Picturing the City: Ryo, Skate Photographer and How to Get Legit Photos
I want to proceed into a realm rich with enchanting potential, that of the visual and to think about Itoshin’s other labors on the street as a skater, and the creative work of the photographers and videographers who collaboratively generate the “authentic” images circulated through Japan and globally, constituting a component in the assemblage of a global skate imaginary. The visualization of skateboarding is also a realm grounded across physical experience and haptic knowledge.
Ryo works as a photographer’s assistant in Yokohama, a job he has had for 5 years. He took the job soon after finishing at an arts college in Tokyo, completing a degree in traditional photography where he spent long hours in the darkroom, perfecting his skills with traditional image-making techniques. These techniques, with conventional negative films are laborious, time and material consuming processes already obsolete within the rapid production schedules of commercial creative work. Given the ubiquity of digital technology in image-making and the mobility of these images across media, from print to web displays, Ryo’s familiarity with, and allegiance to, older analog image processes is either precious or eccentric. Yet his skills developed when image-making technologies were arriving at a moment of radical, when digital cameras were expensive and limited, still in their uneasy adolescence, while a growing availability of used 35mm cameras following periods of peak consumption in the 80s meant costs for acquiring and maintaining photographic equipment was low. Even more immediately than the broader consumer market and wide circulation of knowledge around analog photography was Ryo’s own intimate connection. “Using film is how I learned to make pictures. I printed in my dad’s tiny darkroom, so I’m really comfortable using old equipment. He taught me all the basic things and then I quickly learned lots more. I became more expert than him, but he was too busy anyway, so I took over his space. Anyway, now its cool to say ‘I use a Hasselblad [camera]’ when its usual to just expect a digital image. But it’s kind of an expensive way to be cool!” Where is the utility in this “cool” and how can it be evaluated, especially within an economic system of equivalencies that expose the creative worker with his rarified tools to exceptional vulnerabilities?
Ryo speaks of a reversal in the economic balance around technology—the older and common forms of analog materials have now diminished in commercial dominance, becoming the provenance of an exceptional specialist and so become more costly even as they communicate a precious kind of value by miming—copying—an older form of visual production/commerce. The analog image, with its limited reproducibility (constrained by materials, labor and the specificity of the negative against the instantly copied digital file) and its limited responsiveness to alteration (the negative, once altered is forever so, forgoing then its “authentic/pure” status)—it still is an artifact produced in the moment of contact with light, despite whatever techniques might be applied to the resulting photographic print afterwards—is a surface still in possession of qualities that digital cameras cannot yet perfectly imitate and is in itself an artifact of photography’s “authentic process” so signifying within a syntax of visual histories is a world on the cusp of nostalgia.
He also claims a patrilineal inheritance, a mark that subtly sets him and his affective relation to analog apart from other young photographers who might adopt the technology in a gesture of salvage, a counter-move against “common” image production and a way to accord exceptional value to their work through its precarious temporality. Is it simply a kind of an authorizing claim to a declining but still-powerful tribe of elders in the social world of image production? Does being “trained”, both in a familial/domestic intimate space, and in the formal institutions of the privatized sector of creative labor education, confer legitimacy against the technological instabilities and rapid changes in image production? How does one mobilize this sort of authority, or announce this genealogical bloodline, with fetish tech literally in hand, before the eye, mediating the eye, to claim value and legitimacy in a competitive labor market? In part the discipline of the analog refines and constrains the constant flux of the new technology—the “new” is positioned as something completely within the logics of pre-existing mechanics. New digital tech do not entirely undermine older photographic systems.
Instead, Ryo claims they enhance his capabilities in certain respects: “We can see immediately what the light is like, how things are framed, without expensive Polaroid test images, or without having to do many color prints to balance a final color print. I can make good digital pictures because I know the settings I would use on an older camera. It’s basic photo skills. But this convenience means we can do more, so we actually are working faster while working longer.” This is precisely the tension of industrialized creativity: tech demands an increased pace of work while also allowing creative work to be decentralized or dispersed. It no longer requires a shoot on location and then a return to a darkroom elsewhere to develop and print photos, a built-in deferral/delay system. The immediacy of image production and the transmission speeds of digital images means they can be made and distributed to multiple computers at once, permitting various other tasks to continue or initiate: the images can be cropped to fit text panels, resized and arranged for page spreads, configured within website architecture, manipulated for color and texture in Photoshop or Illustrator. This intensifies the compression of jobs. Because Ryo works for a commercial photographer with long relationships with department stores, their work rhythm is tied to sale cycles and seasonal commercial lines.
