Photos from homeboy Jordan Todd’s recent trip to Tokyo. Check out more on his superb flickr.

Okinawa_Soba is the nom de plume of an American fellow living in Okinawa who presides over a stockpile of 60,000 antique Japanese photographs. To the benefit of photography enthusiasts and nipponophiles everywhere, he has decided to scan and upload a choice selection of the photos to his flickr photostream. How did one individual happen to come into the ownership of such a magnificient photographic treasury? According to Soba, it was rather simple:

“95 % of the stream came from photography dealers and collectors in several countries — the majority of images found during business travels to NORTH AMERICA. The part that was not found in North America was tediously acquired from several other countries of the world via “snail mail” correspondence, phone calls, and looking at Xerox copies of single images (and whole collections) that were available. Over 30 years of business travel in and out of Japan allowed me to frequent Antique photography and Ephemera Shows, as well as other venues that centered around the buying and selling of vintage photography. As a member of the National Stereoscopic Association, attendance at our Conventions and Trade Shows naturally resulted in the accumulation of old 3-D images of Japan and elsewhere.”

Note: I predict that hand-colouring will emerge as an avant-garde photo trend in 2010. Soon after it will be available as an iPhone app. Or maybe that’s already happened and I missed it.

Some snaps of Vancouver’s best late-late night Korean diner – Jang Mo Jib. Many a night I’ve drug myself in here with a gaggle of drunken friends to enjoy Mr. Jib’s earthly delights: sticky-icky jalepeño chicken wangs, hot-sauce-soaked Bulgogi, and enough Soju to drown an octopus.

photos by Jordan Todd.

A few years back, when I was living in Tokyo the following scene transpired before my eyes while riding on an escalator:

I was standing behind some schoolgirls and in front of them were an equal amount of salarymen, or businessmen as we would say in Canada. I can’t remember exactly what happened, but I think the schoolgirls pushed past the salarymen as they walked off the escalator – which got a rise out of the salarymen, who thought the girls were being unacceptably discourteous. One of the salarymen then said “Excuse me, girls, you should apologize”, to which a schoolgirl replied “Fuck off and die you fucking cockroach.”

For some reason these photographs by Hisatomi Tadahiko remind me of that day.

The Sanrio “Smile with Hello Kitty” disposable camera is a scarce wonder in the world of soon-to-be-extinct film products. You might find one at a party shop, a Hello Kitty boutique or possibly online, but once they’re gone, they will be gone forever, just like when someone dies. I imagine once supplies start dwindling, these will become hot commodities akin to Polaroids – there’s just something bizarrely voyeuristic about that cutesey vignette and classic feel. So calling all 80s babies – keep your eyes peeled for these the next time you’re rolling through Chinatown.

“My homegirl in this picture racked me this disposable Hello Kitty camera from some party store. I’ll ask her if they have em in stock regularly, because I’ve never seen them before.”

…and some more Kitty snaps can be found here.

Like many Canadians, I was first introduced to the slick cobbles of Edinburgh through the clucky misadventures of Renton and Sick Boy – a city-defining series of novels that makes “the Athens of the North” seem like a paradise for all brands of skaggery. And so you might say that the Scottish capital, voted by Brits as their favourite city in the UK nine years running, has a complex identity. Somewhat natural considering all that mist, booze and fog, but there’s much more to Edinburgh than darkness, damp drunkards and literary junkies. Mike Chalmers has been taking some portraits of Scots in their natural environment that subtly hints at his city’s salacious side.

PBLKS: Edinburgh isn’t wildly famous for being particularly stylish or sexy, but your photos seem to suggest that it might be a little of both, what’s going on over there?

MC: I think the outside perception of Edinburgh is deep fried food and heroin, but Edinburgh is most active right now, August. The city has doubled in population for one month and is filled with performers and tourists for the Edinburgh Festival. We have a bunch of different festivals but I group them all together.

