Here's a few more from the Italy trips, this one's Venice. Didn't remember it looking so clean in these old pictures.

These are from Roma, second image shows some soldiers guarding the "Temple of Vesta", which i think is actually a misnomer unless i didn't get a memo, the original one was destroyed multiple times and finally demolished by the church a thousand years later due to reasons. It was partially reconstructed but still that stuff is in the Roman Forum, not in the place the image shows. Don't really know what place it is but it does look like the archetype of a Vesta Temple, they say no man can enter a Vesta temple unless you want to receive serious damage or curses.

Monumental arc details and some detail from a church in Pisa. Very classy wooden fence there in Constantine.

Here's the eerie ones, very especially the last image with the lack of a discernible background or sky. love me some In the Void places. Also the Coliseum picture features in its lower left, probably by accident, a change on focus points which gives the illusion that the object in the image is a miniature. The effect is called Diorama but it's usually referred to as "Miniature Faking" or Miniaturization. And there we go, Les Frères Bisson in their arch and nature form.

>>117 >lower left FUCK, i meant lower right, in the grassy field. Here's more explicit examples of said effect.

>>117 These are all very nice Anon, thanks.

>>118 I enjoyed your niche historic insights a lot. Never before in all my shitposting career have i saved so much content from a single thread. So.. gonna move on to the next subject now? What's it gonna be? Interiors? Furniture? Self-portraits? Sculptures? Tableware? Elements of nature? Getting greedy here.

>>120 Oh, our subjects will be specific photographers and their realm of work rather than genres or themes, next one will be an obstinate lady who inadvertently changed the stylistic parameters of the hobby, it's quite off-topic from all these arch photos a couple of brothers did but in the end you'll see the context i wanted to reach. But in terms of aesthetics, especially European ones, it's just as interesting although won't be as big of a dump. Searching some bigger resolution pictures to make it worthwhile.

I'm monitoring this thread.

>>113 >Save images from places to be seen later on for any changes I don't mean to alarm you all, but speaking of which...

Looks like OP has abobdoned us. Did he finaly realized that he's casting pearls before the swine? Maybe corona chan got him? Or maybe they took away his internet privileges inside the prison? Guess we'll never know.

>>125 >Looks like OP has abandoned us Hey there, not really but not gonna lie, i got a bit tired of reading and trying to write our subjects along with finding the best possible resolutions, but the images are already collected (220+) and i got plenty of names to investigate from the japanese spectrum later on, which is basically a different world in terms of photography as they play with their own rules (as usual from them to be fair). I would've not read so much but there's some photographers who have tons of legacy that deserve a bit more than 3 or 4 notes, although sometimes i would go into details not that necessary like the Pre-Raphaelites and their morally ambiguous shenanigans. I also got sidetracked organizing and filtering my own unedited photos into project folders, they are 8000+ and most of them out-of-focus and underexposed because i'm a beginner/my DSLR is a piece of trash with cheap broken lenses, it's a personal battle so i didn't think it was relevant for the audience. Honestly i didn't realize 2 weeks have passed already, guess i'll resume it soon enough.

>>126 >guess i'll resume it soon enough I'll be looking forward to it.

Fucking hell, it's been 2 weeks again? I keep writing and it just keeps going although i started recently. At this point let's do a quick intermission with the nip niche of photographers i mentioned so we can get things moving again, i already looking into some of them so this should be quick.

Here's a few more i found from the man Issei Suda, i didn't do a through job on him because i didn't think i would do big dives on subjects hence why i keep finding more of his stuff, i actually found much more but the quality is small and many shots are mundane as isolated subjects, in a big conceptual narrative they do fit their space. For example number 28 here is a trait of him, taking pictures of eye images, he found out that when in certain moods or situations he would often see or focus on eye pictures, images and representations that appeared out of nowhere, which freaked him out at times due to the synchronicity but never paid so much attention to it to avoid the paranoid tag on him. Didn't work, he published a book about pictures of eyes, i don't think it's long but it certainly registers a ton of ophthalmologist offices in his city.

So, in terms of narrative i might be overplaying a card here but as long as the shows goes on: Ikkō Narahara was an influential japanese photographer born in Fukuoka around 1931, we can bet he had it way worse than Issei due to the era, along the fact he lived near both regions that got the J-Bombs dropped in. He studied the law in a prestigious private university in Tokyo (Chuo) and graduated at 23 yo (1954) so we can deduce he either had a firm grasp in education and laws or he was from a well-financed family, after traveling around and seeing the picturesque north of Japan he decided to go balls-deep into his photography hobby and started snapping. Here we have some photos from his Tokyo days, some of which he withheld from publication until the mid-90's, including a cheeky graduation picture. Reasons for keeping them will follow.

