back
67 comments
It's pictures like this that made me fall in love with National Geographic. The fortunes that were spent documenting different parts of the world when a picture really brought color to life even though they were black and white photos for a very long long time.

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/gallery/2013/dec/06/natio...

I know it doesn’t say ‘first’ or ‘only’ to find the soul of 1950s Japan, but I sense the idea that Switzerland is the familiar and Japan is the exotic. Photography as an art was well established at the time within the borders of the country, and there’s much to discover, such as the work of Hiroshi Hamaya.
I suspect though that a foreigner who does find the country exotic will choose subjects to photograph and photograph them in a way the "locals" would not. That can be both an interesting perspective for those native to the country as well as for the the rest of us.
On that note, does anyone know of works coming from the other direction? Photographers from East Asia documenting the West before the Internet?
I think visitors tend to take more landscape or asmospheric type photos as well as photos of people (sometimes problematic as expectations of privacy/laws are not the same as the US). Japanese tended to take more nature, macro or close framed single subject photos, which makes sense as they have no need to capture an environment they live in all the time. This was long ago who knows if it applies in thr globalizing age of instagram.
Indeed this is true from my experience... moments of insight into beauty (which make me want to take a picture) seem to occur much more when I'm away from home.
Hence, photos of the infamous and proliferous vending machines.
I learned English as a second language. I have often found certain usages of the English language imaginative and poetic -- while such observations seem to escape my native speaker friends. for example, I found much beauty that English uses the same word for both "wave someone goodbye" and "water waves". Now when I walk by the shore, I feel the sea is calling out to me -- this is an association that I never had in my native language, which makes no connection between hand-waving and water waves.

Hofstadter wrote about this, that in different languages people bundle together different concepts. and such bundling is hidden from native speakers. My friend (a native speaker of both English and French) once remarked that she really wished she could re-read some French literature as a non-native speaker so as to deeper appreciate the beauty of the language.

definitely. although one of the hallmarks in a good photographer is the ability to find the exotic in the mundane.

but now i'm curious how many foreign photographers we're missing out on.

Yasujiro Ozu was making films since the 20s.
Old analog pictures have a really nice quality to them. Colours are rich and vibrant without looking too fake. They are often taken on 35 mm film, which means a natural shallow dept off field.

I really enjoy browsing through the box of old pictures from my youth. Everyone above 30 probably has their youth snapped on film, while most pics nowadays are shot on phones. I wonder how someone 40 years in the future would look back at 2021 iPhone pictures of themselves?

"I wonder how someone 40 years in the future would look back at 2021 iPhone pictures of themselves? "

I make so many pics and videos that I really hope it will be something like this: "Hey locally run AI that guards my data and privacy, please show me about 100 pictures and videos of holidays when the kids were in the age of 5-10, project them on the wall.", "Yes, that one in the mountains is nice, where is that? Can you show me some more of that holiday?", "How about some videos taken around that era in and around the house?" "Did we have a dog back then?" "Ah yes, there is Bello, what a nice dog that was, when did he die?" [Star Trek computer voice: "last picture of Bello was may 5 2014".]

No way I'm ever going to sort this mess manually. TBH, a simple import in Shotwell already works wonders, and I absolutely love the "For You" section in "Photos" on my iPhone, I can get lost in there for a long time, but that's just a bit too much tied to Apple for my taste though, I'll be archiving all those files at some point (to 2 local hdds and then rsync them off-site (aka "my parent's house")).

Edit: Maybe, at some point, you can construct an interactive narrative about your life like done in The Orville in "Lasting Impressions" [0]. Why are you all so negative about the future people, you need more Star Trek (or The Orville) in your life ;) Nobody is going to get overwhelmed, we're creating a rich source of information about ourselves and the time we live in, which we will probably never really consume as a series of Photographs, that sounds pretty boring indeed, we can do better, show some creativity!

