of the street documentary greats:
* Garry Winogrand - NYC/LA/Texas, considered by many to be the best.
* Lee Friedlander - From Aberdeen, WA, but really shot everywhere.
* Anthony Hernandez - Modern, still working, has moved on to larger formats of environments.
* Joel Meyerowitz - Modern, still working, has moved on to still lifes in Tuscany, but still teaches. Pioneered a lot of early color street work.
* Robert Frank - Released The Americans the book that really started it all.
* Henri Cartier-Bresson - Surrealist, dream-like work that's hard to imitate.
* Walker Evans - Worked for the Farm Services Bureau and took lots of important documentary work early in America's history.
* Elliott Erwitt - NYC with a touch of humor.
* Helen Levitt - NYC bad neighborhoods and life.
* Brassai - Parisian nightlife.
* Richard Kalvar - Still working, great work of Italy in the 70s though.
* Leitizia Battaglia - Italian mafia in Sicily.
* Gianni Berengo Gardin - Considered the Italian Henri Cartier-Bresson.
* Josef Koudelka - Czech, one of the greatest documentary workers to have ever lived. Still working today and making incredible work. His book Exiles is worth everyone owning.
* William Eggleston - Basically responsible for color photography being accepted in fine art circles.
For some contemporaries still actively shooting street I'd check out:
* Andre Wagner https://www.instagram.com/photodre/
* Martin Parr https://www.instagram.com/martinparrstudio/
* Daniel Arnold https://www.instagram.com/arnold_daniel/
* Aaron Berger https://www.instagram.com/aaronbergerfoto/
* Alex Webb https://www.instagram.com/webb_norriswebb/
* Matt Stuart https://www.instagram.com/mattu1/
I have dozens and dozens more if you run through those and are still interested. Street documentary work is my absolute favorite genre of photography -- got hooked after my first darkroom class at 15 -- and try to consume as much work as I can.
Edit: Ooof, formatting troubles. Never do lists on HN. Will clean up as soon as I find a README.
Edit2: Can you really not do links in a formatted list?
Edit3: Probably easiest to link to here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_street_photographers) for further reference too. I realized I left so many greats and their contemporaries out just rattling off what was in my head. Nikos Economopolous, Mary Ellen Mark, Danny Lyon, Levi Levinstein and Vivian Meier -- hope they'll forgive me.
> As a guy the Japanese police will not be happy if you take candids of women or kids
That's true. There is a lot of fear, prejudice and prudery around gender and age in the arts.
That doesn't mean we should stop thinking: It's crucial to assess for ourselves whether a picture appears to us as offensive as we are confronted with it.
Otherwise the criticism is just meaningless, recycled fear.
> That doesn't mean we should stop thinking: It's crucial to assess for ourselves whether a picture appears to us as offensive as we are confronted with it.
That's an interesting thought. Do you think photographers should have a moral responsibility? A famous example I can think of is the controversy surrounding "The vulture and the little girl" by Kevin Carter.
In terms of street photography, is it OK to "creep" or invade someone's privacy, especially that of children? There is certainly a line between telling a story and trashy exploitation, the question is where is it?
Good question and I don't think I have a great answer.
I personally believe that morality lies not in the document, but in the context it is created or displayed in.
If, for example, the intention appears to me to be dishonest, exploitative or outright cruel, I'd want to criticize the person responsible for putting this document into this context. Whether this is done by creating the document or changing its context doesn't appear as relevant to me.
Regarding the declarative line you mention, I think I'm pretty much a pragmatist: I do not need to know where exactly the border is between India and China to know that Delhi is in India.
...but I'm open to a more rule based approach as well. I just don't know one.
I implied that the author was the photographer when I asked why she chose to creepshot mostly women and children.
Additionally, the implication in my comment was that if she had done the same thing to a man, it would also be a creepshot.
My definition of creepshot is a photo taken of someone without their knowledge. You, charitably, call them candid photos.
From the Wikipedia article on candid photos:
"Thus, the candid character of a photo is unrelated to the subject's knowledge about or consent to the fact that photos are being taken, and unrelated to the subject's permission for further usage and distribution. The crucial factor is the actual absence of posing. However, if the subject is absolutely unaware of being photographed and does not even expect it, then such photography is secret photography, which is a special case of candid photography."
So while you are technically right to call them that, I think the fact that they are the specific subset of candid photography known as secret photography is relevant.
Because the creator wasn't an American puritan of the 21st century millennial variety (or someone thinking like one) who considers candid street photography (an art with a huge tradition) as "creep-shots" or considers human depictions dirty.
Never mind the photographer being herself a woman.
Being a "creep" is an ill-defined, all-too-often prudish notion, of "anybody doing anything someone might be offended by" especially when it involves not being totally isolated but having an interest in people around you e.g. as art subjects for street photography.
Everybody that dares to cast an eye on us (man or woman as you added), without knowing us in advance (or even then) without some kind of formal consent, is suddenly "a creep". It's a sign that we forgot how to function and co-exist in a society -- with other people all around us. Everything is about our little personal space boxes...