These performers are the kind of people I often work with, they dance, act, sing and aren’t afraid to show off. They don’t mind getting sexy if it gets them noticed, there is so much competition here for an audience. Burlesque has really taken off here too, it’s popular to watch and perform in. So there’s obviously been a rash of photographers doing burlesque shoots, which is not my thing but I have burlesque girls who are friends and do some (non-burlesque) shoots with me. I think we’re a sexy city, if you know where to look.

In January, Pieter Hugo‘s latest series of photographs, Nollywood, debuted at Capetown’s Michael Stevenson Gallery. Hugo initially attempted to shoot the series on actual film sets, depicting his subject (Nigerian cinema) in its natural surroundings, but later decided to shoot the actors out of context as he believed that his original photos  “failed to capture the intensity of the situations.”

The end product is a complex and engaging series of photographs that juxtaposes Nollywood stereotypes upon documentary reality. Equal parts entertainment, commentary and slight of hand, Hugo plays off our imagined constructs of Sub-Saharan Africa by presenting an image of Nigeria to us through the visual language of its cinema; mystical, sexual, decrepit, riotous and violent. Where Hugo succeeds is in how he blurs our understanding of African reality – making it seem as if the photographs could be from the trenches of the latest genocide or famine.

While the most disturbing aspect of the series is their resemblance to recent press photos, I think overall the very nature of Nigerian cinema – its lo-fi grittiness and emphasis on production rather than technology – is hugely inspiring. Nigerians are making the movies they want with the resources they have and are saying  fuck it to the whole idea of “production standards”, and have in the process built a wildly popular film industry from the ground up – an accomplishment very few nations can boast.

“I matriculated at the end of apartheid, and the photographs I grew up looking at were directly political in that they attempted to reveal, or change, what was happening. Back then, the lines were clear. You tried to tell the world what was going on with your photographs. It’s much more complex now. I am of a generation that approaches photography with a keen awareness of the problems inherent in pointing a camera at anything.” -Pieter Hugo

Known for its  drop-dead gorgeous women, Baroque architecture and dirt cheap beer, Prague was left relatively undamaged by the rampant destruction of World War 2, allowing the Czech capital to keep all of its history intact.

But such is the not the case with graffiti – Prague has been getting bombed non-stop for the past decade or so, with graf heads from around the world heading to old Praha to take a bite, tossing up yet another layer of style upon the city’s thick and rich architectural history.

photos by J.Todd

Animated GIFs have got to be one of the most avant-garde artforms going on right now. Here’s a bunch I snatched from fuckyoudraculas. If you have any hot GIFs or now of any GIF-engineers worthy of publicity, send them my way = @. I think there’s something going on with these GIFs that can point us towards the future of photography. As we become inundated with more and more quality photos and prosumer becomes consumer, in order to “up the anté” and really make your images pop, they are going to have to contain a bit more energy than what the traditional static image can provide.

For the majority of us, there exists a strict division between our personal pursuits and what we choose to do in order to pay the rent. These parallel realities are for the most part tragically irreconcilable. Although at times they occupy the same space, the two worlds we inhabit are separated by the unforgiving modalities of late capitalism. On one side is the daily grind – a life filled to the brim with bitter cups of office coffee, stagnant deoxygenated cubicle air, end- less hours of nothingness (the internet), and the slavish requirement to CC every node of the social matrix. On the other exists a life populated with everything imaginable. Inspiration, love, excitement, debauchery, sex, cham- pagne, creativity, liberation – and hopefully passion, always. Only in the sparse moments where we can steal away to this brighter side of our double lives are we able to realize our potential as living, breathing, thinking individuals.

But for a lucky, privileged few, this oppressive dichotomy does not exist. Maurice Scheltens is one of those few. Since graduating in 1995 from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at The Hague, this popular but resolutely inventive Dutch still-life photographer has deftly navigated the an- tipodes of art and commerce with a unilateral approach to each one of his striking compositions. Working with much-coveted clients like Fantastic Man, Uniqlo, Adidas, Colette, and Wallpaper (just to name a few), as well as creating personal works that have dis- played in places as disparate as the Arnhem Fashion Biennale, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and the Seoul Art Center Design Museum, Scheltens presents to us a vision of objects imbued with a playful sincerity typically reserved for the living.