[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7826096/

AI can't even be bothered to do half-reliable text translations, seriously doubt that 40 years from now it will work half as well as we imagine it to be. After all, we all imagined back in in the 80s that we would have flying cars and robots around us by 2020's - we should learn that we are constantly bad predictors and completely off the mark.
No way. The Photos section of the iPhone Photos app is already almost there. It makes the nicest videos from live photos (.heic), with music and it chooses the nice moments by itself. Maybe this not-super-critical-and-necessarily-100%-specific-part is where AI already shines. The "For You" content has complicated titles like "$kid'sName spring 2020" or "A day in the park, summer 2021" or "Happiness". 40 years is a lot.
> They are often taken on 35 mm film, which means a natural shallow dept off field

Not to be too nitpicky but depth of field is a function of focal length and aperture size, the film itself is irrelevant. It's just as easy to achieve on digital, not as common on crop sensor sizes (because those introduce a focal length multiplier, thus you need a very light and wide open lens, like f/1.8) but a full frame sensor has the same depth of field as a 35mm film frame.

I understand that. My point is that most personal photos now are shot on phones, while in the past everyone shot full frame.
Ive actually just started to take the time, once a year, to go through all my phone photos, and print out a couple hundred of them and put them in a photo album. I suspect they’ll still be around when me and my iCloud account are long gone, for the grandkids to discover in their parents basement.
They'll be overwhelmed because there are so many photos and movies. I honestly already struggle to share them all with my kids aged 13 and younger.
Having spent lots of time editing, restoring photos from my family that go back over 100 years, I have watched the evolution of the "consumer camera" (at least as it relates to the kind typically in the possession of the midwest working class).

Oldest photo are studio photos (oldest being a tintype, others ... collodion?). Except for the tintype the quality is generally quite nice. Studio lit, static subjects.

Then come the 1920's and a decade of non-studio, candid photos that appear to have been shot on a Brownie-style box camera. These are fairly poor quality. In some cases though they are poorly framed (subjects too far from the camera) and so it is as much the fault of the operator as the poor camera. Photos are exclusively outdoors.

A handful of studio photos are peppered in these decades, now with school graduation photos, maybe a wedding photo shot professionally. These are quite nice. Maybe the nicest of the first 100 years of photos?

Somewhere in the 30's though B&W photos taken on consumer gear begin to appear that are much better in quality. I suspect we've moved past the box-camera and to something more like the folding-style Kodak with better optics. I like this period of candid photos the best — right up until the 40's and 50's.

Suddenly though, mid-Century, the photo collection goes to color, some of them Polaroids. Oh wow the quality falls right off again. We're back to the Brownie box-camera in terms of image sharpness, clarity. I think we, as consumers, traded quality for color and instant processing.

By the time I am old enough to take pictures (70's) I remember using a Kodak Instamatic (135 film?). Also poor. We had flash of course by then so many more photos go indoors.

My mother sometime in the 70's got a Canon AE-1 so 35mm and decent lens (no doubt the kit "nifty 50") make for some of the best amateur photos of the century for our family photos.

It is curious that the pattern would sort of repeat in the 21st Century as I switched to digital. I had access early on to digital cameras (part of my job) so I was an early adopter. When they became affordable I began buying and upgrading through a few lines of nice Canon point-and-shoot cameras. This was the beginning of the "megapixel wars". The quality of the images began to get quite nice — Canon optics, aperture-priority, ability to adjust exposure bias...

And then sadly, the quality regressed since we lazily turned to relaying on the iPhone camera and early on it was worse than that of the nice Canon cameras. (My wife though had graduated to a Canon Rebel around this time and held on to using it for a while so that many of our vacation photos started to surpass those taken with my mother's 35mm.)

As generations of iPhones improved their camera quality, eventually all the Canon gear got left at home since the photo quality of the modern iPhone was "good enough" at last. Playing with lenses, depth of field (no, not the fakey "portrait" kind of computational depth of field) are gone however — I suspect not likely to return. The thinness of the phone means we're not likely ever to see larger apertures where depth of field becomes meaningful.