At the same time, we publicly exhibit more and more of our bodies and lives every day on several platforms (including of our kids and pets and inanimate possessions), and at the same time we protest more than any other time when someone mind consider us a worthy subject for street photography while in public view...
We have a word for this in my country, which roughly translates as "a person who can't stand to have any intra-personal/social interaction, and on such an occasion acts as if they were bitten by a fly". The dictionary translates it as "touchy", but doesn't capture the full richness of it. In any case, everybody is extra touchy nowadays.
>Speak for yourself. There isn't a single image of me anywhere on the internet.
I speak of the general population. I don't understand why people who want to contest general statements with personal counter-examples.
Do they feel that a statement like "we publicly exhibit more and more of our bodies and lives every day on several platforms" means "ABSOLUTELY EVERY ONE OF US WITH NO EXCEPTIONS DOES THAT", and in all caps at that?
>Am I not entitled to keep it that way?
No. There are no special laws and protections about photography of people in public for example. Or against your friends posting a photo that happens to have you in it on the internet.
So at best you are entitled to not upload it yourself.
> There are no special laws and protections about photography of people in public for example
Yes there are, for example in France [1]: "Before any public diffusion of a photo through newspaper or any other media (including internet), the Publisher has to obtain the autorisation from the people on which the picture is focused"
This law would apply to all the pictures in the article where the people are the focus of the picture
> we publicly exhibit more and more of our bodies and lives every day on several platforms
Except that we're (we in a general terms, I've stopped posting photos on social media years ago) choosing which pictures we're posting, where and with what filters (public or friends only).
For me the creep will be the person who keep looking at the same person, not just taking a look.
I actually found this view point interesting. If you wouldn't mind elaborating on why you feel that way, I think it would be productive. Because it never even occured to me that these photos could be perceived that way by someone.
My definition of creepshot is a photo taken of someone without their knowledge. The photographer may have gone back to get consent from the people photographed after the fact, but I found no mention of it in the article. The only mention of the photographs being taken secretly is in the title, and that's where I'm drawing my conclusions from.
I have lived in Japan. While I was there, there was a law that cellphones had to make a loud shutter sound whenever a picture was taken. Hence, those of you claiming that the concept of creepshots is a western puritanical idea are dead wrong.
I believe that the photographer chose to photograph women and children because, if they were to become upset with her for taking them, there is less risk of physical harm or intimidation.
It's possible that she was just more interested in capturing the lives of women and children for whatever reason. But, to answer your question (finally), the reason I feel this way about this subject is because I am a woman and I hate people taking my picture without my knowledge. I have hated it my whole life. I have the experience of being both the powerless child and the unintimidating woman.
Imagining someone taking a photo of me without my knowledge or consent, and then publishing it and gaining fame or fortune from it is extremely upsetting.
I hope this has helped you understand my perspective.
"The images you see here were all taken between 1996 and 2009"
9-22 years old. some of them were well within the internet era.
I looked up more info on the shutter sound accompanying photographs taken on smartphones. This has been in effect since 2001. But I was wrong about it being a law. It looks like all the cell phone carriers in Japan self-regulated and made it a requirement themselves.
One of the things I've noticed about Japan (and Taiwan also) is the seemingly lack of the feeling of cringiness. These same photos taken of Americans would be nearly universally laughed at, and I have a suspicion that the feeling of cringe and embarrassment prohibits a lot of would be great artists in the west from developing their talent.
You might already understand this point, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.
Because we're social animals and most people don't have the ability to simply ignore harsh/insulting/whatever words directed at us.
It may well be possible to develop the ability to ignore such words, but if it is, that's an ability that would take a fair bit of time to develop, so is out of the reach of most people right at the present moment.
I'm asking because when someone says they are offended by someone else's words, it's because the use of that word makes their daily normal life more difficult to live in a direct material sense. That's the measure being defined when someone says "I'm offended". It's a matter of material conditions.
Slurs are used by people who have structural power in society, directed at those who do not. It's punching down, not punching across or up. That's what is meant by taking offense to someone's words.
Forgive me If I question whether or not a man, which is quite a privileged identity, is truly being punched down upon from someone more powerful by the word "creepshot".
@tomjakubowski I was clarifying I was male and not female as I used the word 'sexist'. 'creepshot' implies predatory, voyeuristic behavior and the post's photos weren't even remotely sexual or creepy imo
One of my favorite Youtube channels is Rambalac. It's just videos of walking through various places in Japan, from crowded streets to peaceful natural areas. No voiceover or explanations - almost every video is as if a video camera were moving around on its own and recording everything it saw (occasionally he interacts with things). Super relaxing to have on in the background, and really cool to watch to get a glimpse of everyday life there.
https://www.youtube.com/user/Rambalac
Here's some of the videos, there's a huge variety:
Shibuya at night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qGiXY1SB68
Shinjuku evening walk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHr4qSQ-5XU
Kyoto's Kiyomizudera in the morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAeN7TdGq4o
Cat island (Tashirojima): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnfzALzLNgY
Playing with deer at Nara: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu4GJwCpX2w
Shibuya Halloween: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkm522cTpzE