Here's some assorted ones from various periods of his early to mid career. Right, so we can also deduce he either had extensive previous experience with the camera or simply had an innate talent for it, this so-called self-taught photog had his modest first exhibition (they were easier to do back in the day) in 1956, which compiled some of his photos since 1954. It was a monumental hit on the scene and pretty talked about in its era, it influenced many future photogs about how casual photography done in such a level becomes a documentary archive, along with being aesthetic as hell and surprising many critics due to it being the debut project of the photographer in any field regarding the arts Ikkō actually reserved himself until he had "a big one", which came rather soon-ish in his career

The exhibition was called Human Land or The Land of Humanity (人間の土地 / Ningen no Tochi) it combined 2 projects of his: One was called Village at the Foot of the Volcano, a view on a little town called Kurokami Mura (Black God Village) besides Sakurajima volcano in the deep south of Japan. Said place grants the denizens near it no clean water, among other things like fumes, rocky as hell terrain and many sights from the old place that was buried in a 1914 eruption, the one that expelled so much bad hot gooey stuff that it turned the former island into a peninsula connected to the mainland. Due to that exhibition/book not having too many scans, and considering its importance, i grabbed many of the images from a gov site which doesn't have a lot of resolution, sorry 'bout that. That Gate Entrance is one of those tall ones you see in movies, here shown buried after that aforementioned incident.

Kurokami Mura was not a very prosperous place to say the least, the inhabitants were the youths and their descendants left of those who lost pretty much everything, times were pretty tough but they found ways to amuse themselves, not to mention the place was certainly picturesque. They practically rebuild it over the years, with new blocks, new shrine, a school, but still it seems to have been rough. Here we also have a perv shot, we always need one of those with these japs.

Carrying water was fundamental for these fellows, walking for it into nearby villages every damn day and with the porous terrain i bet they were specialized in making tough straw shoes. As you can see perhaps the beach and the view were worth it for some of these denizens of Earth. Here in the third picture we are starting to see this trend with the japs that i got to get very fond of since i shot/lived through a similar view once: The lack of separation between sky and sea, making the islands or almost any subject appear to be floating in a void. Very cool, i've mentioned "Into the Void" feelings in photography a couple of times before although with other kind of views/techniques, and i know it's repetitive but i get my rocks off from it, what can i say. I'm a novice in photo history (and shooting it too to be fair) but i highly suspect this japanese trait was started by 2 particular dudes i have in the lists, i wanted to start with them before Ikkō but oh well.

Some dawn/dusk shots, the injured man appears a couple of times in this project but i didn't found his particular story, he appears in the parents' side of a graduation event, as a worker and here as a busted up feller biding his time. For such nice clothes these guys live in dire conditions, later on or at least in recent years the place has become a tourist site and seems to have received some of that beach money.

Now for the main meal of this post: The other, vastly more famous project which was ominously called The Island without Greens, documenting the denizens of Hashima Island aka Gunkanjima, the man-made artificial island in the middle of the Nagasaki coast front, which allowed a bunch of miners and their families an in-situ residence to keep chucking picks at big chunks of coal underneath it. This is a top-tier one if you ask me.

The Battleship Island as it stands translated, is a 480 meters long plus 160 meters wide apartment & mining complex established in 1887 that housed a little more than 5000 miners and their families members at one point; that's 83,500 dudes per km2, the peak was just a couple of years after these images were taken. Even when the photos don't show it you might guess it was a hive full of people but who certainly wouldn't liked it a lot, it's a concrete purgatory to say it kindly. The miners seem to be having a jolly good fraternal time anyways, who knows how much black ooze they got in their lungs, they seemingly didn't care a lot if the smoke break images are to go by.

Most cities or towns based around the mining industry usually have a couple of things in common and in abundance: Testosterone and money. So mixing in family members and kids can be an explosive combination, imagine that bunch of rowdy miners with money (or paying their social sentence) and then going out and finding nothing much to spend it on or pass the time in the non-punitive hours. For the family members it must've been pretty boring at times too but it seems they managed.

