Kyoto Journal is an English language publication coming out of Kyoto. To mark its 70th issue Kyoto Journal has looked locally at its birthplace; Kyoto. I showed the founding editor John Einarsen some of my previous work documenting city streets in Vancouver and he thought something like this might work in issue 70.



I was new to Kyoto at the time (this was last November) so I started to look for locations right away. I had little idea of what Kyoto was like beyond the tourist spots I've seen before. Kyoto is the city of temples; there is no mention of being the city of convenience stores or renovated cafés. I went out many times to either look or to photograph. Each week I told John "I'm almost finished, I just have to shoot one more building and stitch it in." Well, that week kept repeating. By April I had to attach a tripod holder to my scooter so I could get around. I went from hypothermia in the winter to heat-stroke in the summer but I was still shooting.



A few weeks before the magazine went to press John was still calm and patient with me. I kept promising to finish but John said, "I have a few more places I want to show you." He took me on a tour of some spots that don't have tour bus parking like Kurodani Temple (黒谷寺). By this point I was using a bicycle to get around more slowly and I found even more hidden locations.
Well, sometime in July I finished the image. It includes images from November to July with over 70 layers of buildings and people. It isn't "straight" documentary where each snapshot would have be considered a separate image, it's edited like a film into a one coherent strip about 2 meters long. It wraps around from the back cover to the front and the first few pages in.

Finally the 1st Art catalogue has arrived from BMO. It shows the artwork of the winning artists between 2003 and 2007 from all across Canada. I'm happy to see that there are more winning photographs from Emily Carr Institute. The original project I submitted that was chosen as the national winner in 2005 is described in this entry. You can see more detailed images here as well.

 

Uzumasa is near Eiga Mura or Movie Town in Kyoto city. The neighbourhood can't be compared to Vancouver at all. While Vancouver was built in clear steps our neighbourhood in Kyoto is layer on layer of construction. The houses are packed together but not in even rows. The streets become suddenly narrow and house-fronts face different directions. But in Kyoto the tiny Jizo shrines keep their sacred spaces like bubbles from the past as trains, scooters and houses surround them. If Vancouver is well known for its modernist architecture, being predominantly built in the 1950s and 60s, Kyoto is more like a well packed suitcase holding the contents of over a thousand years in a modern city.

This is a scale model built for "Pawn." The background has been destroyed but the car model will be used for upcoming installations. Stay tuned.

The main image for this series is 350 cm wide but you will be able to zoom into the faces of the harvesters in the photograph with a special viewer the works right from your browser.

This way you can enjoy the images almost like you are standing right in the gallery.

The largest image in this series is a work in progress reaching 14 meters across but due to the difficulty of working with hundreds of files it will take me probably two years to fully complete the image.

このシリーズのメイン写真のサイズは幅３５０cm。しかしブラウザーから
直接動かせるビューワで写真中の収穫者たちの顔表情までズームして見ることができる。
このブラウザーでの見方はまるでギャラリーの中であなたが鑑賞しているかのような楽しませてくれる。
このシリーズの中での一番大きな写真は幅１４mにのぼり、現在製作中。何百ものファイルを使っての作業のため、
完全に完成させるまでにはあと２年を要する予定である。

After my move to Japan I realized I still have material I haven't fully processed from Vancouver. Here are some large panoramic photographs that are complete. This time they are shown much larger than I've been able to show them before.

日本へ移ってから、実はまだバンクーバーで進行中であった素材があることに気づいた。
ここではすでに完成済みのいくつかのパノラマ写真を紹介する。今回は以前よりもさらに大きなスケールで
ウェブ上にて見られるようになった。

I thought I'd show some more from this series. When I was working on this series I was thinking a lot about borders and boundaries because we're always surrounded by them. My Dad recently reminded me about how borders are changing with his example about the Schengen Area. The Czech government is notifying people that soon it will become part of this border-free zone in Europe. More on the Schengen Area.