I started to get into Micro-4/3 for a bit, recently picked up a Sony mirrorless, but I suspect the days of automatically strapping on a dedicated camera when we head out to hike, vacation, are now a thing of the past.

We'll see.

> I suspect not likely to return.

Phone pics have so quickly become the “default” look that full-frame wide-aperture shots are now becoming almost an affectation; one that can cause comment in itself - like choosing Polaroids or b&w film used to be.

I wonder how that will play out. Filmmaking opted to go back to “blurry” 24fps even when higher rates were available, but the convenience of phones generally always wins.

Ha, I’m reading this post on vacation in the lobby of a hotel with my (film!) camera in a bag on my body.
I'd like to restore some old faded color photos. Any advice on software/techniques?
I used to print a selection of my iPhone pictures every few months or so, but the print shop went under and now I’m stuck :/
‘I always go too far, too deep,’ wrote Bischof. ‘That is not journalistic. I realise that I am not a newspaper reporter. In my innermost soul I am still – and always will be – an artist’

Good! Modern journalism's focus on ethics and rigor over truth seems to confuse people and make them think they can't report the news. No matter what you report or how, there's no guarantee that the truth will out. Your own biases, the reader's biases, the editor's pen, the government's censors, and various incentives, all conspire to transmogrify the truth. Don't worry about whether you're a real journalist, as if it will make any difference. All you need to do is share stories and express yourself honestly. There's more truth in these artistic photos than there is in an entire Sunday edition newspaper.

I would be surprised if the photo-journalists out there grouse very much about whether they are being ethical, truthful. I would imagine, like the photographer in the article, they all see themselves as artists and photographer first. It is surely what drew them into the gig.
Another European photographer working in postwar Japan was the late Italian academic and alpinist Fosco Maraini. His book Meeting with Japan (1960) is one of the greatest cultural analyses I've ever read. While his photos aren't as striking as TFA, the subjects and his writing capture the multiple transitions taking place in the country starting during the war (where he lived, including several years as a civilian POW) and during the 1950s. The English edition (translated from Italian) is out of print but worth purchasing if you can find a copy.

Obituary: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/jun/15/guardianobituar...

If a headline like "A Japanese wanderer who found the soul of France" seems strange to western folks then this headline is just a mirror of same absurdity.
Part of me agrees completely but the other part of me remembers reading Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America“ and feeling that he absolutely nailed it.
Are you American?

I think it makes sense to pay attention to other people's perspective on our own country, because we can get an outside perspective while also applying our firsthand knowledge to evaluate if they are talking out of their ass.

In this case, the actual article is about a photographer. I suspect he didn't actually find the 'soul' of 1950's Japan, although I've never been to any Japan, but he did take some nice photos.

I find neither of those headlines absurd nor strange, so by the rules of logic I guess the above statement is correct - although I disagree with the implication that there is something wrong with either one.

I'm always fascinated by the insights a thoughtful and serious outside observer can bring to a locale or subject.

It doesn’t seem strange to me. Why would a Japanese artist searching for the soul of France not find it? A lot of art is made by outsiders, who see the distinctive elements that insides take for granted.
I would also like to see the photos of 1950s France by a Japanese photographer.
he used a rolleiflex TLR medium format camera (the square images) and a leica IIIC 35mm.

> Bischof died in a road accident in the Andes on 16 May 1954, only nine days before Magnum founder Robert Capa lost his life in Indochina.

Not to stray too far off-topic, but is anyone aware of any scientific studies on the exaggerated interest in Japan and Japanese culture among "nerds" and other social outcasts?

By that I don't mean Cosplayers or Manga fans, but rather the "tech" version of nerddom - people who don't follow Manga, Anime, or Idols, but are fascinated with anything if it's related to Japan.

I guess the most obvious reasons are the myth that "nerds" can find sex partners in Japan more easily than in their own culture, and the darker fascination of Western Neo-Nazis (like Breivik) with Japan's alleged racial purity and chauvinistic nationalism. Especially because a mass-murderer has openly stated his deed was "inspired" by Japanese culture, I wonder if the connection has ever been analysed scientifically.