The maintenance workers might've had it worse unless they were also direct family members which is my ignorant theory. At one point it was just a small island with a coal hill in it, the precious and not-uncommon-at-all rock was discovered around 1810, by '87 some folks started hauling it in boats and in '90 Mitsubishi just bought the damn place and made the hulking sea walls in. Around 1916 the first concrete building was made and things went turbo, 4 kilometer-deep mine shafts at some point and it was all dandy unless you had to go with clothes (95% humidity according to JimmyWalesPedia). In the Jap occupation of Manchuria many tough mothas, charged with reckless patriotism or just horrible crimes, were given a full-paid vacation to Hashima without scheduled return, so you might guess that apart from being a depressing sight the island was also haunted as hail, 2000 ghosts to be specific.

Narahara's use of diverse focal ranges, going from wide-angle to telephoto along with "normal" ones, give a varied but concise idea of the island and its tough as fuck conditions, either from the day-to-day miners' POV or from their bored relatives and jaded public janitors. Due to said variation in photo topics such as subjects and focal distances The Ik miraculously evaded being encased into a single genre and basically shat all over contemporary critics by pulling "street", architecture, portrait, documentary and landscape photography into a single solid presentation. This also gave old critics lay-way into their reasoning that photography itself only has 3 or 4 ways of shooting it, i would re-write them again but i actually forgot about those (no bully pls) all i remember is that i agreed completely; in technical terms there's very few ways how to shoot things, in terms of composition a bit more but still some few depending on the situation... the modern genre catalogue system basically just focuses on themes and the meta behind dealing with said things, hence why Ikkō buggered some people by shooting certain subjects with the "wrong" focal ranges and exposures.

At one point around the 70's the miner engineers saw that they had almost mined the entire thing up, so without further notice or planning everyone packed their stuff up and left in haste, practically abandoning the place in a week or so and without being able to get most of their furniture out, guards became the last ones to go some months later. It remained abandoned and visited by crafty perv tourists until around the late 90's, when its fame had gone overboard between certain circles and overnight the island became a meme in mainstream media, especially when they found out the place actually used prisoner labor, a war prisoner purgatory at some point between that too. At least from this some things happened like the Japanese government protecting the island with a royal decree and UNESCO papers (much to the chagrin of the butthurt zainichi war prisoners) granting it a ton of bucks for remodeling and later on being digitally modeled for Killer7; didn't save it from appearing in trashy movies like a James Bond one and a live-action remake of Attack On Titan, tho.

After this rotund success, The Ik was righteously motivated and went on to study art history in another prestigious private institution, getting his degree in reading books with many pictures in it around 1959. In that meantime he planned another couple of projects, the exhibition itself would be in 1958 under the name of Domains, focusing on 2 topics again (and at this point showcasing his constant duality between man in nature and man in the machine). One of the subjects was the Woman's Prison in Wakayama under the project name of Within the Wall, this place around the middle-south region of Kansai, and the other was the Trappist Monastery in the northern island of Dosanko under the project name Garden of Silence; as you may notice both are secluded, cloistered fellows biding their time in their own ways, until this guy with his camera paid a visit.

This one i short-assed it due to time constraints also not a lot of high-resolution pictures around still they are interesting documents (the Prison more so) also one of the leftovers of this venture was pretty interesting too, it would appear on publication in the late 60's in a book called Japanesque (tough to trace pictures of) that one was about Buddhists at some Temple i didn't write down (sorry). The pictures are rad, you have to admit, some of them no doubt were inspiration for many cinematographers in the late 80's/early 90's Hong Kong Cinema; Zen 08 here screams Ping-Bing "Mark" Lee, Xiaoding Zhao or Tak-Hei "Peter" Pau, although in my early supposition here i might be missing an earlier pioneer.