When I was a child, I once had to stay behind while my parents went to visit relatives in Germany. This was just in case they thought of escaping from the Czech Republic. The borders were very strict and travelling anywhere meant you needed to have permission to do so. When we moved to Canada we were all so happy that we could just drop by the border and go the the United States. These days the situation is changing in Canada.

I shot the brothers series on film using an old studio camera. I had this idea to mount a camera in front on my brother Nik's car. So it took forever to shoot it but the results are worth it. We planned each shot carefully but then the moment was still spontaneous. Eventually we were pulled over by the RCMP because he wanted to know what we had attached to the 2x4s bolted to the front of Nik's '69 Beaumont. He must have thought it was cool, since we took a photo together.

In 1996, I visited the Czech Republic for the first time after 16 years. I was hanging out with my cousin Martin and his friend Mamut in the town of Žatec. It was enough time after the Velvet Revolution that we thought the Soviet flag was pretty funny and I ended up finding one in an old storage shed at a camp. I thought, “people actually had to fly this flag.”

But what about the college students willingly wearing the hammer and sickle logo around Main Street in Vancouver? And the one clothing shop on the same street using the Soviet hammer and sickle in their window display. Our generation of trivially-worried North Americans is bombarded by symbols; these kinds don’t mean anything anymore.

Even though Josef Stalin starved 11 million people under the same flag, the symbol only remains to show that the wearer is “not taking life too seriously.”

By 2006, I added 12 more flags to this series but it won’t be finished until I can bombard myself with symbols until they don’t mean anything to me anymore.

１９９６年、僕は１６年ぶりにチェコ共和国の親戚を訪ねた。　このソビエト国旗はその際、従兄弟であるマーティンとその友人、マモットとたまたま行ったジャテツという小さな町のキャンプ場にあった古小屋で見つけた。　この旗を見た時にはビロード革命からかなり時間が経っていたので僕の目にはおかしなものに写った。 　だが実際、過去には人々はこの旗を揚げなければならない時代があったのだ。

では、バンクーバーのメインストリート周辺でソビエトのシンボルである槌と鎌ロゴのシャツを喜んで着ている学生たちはどうなのか？　

そして同じメインストリートで槌と鎌をショーウィンドウに飾っている衣料店は？　 われわれの世代は北米人たちがこれらのシンボルによって本気で受け取られると心配することはなく、 もう何も意味しないようになってきている。 たとえ、かつてスターリンがこの同じ旗を使って一千万人もの人々を飢餓に苦しめたとしても、このシンボルはもうロゴを着用している若者たちにとっては真剣に受け止められていないのであろう。

２００６年までに僕はさらに１２旗をこのシリーズに追加した。　だが、これらのシンボルが意味を無くし、そして僕自身が受け取れるまでは、まだこのシリーズは続いていく。

Symmetry has been scientifically identified as one of our biological benchmarks for beauty. Numerous reasons may be given for this; from giving evidence of a genetically superior person to simply being physically healthy. But idolising beauty is only one part of what beauty has the potential to become.

This work is part of an ongoing series of photographs using forensic photography and a sort of surveillance photography to create mosaics resembling a police fingerprint database. I am using my own custom made software to create the final images. Each final image has a corresponding "straight" fence photograph and a processed fingerprint image.

This software uses Mark Probst's Metapixel to recreate digital images using thousands of thumbnails or image fragments in a mosaic.

Granville Street is one of the oldest and most central Vancouver streets. It is both a pedestrian mall where the oldest department stores started out and a place where small local businesses operate among pan-handlers and homeless teens. A row of old movie theatres have been converted to night clubs and auditoriums. I tried to show this range within one block using only one image.

I photographed Dunsmuir Street and Homer Street from February to May of 2004. I finally used about 200 of 450 images taken for these two panoramic views. I aimed not for recreating the street as an architectural map but a temporal map, creating a feeling of how the two streets are used.