> I guess the most obvious reasons are the myth that "nerds" can find sex partners in Japan more easily than in their own culture

I believe that is part of it, honestly. But I wouldn't present it exactly that way. I think instead that there are many American males that feel threatened by the assertive, independent American woman. Perhaps beginning with "women's lib" in the 1970's?

Asian culture appears to paint a picture of a submissive female role that is non-threatening, in fact deferential to the male. Even in terms of appearances the stereotypical Asian female has long hair "befitting a woman" and wears traditional feminine clothing.

But I think there of course is another kind of interest in Japanese culture that is not defined by sex roles, a fascination I have myself about Japan.

I think it is other-worldly to this Westerner. Food is foreign but delicious. Society is structured in a way that keeps order. Strict social rules but flexibility toward foreigners who are unused to these rules (and apparently allowances for the behavior of drunks as well?).

I think too many of us see modern Japan as a foil to our own failing societies as we head into an unknown future. Tokyo with public transportation and, as I said, strict social rules, has kept a mostly sane and functioning metropolis together. As we look to our own cities in the U.S. growing to Tokyo-like proportions we can hope that there is a way forward ... if we can only be more like Japan.

Anyway, that is my take on it.

If you can step away from this exotic/erotic axis and consider your question again, I would suggest also thinking about other archetypes and stereotypes visible in Japanese history and pop art accessible to westerners. Many of these seem to have obvious appeal to "nerds" and social outcasts.

Among many things represented there are: intense stoicism, quiet suffering, sacrifice, and discipline; intense devotion and high craft; and individuals trying to contain and balance their personal issues within a high pressure society expecting obedience and conformity. In many exported stories, there is also a strong hint that in spite of all this, Japanese culture somehow allows for very eccentric (geeky?) characters to carve out a pocket world where their obsessions become almost respected in the same way as traditional disciplines. A sort of meta-discipline focused on the process of refinement itself...

Diverting the discussion to the subject of the nerd identity is always on topic for Hacker News.

I'd say there's several centuries worth of precedent on Western interest on Japanese art, history and culture. The US sent gunboats to force them to show the goods at one point, when they were unwilling to share them.

I think such a study would not reveal anything but rather mundane truths.

> By that I don't mean Cosplayers or Manga fans, but rather the "tech" version of nerddom - people who don't follow Manga, Anime, or Idols, but are fascinated with anything if it's related to Japan.

For some reason, you are putting up a strong separation here that I am not sure actually exists in real life. People don't compartmentalize their hobbies and remaining interests into two separate buckets that have nothing to do with each other.

I find it reasonable both that:

- People who watch anime or read manga all day are more likely to notice, upvote, and share a story about Japan just due to the proximity of language.

- "Nerds" as you put it are more likely to be into anime or manga in the first place.

Given these two, it follows that nerds are more likely to share general stories about Japan without any of the much darker reasons you seem to posit.

Similarly, I would also find it reasonable that someone listening to and practicing Euro-centric music all day is more likely to share stories that have a mainly Euro-centric context.

Asian cultures are just interesting from my POV. Think about how the English fascination with Roman ruins embedded all sorts of Roman allegory and content into popular culture.

Japan and China has their own stories, histories and empires dating back thousands of years, but they just aren’t a part of western culture and education. It’s a novelty for some and a passion for others because of the aspect of discovery. I know very little about Chinese history, but if you grabbed 100 of my not-Chinese peers, I probably know more than 90 of them.

I also find them interesting, but what interests me is why Japan, not China, Thailand, Korea, or Malaysia is the most interesting to "nerds".
These are beautiful
if you cherry pick 10 pictures out of thousands I certainly hope those 10 will be beautiful
That’s called ‘editing’ and I’m not sure but it sounds like you’re implying the practice undermines the quality of work like photography, when in fact it’s arguably a more important part of the practice than aiming the camera and releasing the shutter.
the first photo especially is breathtaking
I found the 6th to be the breathtaking one for me