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.
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.
It's not photography specifically, but one of Japan's most revered historical figures is Fukuzawa Yukichi. In the 19th century, he spent many years traveling through the West, learned English and Dutch, and wrote a lot of books in Japanese about his experiences.
He "discovered" the West for Japan and brought knowledge back. They used that knowledge to help re-found the country after the Edo period ended; he's regarded as one of the founders of modern Japan.
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.
This is why I love showing tourists around my home city. They notice so many special things that have long since faded into the background for me.
For example I was taking four Japanese grad students to a local park famous for its hikes and waterfalls. But the thing that made them jump up and start pointing and taking pictures was when a yellow school bus drove by. Look, look! It's Snoopy! It's a real yellow bus, just like in Snoopy!"
When my eldest brother was in high school, he did a two-week exchange program with a high school in Italy (where an Italian student came to stay with us for two weeks, and later my brother went and stayed with that student and his family for two weeks). I was fairly young at the time, but I distinctly remember when all the Italian students went out into the city to do some sight-seeing and he came back with basically his entire camera roll filled with pictures of squirrels, and apparently most of his friends had done the same.
Hm, yes famous would have been the more clear word to use. I think they're great. The word infamous has always been blurry for me, since it's often used ironically, in which case it just means "famous" again.
I think the problem with a word like infamous is that it kind of requires the context of the author or speaker's social mores, and if you don't share their value judgement then they're just famous. And social mores have changed a lot and even now vary from person to person.
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.
We are metaphorical machines and language drives a large part of it, at least according to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I wish I had the perspective of a second language - maybe this is where the statistic of multilingual kids performing better comes from.
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!
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.
While I agree that the expectations for AI are too high, I think the use case described is almost achievable with today's tech. It's just language processing to process the request (User wants to see dog around this time period in this location) and finding relevant images (find pictures with dog with exif data that matches time period and location).
You could do most of that with some creative use of CLIP. 'Show more of the mountain' is trivial out of the box, and the 'kids aged 5-10' just needs a bit of logic: take a few photos of each kid at various ages 5-10 (perhaps already specified by the user?), embed, average along with the text prompt 'kids aged 5-10', and use those as the targets. 'Around that time' and 'in and around that house' can be done by metadata dates + GPS + image embedding of the 'house' (or just the text embedding of the word 'house'!) to filter photos by date+location, and then similarity to 'house'. And so on.
The question there is how to be able to create those queries automatically in response to transcribed user voice commands. But hey, given Codex/Copilot, who can doubt that programming such queries is out of reach of a contemporary NN either?
> 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.
Huh, til. I had a little Crayola brand camera that fit APS cartridges as a kid, and I had just lived my whole life assuming disposables had a similar "not quite" size film inside.
I also haven't actually seen any of those pictures in nearly a decade, because my family lost a storage unit at some point that apparently had all my childhood memorabilia in it. I'm probably remembering them worse than they were.
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.
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.
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.
I do it manually and fully on a desktop Macintosh.
It begins with scanning at high DPI on a flatbed scanner. A mid-range Epson and 600 DPI is more than adequate for old photos, I find.
The raw scan then gets pulled into the photo editing software. Levels are the most important thing to adjust (again, manually). Playing with exposure, shadow level, highlight levels — always trying to get a good dynamic range from the photo (not pulled down so dark you lose shadow detail, not pulling too bright that you clip/bloom the highlights).
I like to try then to remove dust specks, scratches and other defects to try to make my digital version superior to the original. For this step I myself rely on an older version of Apple's Photos app (from like High Sierra?) because the retouch tool is quite fast in that version of Photos (the retouch tool has since fallen way off in speed, usability. I believe however I am missing the Brightness adjustment in this older version of Photos, that is unfortunate).
Adobe Lightroom though is still I believe the gold-standard for photo-editing apps. No doubt they have an excellent retouch tool (but I refuse to pay an annual subscription for software). But there are plenty of other apps that will give you all the photo editing capabilities you might want. I have Pixelmator Pro and Affinity Photo but I have not tried to learn either with regard to restoring old photos. They are probably more than capable. Additionally I have briefly played with apps that focus on B&W (grayscale) images and offer a rich palette of tools that focus on adjusting "tone" and other things I can't quite grok but would like to explore more.
‘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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Japan was occupied and rebuilt by the United States immediately following the war. There was tremendous cultural and technological exchange during this time, and after occupation ended, Japanese cultural and technical exports rapidly achieved parity with the West in a way that the other countries you listed did not. If you were a tech-focused kid in the 80's, it was Japan that had the fascinating imports. Japanese cars went from being a cultural laughingstock to economic powerhouse in less than a decade. Japan was simply present in the US to a degree that no other Asian country came close to.
(South Korea is the next closest competitor in terms of having the West's attention, and it's not a coincidence that it is also the other major east Asian country to have gone through an occupation and rebuilding phase, with the concomitant cultural exchange between the two.)
Taiwan is the odd one out (IMO) in that it also has a strong history of ties with the US and cultural/technological exchange, but it doesn't seem to have captured attention in the same way as the other two. I don't know why.
Japan produced a lot of comic books and films, and nerds like comic books and films?
Interest ebbs and flows. Korea is perhaps eclipsing Japan in general interest these days. But their cultural export is pop music and boy bands, and their main Western demographic seems to be teenage girls.
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.
You will inevitably get 10 good shots out of thousands if you randomly take pictures everyday, anywhere, anytime. You can judge the quality of one's work only by its consistency, not by cherry-picking.
I’m not really sure I’ve ever heard a photographer aside from Hype Williams tout the efficiency of their use of film as an important thing about their work, and I know I’ve never heard anyone cite it as a reason a photographer is good at their craft.
Many photographers, including some regarded as the best portrait photographers working today, take photos by running the motor drive, generating up to 10 images a second, doing so in bursts through photoshoots that can last 30 minutes to hours, in the end only choosing one photo of thousands to present as the result of that session.
You’d have a hard time convincing me that a subjectively equivalent image that is the product of a shoot where the shutter is pressed less often is the work of a ‘better’ photographer. The number of images rejected from an edit just isn’t a factor in the quality of a photographer’s output.
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/gallery/2013/dec/06/natio...