Today some photos of my father-in-law. We like to joke that he is a bit Yakuza-ppoi (meaning there’s a certain Yakuza-ness to his appearance), which the sunglasses and cigarettes seem to highlight. That’s probably why I love the photos of him from this trip where he’s holding the umbrella, which help bring out what a sweet and kind man he really is.
that is one cool t-shirt your father in law sports.
my father in law is also yakuza-esque. though more in the pink shorts and bright yellow polo shirts he wears in summertime and the gold car with gold hubcaps he drives.
heya kurt — this is a comment for the moblog posts, but the comment function over on the right hand side moblog strip doesn’t seem to work. so i post it here:
no need to worry. wonder. second guess about what you are photographing. just post. i think, especially with the phone camera-email-moblog, its about your life, your dailyness, transi-terri-torialism. the medium should change why and what and how you photograph and the form changes the viewers access and relationship to vernacular and/or artistic imagery.
for me it comes down to a very simple thing. you, the photographer, are freer than ever to just click away at whatever you want. and the viewer is freer to do what ever they want in viewing/not viewing those images. pretentiousness is out the window. as older modes of distribution fall away — modes that were either expensive, a hassle or required relationships to maintain — so falls away all the ideas of good and bad, commodity values, prescious objects, that were reqiured to sort out just which imagery made it through the bottleneck of a limited number of distribution nodes.
i think we are on the verge of new aesthetic criteria of judgements for success in image making. as photographs get easier and easier to produce in real time and intantaneous global distribution only improves with each day, the use and place of photography will drastically morph. maybe those curmudgeons of old were right — photography is not art. its real subversive lasting power and strength is in vernacular uses.
plus we like looking at kaika.