Hailstones left my plants distraught

 

The Man in the Castle

Roland Barthes wrote that Maupassant often lunched at the restaurant in the Eiffel Tower so as to escape from having to look at it. "It's the only place in Paris, where I don't have to see it." In a typical Japanese castle, one wonders if the rulers while looking at lofty views of their dominion, noticed the irony of not being able to see what they stood on.

 

Respect

Then and now. Getaya-san on Sansakizaka and Yakitoriya-san in Yanaka Ginza. The sort of values becoming extinct in our internet-dominated physical world.

“Lyrical Landscape” architecture photography

A portrait is not a passport photo.

Photographs depicting architecture and interiors in design magazines can generally be called “functional” photography, like passport photos of spaces. They are usually straightforward super wide-angled shots that try to showcase spaces in their entirety, even if it means distorting narrow spaces beyond imagination. In the false belief that such photographs show things objectively, factually, photographers patently disfigure any plausible imagined experience of them. Such architecture photos have become a boring genre with iron shackles so systemically entrenched (photographers, commissioners, publishers) that few would dare decouple.

Another way of presenting architecture and interiors is to acknowledge that space is not about its dimensions, not about its constitutive elements, but about its ambiance or atmosphere. And any perception of it requires a breathing, living person with an internal subjective world. The photographs of it should attempt to present this atmosphere or joukei (情景) or literally, its lyrical landscape. Each photographer would have his/her unique way of depicting this; photography being not an act of objective recording.

For me, the photos above are some examples of trying to show architecture in this way.

#architecturephotography #lyricallandscape #KojiTaki #YukichiWatabe #KeiichiTahara #RikuIkeya #GoItami #showandtell #representation  #情景 #建築写真 #多木浩二 #渡部雄吉 #田原桂一 #伊丹豪 #池谷