Ryo is now 27; the predictability of the work feels mundane. He has photographed skaters since high school, soon after he began skating himself. Over the many years he’s been skating, he’s met many of the best riders across the city and has developed a close friendship with Itoshin, a pro rider for Lesque, a small independent company based in western Tokyo.
Ryo works as a photographer’s assistant in Yokohama, a job he has had for 5 years. He took the job soon after finishing at an arts college in Tokyo, completing a degree in traditional photography where he spent long hours in the darkroom, perfecting his skills with traditional image-making techniques. These techniques, with conventional negative films are laborious, time and material consuming processes already obsolete within the rapid production schedules of commercial creative work. Given the ubiquity of digital technology in image-making and the mobility of these images across media, from print to web displays, Ryo’s familiarity with, and allegiance to, older analog image processes is either precious or eccentric. Yet his skills developed when image-making technologies were arriving at a moment of radical, when digital cameras were expensive and limited, still in their uneasy adolescence, while a growing availability of used 35mm cameras following periods of peak consumption in the 80s meant costs for acquiring and maintaining photographic equipment was low. Even more immediately than the broader consumer market and wide circulation of knowledge around analog photography was Ryo’s own intimate connection. “Using film is how I learned to make pictures. I printed in my dad’s tiny darkroom, so I’m really comfortable using old equipment. He taught me all the basic things and then I quickly learned lots more. I became more expert than him, but he was too busy anyway, so I took over his space. Anyway, now its cool to say ‘I use a Hasselblad [camera]’ when its usual to just expect a digital image. But it’s kind of an expensive way to be cool!” Where is the utility in this “cool” and how can it be evaluated, especially within an economic system of equivalencies that expose the creative worker with his rarified tools to exceptional vulnerabilities?
Ryo speaks of a reversal in the economic balance around technology—the older and common forms of analog materials have now diminished in commercial dominance, becoming the provenance of an exceptional specialist and so become more costly even as they communicate a precious kind of value by miming—copying—an older form of visual production/commerce. The analog image, with its limited reproducibility (constrained by materials, labor and the specificity of the negative against the instantly copied digital file) and its limited responsiveness to alteration (the negative, once altered is forever so, forgoing then its “authentic/pure” status)—it still is an artifact produced in the moment of contact with light, despite whatever techniques might be applied to the resulting photographic print afterwards—is a surface still in possession of qualities that digital cameras cannot yet perfectly imitate and is in itself an artifact of photography’s “authentic process” so signifying within a syntax of visual histories is a world on the cusp of nostalgia.
He also claims a patrilineal inheritance, a mark that subtly sets him and his affective relation to analog apart from other young photographers who might adopt the technology in a gesture of salvage, a counter-move against “common” image production and a way to accord exceptional value to their work through its precarious temporality. Is it simply a kind of an authorizing claim to a declining but still-powerful tribe of elders in the social world of image production? Does being “trained”, both in a familial/domestic intimate space, and in the formal institutions of the privatized sector of creative labor education, confer legitimacy against the technological instabilities and rapid changes in image production? How does one mobilize this sort of authority, or announce this genealogical bloodline, with fetish tech literally in hand, before the eye, mediating the eye, to claim value and legitimacy in a competitive labor market? In part the discipline of the analog refines and constrains the constant flux of the new technology—the “new” is positioned as something completely within the logics of pre-existing mechanics. New digital tech do not entirely undermine older photographic systems.
Instead, Ryo claims they enhance his capabilities in certain respects: “We can see immediately what the light is like, how things are framed, without expensive Polaroid test images, or without having to do many color prints to balance a final color print. I can make good digital pictures because I know the settings I would use on an older camera. It’s basic photo skills. But this convenience means we can do more, so we actually are working faster while working longer.” This is precisely the tension of industrialized creativity: tech demands an increased pace of work while also allowing creative work to be decentralized or dispersed. It no longer requires a shoot on location and then a return to a darkroom elsewhere to develop and print photos, a built-in deferral/delay system. The immediacy of image production and the transmission speeds of digital images means they can be made and distributed to multiple computers at once, permitting various other tasks to continue or initiate: the images can be cropped to fit text panels, resized and arranged for page spreads, configured within website architecture, manipulated for color and texture in Photoshop or Illustrator. This intensifies the compression of jobs. Because Ryo works for a commercial photographer with long relationships with department stores, their work rhythm is tied to sale cycles and seasonal commercial lines.
Ryo is now 27; the predictability of the work feels mundane. He has photographed skaters since high school, soon after he began skating himself. Over the many years he’s been skating, he’s met many of the best riders across the city and has developed a close friendship with Itoshin, a pro rider for Lesque, a small independent company based in western Tokyo.
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