These ones were also a success, this guy was just hitting them out of the park, but in context there were some serious heavy hitters at the same time as Ikkō that supposedly were better and also predated him by a couple of years (pending investigation). The Eyes of Ten exhibition happened around 1957, showing the public 10 of the most well-known young photogs of the day (at least in preppy Tokyo) here Ikman would see face to face what those guys were about. And well, that event basically created a new style in the eyes of the critics. Our wee lad here wouldn't be easily discarded, although it seems by documentation that he respected them a lot, after a while (actually soon after the Domains exhibition) he contacted some of these monsters and seems to have ended up making frens. Another exhibition dubbed the same (Eyes of Ten) happened and at that point it was pretty much established, from those 10 it looks like 6 talked shop and stroke a partnership, soon they would establish the photographic cooperative agency Vivo, which i don't know much about at this point but they seem to enjoy legendary status among the hobby's history. Really, i feel stupid writing about it knowing it might as well be like somebody just discovering Led Zeppelin or something, still let's waddle on mentioning their legacy includes the solid manifestation or conclusive proof of a stylistic trend that had been observed over those years in post-war Japan but always in small examples, so-called "the image school" which bent the usual street/documentation photography rules of that era that based themselves in a realistic representation of events by the photographer's eye. By that i mean these guys composed, shot and tried to fool the viewer's eye with images that show stuff in either a very personal manner, showcasing lack of discernible visual barriers V.O.I.D. and/or using subjects in unorthodox compositions based on their intrinsic nature/meta. In short, visual games, abstraction and rule-breaking for the playful/pervs. They don't seem to have worked in constant artistic cooperation but rather in a sanctuary office space sharing expenses between all of them, everyone basically did what they wanted, sometimes made money in side-activities, and released stuff for art's sake without worrying about agents or jobs: Their fame was secure. It lasted only 3 years in full swing, pretty shit duration to be honest... but the influence their cheap publishing exploits made became the norm for the new wave of japanese visual styles, ranging from the actual new wave of japanese photographers of the 60's and 70's (in which our old buy Suda here is a product) to even some cinema efforts (Nagisa Ōshima's social degeneration movies of the late 60's). Some examples of Narahara from those years can be seen in the first two posts from this series, particularly Sumo Guy and Checkers. Another hit for the guy here, so much that after the movement died out he was invited to Europe to showcase some stuff, he ended up being given some jobs here and there which in part gave the man the will to live in the old Continent for a while. From 1962 to 1965 he resided in France, Spain and Italy, pulling some exhibitions on the latter two, even books. One called Europe: Where Time Has Stopped (ヨーロッパ・静止した時間 / Yōroppa: Seishi Shita Jikan) and for Spain another called España: Grand tarde (スペーン・偉大なる午後 / Supēn: Idai Naru Gogo), i didn't find many pics from those but here goes. After that he returned to Japan and decided to might as well, finish it with Japanesque (ジャパネスク / Japanesuku) which we previously mentioned with Zen Boys.

Big pimpin' so far, after his reiterative success in Japan (he won Japan Photo Critics Association's Photog of the Year in 1967) the guy made the next logical step, at least back then: America. Exhibitions and art money launder galore, Ikman resided in the big city from 1970 to 1974 and seems to have worked as a fashion protog like on his last days in Tokyo, he planned some projects in the big apple jew hell but the real, actual hit he conceived in America was an improvised adventure, and certainly one that won me over in terms of fanatic pleasure. In a somewhat relevant side-note Ikkō had at some point studied a couple of the greats of the American Photography scene more on that later, he attended some classes and exhibitions, his english was crap so he decided to film some reunions and try to understand them later on to polish or try to make sense of what the americans said. One of those occasions was with the j-photographer Diane Arbus, which is another subject on her own due to being part of this system many of you might know at this point entertainment industry tightly controlled by some few and pushing for certain kind of things but to make things short another thing that made Ik famous was that he obliviously recorded some conversations of this photog to study for a while, and time later when visited by some dudes who saw dem footage they calmly explained to him that, according to the dates showed, that was shot a few days before she had taken tons of drugs and cut her wrists out. This was relevant because it's supposedly some of the only footage available from her, a figure peddled by many for some reason or another, we shall see another day. Aaaanyways one week in 1971/2 the guy decided to vent out and explore the country's natural landscapes to check some places he saw, at one point traveling in the highways this japanese fellow realized the great plains and desert regions were actually quite literally vast areas of land with very few people going around and living peacefully like nobody's else business. Somehow this shocked him, and much like how he felt when he explored Europe's beautiful historical cities he saw that the southwest and surrounding areas are places Where Time Has Vanished (消滅した時間 / Shōmetsu Shita Jikan) seemingly another planet altogether and his ride was his ship. Later on he included a bunch of pictures from the big cities too, but the real protagonists are his small town and highway captures, ranging from reservations to casinos to hotel bars. Home sweet home.

Riding the desert on a leather interior must've been an interesting experience for the guy who lived a winter in Gunkanjima, many of these pictures (along with their locations) are possibly inspired from A.A. soon so the story about him studying western photography makes sense, he certainly gave them a vibe of ethereality on his own too. At this point i noticed the same thing as with Suda: It must be a real bitch to find these photo books in affordable prices, and then actually having the balls to bust open them to scan the images.

