Street Photography

Igal Gilboa

The Tokyo Streets

Posted by Fahmi P. Rahman on Dec 2, 2013 in FEATURE, Featured Articles |

The Tokyo Streets:  A Conversation with Chulsu Kim and Fahmi R. about Street Photography

What I love about street photography is the uniqueness of its moments and of every photographer.  It’s a great way to interpret their imaginations. Street photography is the purest moment caught by the lens of a camera. The process of taking street photographs is challenging and difficult sometimes. This why I like Chul’s photographs.  He is a Korean that lives in Tokyo, Japan. He truly caught me with his street photography. The absurdness,  the shocking moments, the light and shadows… all are great elements that he finds.  He greatly frames the streets of Tokyo with his mobile phone.

 

Chul began snapping the streets a little over 2 years ago.  He lives in Tokyo and works at a food company. He takes photographs almost everyday during his way to work and back home but not on the weekends or on holidays. He said, “Holidays is family time for me.” He said, “Street photography urges me to portray human relationships.” He seeks moving moments, and any strong impacts on the streets. He also said, “Street photography is one of the best ways to express himself.”

 

Mobile photography is the greatest approach for capturing moments on the street, because of its compactness. A mobile street photographer can work more discreetly while snapping using their phone. Chul also contends that shooting the streets using his mobile phone gets less resistance and is easier to take the photographs of natural human posture.  The mobile phone gives him the best timing to take photos and the phone reacts very quickly.  It’s easy and fast for reviewing photos and gets him quickly back on the streets for the next frame.

Along with the pros, shooting with a mobile phone also has its cons. Sometimes the image quality might be buggy. Moreover if we take pictures in low-light condition, it will have a lot of noise and need extra work during the post processing phase. For Chul the cons of using mobile phone cameras on the street is that it’s hard to hold while taking pictures. It is difficult to take pictures without steady conditions.

 

In a day I might collect around 10 to 20 photos, but for Chul, those numbers are nothing. He manages almost 700 pictures in a day! He takes a massive amount of photographs. He said he just keeps taking pictures while seeing anything interesting on the streets. Snap, snap, and snap. Yes, taking it first then curating it later, because the moment can just go ”poof” – then it’s gone. Some friends of mine said, the first and second moments are what define street photography.  The next  is journalistic photography. Moment and timing are the key to creating great street photographs.

Chul confesses he doesn’t use any guidance for taking street photographs. He just built up his style by taking pictures through his own intuition. There’s no certain stories that are contained in his work. I  have come across many weird situations, such as people getting mad, being chased by a bunch of people in an area (village) who were asking me what I was doing with my camera.  For Chul, he sometimes feels people staring at him strangely while shooting them with his camera, but he doesn’t care. For him that situation is not as an obstacle as he says, ”I am just doing my work.”

 

The more you do street photography, the more you will observe what interests you in your environment.  The people, what they do and how they interact are all essential in how I observe my neighborhood.  “Shooting the streets everyday makes me create and learn something new about my environment” says Chul.  He has a dream about his work on the streets.  He would like to have a solo exhibition, create a photo book, and organize a positive community to share their works with other artists and photographers.

 

I hope in the near future that mobile photography can grow more in a great way.  I hope that the technology continues to improve for the camera and sensor in mobile phones to close the gap for post processing.  Chul agrees with me.  He has dreamed about a high performance camera in a smart phone.  A camera that may have true shutter control and diafragma control in its lens.  Who knows? Let’s see what the future brings us.

This is my interview with Chulsu Kim translated in Japanese by Hayami (@n883):