His work ranges from delicate arrangements of designer labels to superficially haphazard art pieces that effortlessly deconstruct our relationship with the everyday. In Scheltens’ world of spinning lamps and disappearing oranges, the materials that occupy his compositions betray their inherent artifice with a blank honesty that almost makes the photographs realer than what they represent. Staring at his imagery brings to mind a line of philosophical discourse that was always too convoluted for me to grasp with my eyes wide open.

I’m reminded mostly of the words of Jean Baudrillard, the great French post-structuralist: “This is how illusion operates: it restores to us beings and objects in the form they intrinsically take when changed by their absence, their disappearance. Vanished, but transparent to their own disappearance, whether this en- sues from their origin or their end. It is in this sense that they deceive us, but are faithful to themselves, and this is why you have to be faithful to them, for it is in their detail, in their exact figuration that objects are illusory, that reality is illusory.”

It is 3 a.m., and I’m sitting alone at my desk, waiting for Scheltens’ call. Working out of his studio in Amsterdam, he’s nine hours ahead of my studio in Vancouver, where the rain is tempting my eyelids with a soft drum loop pattering against the window. As always, my desk is cluttered with the detritus of my cultural idiolect: crumpled receipts, emptied Americanos, stacks of magazines, a half-eaten doughnut, a bottle of vodka, long-forgotten photo negatives, and so on.

As I wait for my phone to ring I’m soaking up one of Scheltens’ trademark pieces – flower cutouts surrounded by paper butterflies. The 2D effigies, ar- ranged with a spooky elegance and shot against a background of darkness, are beautiful, but why? The subtle interplay between the second and third dimensions is undeniably oblique, but the impression of a freshly cut bouquet remains as vivid as the real.

I check the weather; it’s raining in Amsterdam as well. I imagine all those smartly dressed cyclists balancing their umbrellas as they ride past the city’s canals… and then my Final Fantasy ringtone brings me back to my desk. It’s Scheltens; he’s rushing down a flight of stairs. We chat for a bit about his influences and inspirations: Man Ray, the Eames gal- lery, and graphic design in general. I’m impressed by how little difference there is between his personal, editorial, and commissioned work.

“The approach is very much the same, and I try to be as personal as possible,” he says. “The objects become like a wallpaper; it’s all just graphic material, it’s not about Gucci or Dior. I like fashion, but I always take a side-route and show it from a fresh angle.” Indeed, while most photographers choose to fetishize brands and exalt them to the gods of consumerism, Scheltens treats the likes of Hermès and Sony with the same measured delicacy as a crumpled pack of cigarettes or a flat- tened paper octopus. Scheltens never lets go of that uneasy feeling achieved by taking objects out of their natural habitats and placing them into new, possibly uncomfortable environs.

Scheltens explains how he tends to work in stylistic phases: he might get an idea while working on an editorial or commercial assignment, and within the borders of his client’s interests, he will refine the idea until perfected, then expand upon the theme within his personal work. “It’s all about the construc- tion – what you see is not what it is,” he says, touching on the dreamlike presence many of his objects convey. “Freedom is very important, and I’m trying to see how far I can go within each composition.”

Much like the graphic design methodology from which Scheltens gains so much inspiration, he works layer by layer, with a strong focus on contrasting the dimensions of texture against the photographic medium. In this sense, his girlfriend Liesbeth Abbenes is an ideal studiomate. Abbenes crafts wall tapestries that depict graphic images. With similar styles, the two have col- laborated on a number of projects and have been able to achieve a rare synergy between their respective mediums.

Scheltens and I keep chatting a while longer, touching on what it’s like to live and work outside the established art-photo circuit of New York-London-Paris. He says he’s happy where he is and is currently working on renovating his home – an elabo- rate task for a man who spends his days shifting millimetres to aesthetic perfection. After exchanging a good day and good night, I let my microwave-warm laptop take a nap and switch off my lamp. Amsterdam is still bustling through its day on the other side of the planet – artists, fashionistas, beggars, and baristas – while the items on my desk have all but disappeared.

[originally printed in The Block Magazine]