Kyoto Journal is an English language publication coming out of Kyoto. To mark its 70th issue Kyoto Journal has looked locally at its birthplace; Kyoto. I showed the founding editor John Einarsen some of my previous work documenting city streets in Vancouver and he thought something like this might work in issue 70.



I was new to Kyoto at the time (this was last November) so I started to look for locations right away. I had little idea of what Kyoto was like beyond the tourist spots I've seen before. Kyoto is the city of temples; there is no mention of being the city of convenience stores or renovated cafés. I went out many times to either look or to photograph. Each week I told John "I'm almost finished, I just have to shoot one more building and stitch it in." Well, that week kept repeating. By April I had to attach a tripod holder to my scooter so I could get around. I went from hypothermia in the winter to heat-stroke in the summer but I was still shooting.



A few weeks before the magazine went to press John was still calm and patient with me. I kept promising to finish but John said, "I have a few more places I want to show you." He took me on a tour of some spots that don't have tour bus parking like Kurodani Temple (黒谷寺). By this point I was using a bicycle to get around more slowly and I found even more hidden locations.
Well, sometime in July I finished the image. It includes images from November to July with over 70 layers of buildings and people. It isn't "straight" documentary where each snapshot would have be considered a separate image, it's edited like a film into a one coherent strip about 2 meters long. It wraps around from the back cover to the front and the first few pages in.

２００８年６月４日ー６月３０日

All the photographs in this series were taken in or just around Takashima City in Shiga Prefecture. What sparked my interest originally were two ideas. One, that this was the city where my in-laws live and I was just beginning to discover it as a Westerner, completely new to the life here in Japan. I thought that if I went out and photographed it I'd learn more. Two, the city was recently formed from five small towns and one village; perhaps signalling an end to the quiet life here.


＜日本語訳＞
このシリーズにある作品の全ては滋賀県高島市周辺で撮影されたものである。
そもそもこのシリーズを始めたきっかけには二つの考えがあった。ひとつには義理の家族が住む場所で、欧米人として全く新しい日本の生活を発見し始めていた時であり、写真に撮ることによって、自分自身色々なことを学ぶことができると思ったからである。二つめとしてこの市が近年６町村が合併したということ。おそらくここにある平穏な生活シーンに変化が見られるかもしれないと感じたことである。

 

Uzumasa is near Eiga Mura or Movie Town in Kyoto city. The neighbourhood can't be compared to Vancouver at all. While Vancouver was built in clear steps our neighbourhood in Kyoto is layer on layer of construction. The houses are packed together but not in even rows. The streets become suddenly narrow and house-fronts face different directions. But in Kyoto the tiny Jizo shrines keep their sacred spaces like bubbles from the past as trains, scooters and houses surround them. If Vancouver is well known for its modernist architecture, being predominantly built in the 1950s and 60s, Kyoto is more like a well packed suitcase holding the contents of over a thousand years in a modern city.

The main image for this series is 350 cm wide but you will be able to zoom into the faces of the harvesters in the photograph with a special viewer the works right from your browser.

This way you can enjoy the images almost like you are standing right in the gallery.

The largest image in this series is a work in progress reaching 14 meters across but due to the difficulty of working with hundreds of files it will take me probably two years to fully complete the image.

このシリーズのメイン写真のサイズは幅３５０cm。しかしブラウザーから
直接動かせるビューワで写真中の収穫者たちの顔表情までズームして見ることができる。
このブラウザーでの見方はまるでギャラリーの中であなたが鑑賞しているかのような楽しませてくれる。
このシリーズの中での一番大きな写真は幅１４mにのぼり、現在製作中。何百ものファイルを使っての作業のため、
完全に完成させるまでにはあと２年を要する予定である。

After my move to Japan I realized I still have material I haven't fully processed from Vancouver. Here are some large panoramic photographs that are complete. This time they are shown much larger than I've been able to show them before.

日本へ移ってから、実はまだバンクーバーで進行中であった素材があることに気づいた。
ここではすでに完成済みのいくつかのパノラマ写真を紹介する。今回は以前よりもさらに大きなスケールで
ウェブ上にて見られるようになった。

I thought I'd show some more from this series. When I was working on this series I was thinking a lot about borders and boundaries because we're always surrounded by them. My Dad recently reminded me about how borders are changing with his example about the Schengen Area. The Czech government is notifying people that soon it will become part of this border-free zone in Europe. More on the Schengen Area.

When I was a child, I once had to stay behind while my parents went to visit relatives in Germany. This was just in case they thought of escaping from the Czech Republic. The borders were very strict and travelling anywhere meant you needed to have permission to do so. When we moved to Canada we were all so happy that we could just drop by the border and go the the United States. These days the situation is changing in Canada.

Granville Street is one of the oldest and most central Vancouver streets. It is both a pedestrian mall where the oldest department stores started out and a place where small local businesses operate among pan-handlers and homeless teens. A row of old movie theatres have been converted to night clubs and auditoriums. I tried to show this range within one block using only one image.

I photographed Dunsmuir Street and Homer Street from February to May of 2004. I finally used about 200 of 450 images taken for these two panoramic views. I aimed not for recreating the street as an architectural map but a temporal map, creating a feeling of how the two streets are used.