Q: Hayami 
まずあなたがどのような人か、そして日々、ストリートフォトグラフィー以外でどのようなことをしているのかできるだけ詳しく自己紹介お願いします。
A: Chulsu Kim
東京在住、32才
路上撮影をメインに約2年前から写真を始めてます。
普段は会社勤めで休日に写真撮影を楽しんでいます。最近は家族サービスをサボり気味で少し気まずいです。
Q: Hayami
なぜストリートフォトグラフィーを始めたのですか？
そしてそこに何を探し求めていますか？
また、あなたにとってストリートフォトグラフィーとは何ですか？
A: Chulsu Kim
回答します。よろしくお願いします。
自分が好む人間模様を描写したいという衝動からストリートフォトグラフィーを続けている。
そこに感動、衝撃の強い力を求めている。
ストリートフォトグラフィーは自分を表現するための手段、そして一部と考える。
Q: Hayami
モバイルを使用してストリートシューティングをすることの良い点と悪い点は何ですか？
あなたの経験を教えてください。
A: Chulsu Kim
ハヤミさん
確認よろしくお願いします。
良い点
周りに抵抗を与えにくいため、より自然体が撮りやすい。
またタイミングを逃さず、すかさず撮れる。
悪い点
持ちにくい、撮りにくい
Q: Hayami
素敵なストリート写真を撮るにあったてどういった構成で撮っているのか？
写真を撮る上でのこだわりはありますか？
A: Chulsu Kim
特に何も考えずに、歩いていてイイと感じたものをひたすら撮るやり方。なので一日で約7百枚以上の写真を撮っている。
Q: Hayami
あなたにストリートフォトで影響を与えているのはだれですか？
そして、その人（達）の何が好きですか？
A: Chulsu Kim
IG 含むSNSに参加している写真家達で
特定人物はいない。
みんなの視点に凄く影響されている。
新しい発想、斬新さ
Q: Hayami
ストリートフォトグラフィの中で、どんな要素やスタイルを発見しましたか？
またそれはなぜですか？
A: Chulsu Kim
ハヤミさん、よろしくお願いします。
直感に従い撮影するスタイルが定着した。
写真にストーリーを求めず、ありのままを切り取る。
Q: Hayami
今までストリート撮影中に何か突飛な状況に遭遇したことはありますか？（例えば怒られたりとか、、、）
それはあなたがその人達に何をした時ですか？
A: Chulsu Kim
被写体撮影時に怪しまれることが多いが堂々としていればいい。やましい事をしている訳でなく作品を仕上げているだけなのだから。
Q: Hayami
ストリートを撮る上で、大きな挑戦とは何ですか？
A: Chulsu Kim
好き嫌いせず、なんでも撮ること。
新しい発想が生まれるかも。
Q: Hayami
今までで、ストリート撮影をしながらもっとも長く旅をした話を聞かせてください。
A: Chulsu Kim
無し
Q: Hayami
個展を開催したいという夢（願望）はありますか？または将来、写真でどんなことをしたいですか？
A: Chulsu Kim
個展したいです。
またPhoto book 作成や、グループを立ち上げし 素晴らしい写真家達との交流と作品の共有を積極的に行いたい。
Q: Hayami
ストリートフォトグラフィであなたの最も大きな偉業は何ですか？（成し遂げたことなど）
A: Chulsu Kim
無し
Q: Hayami
モバイルフォトグラフィの将来に望むことは何ですか？
A: Chulsu Kim
カメラ並みの機能拡充
Q: Hayami
金さんのモバイル使用のベストショット5枚を送ってください。（その写真それぞれのストーリーや説明といっしょに）
A: Chulsu Kim
ストーリーは無いのですが、強いて言うならば people&street

Street photography is not an easy genre of photography. The photographer needs patience and a keen sense of observation. The quickness of seeking moments, the speed to react, and an incredible imagination are all

tools that need to be practiced by the photographer. That’s why street photography  is so unique. Lastly I would like say thank you to Hayami for giving me a hand with this interview. This most incredible part of mobile photography is our community.

Chulsu Kim Tokyo street photographer.
My theme is to represent human’s life and to find the meaning of the photograph.
Is there any truth in the photograph?

テーマは人間模様を描写し続け
写真の意味を見出す事。
果たして本当に写真には意味が
あるのか。

 

My name is Brandon and I began Humans of New York in the summer of 2010. HONY resulted from an idea that I had to construct a photographic census of New York City. I thought it would be really cool to create an exhaustive catalogue of the city’s inhabitants, so I set out to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers and plot their photos on a map. I worked for several months with this goal in mind. But somewhere along the way, HONY began to take on a much different character. I started collecting quotes and short stories from the people I met, and began including these snippets alongside the photographs. Taken together, these portraits and captions became the subject of a vibrant blog. With nearly two million followers on social media, HONY now provides a worldwide audience with daily glimpses into the lives of strangers in New York City.

If you want to say hi, you can reach me at: honybrandon@gmail.com
For interview/speech/press/business requests: honyassist@gmail.com

http://amzn.to/193K3L3

humansofnewyork

"The motion of knitting isn’t all that different from the motion of plugging away at your smartphone all day. Except knitting promotes focus, and the phone promotes distraction."

Michal Poleg