The slow ASCII

What do you write about when you’re not in the mood for writing? And, as you probably noticed already, I’m not in the mood and I haven’t been posting much text for a while now. Don’t know exactly why, but it has to do with a couple of (huge and complicated) ongoing projects at Brandient — and fighting the urge of posting irrelevant junk (like this post) for compulsion’s sake .

So I post photos — I hope you don’t mind. If you do mind, well, please leave a note and I’ll move the entire Photography topic out of the homepage, to a blog of its own, like Notes or Articles.

The Japanese

Speaking of photos, I spend my nights lately searching for pearls in the big pond of mud called Flickr¹, where I’m closely following around 80 photographers and a lot of thematic groups.

I’m really drawn toward Asian photographers using film cameras — their serenity, perfect compositions and bokeh (from the Japanese boke ぼけ, “blur”) aesthetic philosophy. And I found quite a few of them. Let me give you a few hints and you’ll see what I’m talking about:

• Tommy Toshihiro Oshima [DNA] — look for his Noctilux f 1.o shots, like the gorgeous low-light portraits rad! and resonance, but don’t miss hypnosis, sleepwalker, guardian, dioramic sunday, the ninth gate or captive to open your appetite;
• Clarice Mami Koni [DNA] — she loves Russian cameras and medium format. I love her in_the_grass and 8 but you should browse through bicycle, breeze, siesta_#1, mountain_path and with_simon to get the idea;
• Sakazoh Yayoi Sakamoto [DNA] — My favorite is Kagurazaka #13, but you should take a look at works like POLAROID #13, POLAROID #24, POLAROID #27, SCALA #04 and SCALA #06;
• Papaiya [DNA] — stunning medium format low-key photography. A few personal quick faves: /, in mirror, Friday, no child, conditioner, L and 0808f;
• Golban [DNA] — take a look at Carousel, -, 木漏れ日, 7, * and working man.

That’s it for now, five of them — more to come. I hope you’ll kick back a minute and get into the proper mood to enjoy these beauties.

The masthead

Photography is great and an image is worth a thousand words — a thousand totally irrelevant words, sometimes. This is why I killed the photo masthead and switched from this:

to this:

It uses the same screen real estate, only wiser. Hopefully.

¹ No, this doesn’t mean changing my mind about digital proletarianism — I still believe that only elite makes the Internet a great place — and the elite photographers is what I’m looking for on Flickr.