This guy afforded a Cadillac/Lincoln luxury 2+2 after working 2 years if not less, fucking fashion photography. Here we see some influence from E.H. soon-ish in the NY image, the Jackie Kennedy Masks image does kind of appear as an oddity rather than an actual composition in this project. So after this book/exhibition was released, the guy practically reinvented his name again but now in the Western Hemisphere, he sold a bunch of prints and was given free reign by a gallery to experiment with whatever. So I.K., known for his wide-angle images, picked the widest, thickest thing he could find and went to the streets for experimentation.

He chose a "fish-eye" lens (uncorrected wide-angle optic) and starting doing some sort of street documentation, nowadays it's popular to see this kind of photography (there was even an app for it some months ago) but back then in 1975 he was basically pulling wool over people's eyes. Broadway, New York is a 1973's experiment in street/arch photography with many of the important avenues being registered using this template of 4 spaces shot with a ball of glass, don't doubt a bit this guy got paid big money by some people for it.

In 1974 the guy got a Museum of Modern Art exhibition (MoMA the biggest noses in the world apart from Bilderberg) under the title of New Japanese Photography, in which he and some of his pals were protagonists and this place showcased their very best with prints readily available for sale at thousands of dollars. Some hearsay has been said and who really knows what happened there, either something too good or a puke-on-somebody's-wife situation but after that, and with more renown than some all-american protogs, Narahara packed his bags and returned to Japan once again. He went on to re-publish some of his american work there, made some new stuff, fashion shoots, by the early to mid 80's he returned to Italy to make some night experiments (shown in the second post), honestly there's not much i could find from the guy after the mid-70's other than him being a figure of respect by many of his peers. He delved into colour photography, something experimented in Japanesque but more focused on fashion and product; here's 2 pictures which i don't know where they came from, sunrise colours in a desert highway, man that's pretty. It might be from his american journey but i'm not sure. Around that era he went to London and Seoul to exhibit his exploits, probably made some cash, and after that i would just be deducing and pulling things out of a hat based on his books' titles. Won some personal recognitions and prizes like the Higashikawa-Shõ (one of the 3 big prizes back there, surprisingly the modest Suda won it first) and the all-prestigious japanese Medal with Purple Ribbon. That's the thing with the japanese, tough to trace or find documentation of them. From 1999 to 2005 he seems to have been a professor at the Graduate School of Kyushu Sangyo University in his natal Fukuoka, along with one of his pals, and later on he had some retrospective shows here and there in big cities. In January 2020 he called it quits at 88 years old, his obituary and several retrospective previews of the american days were my introduction to him so i guess his story is still being retold.

His particular style regarding the visual games and tricks with the horizon lines are tasty, at least for me, along with the use he gave to the wide-angle lenses, providing them with a niche to shoot people too unlike what the critics said. His actual influence might be more obvious to me in further ventures into the nippon photography scene, or perhaps i might see some who shaped his eye, but so far he's a favorite due to his very clear cut topics and documentation, projects presented in pairs, blue palettes and obviously his stylistic freedom. Now that i think of it maybe i've seen work of his before but who knows, perhaps one day i'll find his fashion/studio shots and provide some further examples. Meanwhile i guess i will finish the other posts first.

i've archived this thread to get these pics. thanks for the wonderful dump Anon.

Check out this guy's stuff. Pretty cool imo. http://www.coreyfishes.com

>>165 Noice, that Nord Norge part is pretty cool. Some meme images here and there but generally it's good.

There's some overused trends nowadays and the last two ones here follow them but in its specific context i think they work very well, this guy's very good. I'll check him further, thanks anon.

>>150 Damn it's been two years now, been hoarding pictures but never writing about them. I found some more from Ikko Narahara so here goes: These ones from his Zen, Domains and Sumo/60's Japan days

These ones from his Spain book Grand Tarde

Some more from Europe, from Where Time Has Stopped and i think the Venice book from the late 80's but i am not too sure. And the cover for one of his books, Tokyo, the 50's, that's that, not many scan books i see lol. More subjects to come i hope, work is busting me.

>>405 That first pic is amazing

Any excuse to post Ikko is good, so here's one: Found some biggie scans from the Contemporary Art Library project website along some others i didn't see the first 3 times. These are some more from Venice ~ Nightscapes

Some more from Where Time Has Vanished

Here's a couple of the fabled colour photos from the Stellar Memories book which encompasses the same era around WTHV, it even has some photos from it so it probably is a re-edit of sorts. Cool hue overdrive, first pic was an instant favorite for me

Misc. ones from Domains, Grand Tardeand Tokyo the 50s Shame his photobooks cost a lot but perhaps one day i might get one.