Zoom In, Trip Out

John Vettese sees what develops

by John Vettese

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

On the road, everybody's a photographer. Not that they're all great, of course — recall the aesthetic failings of family vacation albums you've endured in your life: too much blur, too many shots of one static monument, poorly cropped mountains.

Click Here For More Images

Fortunately, since now-ubiquitous digital cameras are able to correct for the built-in errors of film point-and-shoots — even cell-phone cameras take decent photos — it's much easier now for casual photographers to come away from vacation with exceptional shots than it was under the slide-show regime.

But what does this mean for those who have honed photography as their craft? When they travel, do they have to step up their game? I've worked with photographers who refuse to take their camera on vacation, since it's their off-the-clock time, and with others who return with an interminable volume of shots, triple what they might have before the digital-camera age.

But there's also the school of thought that photographers don't do anything differently when they travel: They just do their thing in a different setting.

Tsuyoshi Ito runs Project Basho — one of Philadelphia's big three community darkrooms, along with The Lightroom and Yo Darkroom — and next month, he's leading a photo tour of his native Japan for a half-dozen local photographers. It is the first excursion Project Basho has attempted on this scale, and the guy behind it says the chief difference in how photographers travel is their schedule.

"On a typical tour, [the guide] has you look at one place, then rushes you off to look at the next," Ito says. "But photographers usually want to explore on their own." And this is Ito's goal.

The trip was structured for maximum flexibility, including some days with a schedule no more detailed than "Sept. 5 through Sept. 7: Explore and photograph Kanazawa." The destinations favor the pastoral countryside and fishing towns of the Ishikawa prefecture, much more so than the touristy hustle and bustle of Tokyo. ("[The countryside] is not as accessible as Tokyo," the tour guide says, "but there's so much more to see.")

Ito expects that the images his photographers return with won't be a massive departure from what they shoot at home. When he visited Japan last December for the first time after 11 years of living in Philadelphia, Ito returned with photos of tightly framed walls with paper hangings that he shot in the city (pictured, p. 22), and tranquil panoramas of the coastline. Locally, he has focused on the walls of Northern Liberties and the verdant Rittenhouse Square.

"When I was in Japan, I was still looking at the same things in a way," Ito says. "It was different scenery, but I was still going for the same thing I'm always looking for."

When artists are drawn to certain visual elements and themes, it's logical that they would continue to seek out those themes in new surroundings. Even with a different cultural aesthetic and different scale to acclimate themselves to — Ito recalls how his biggest challenge returning to Japan after a decade of shooting in Philadelphia was the size of the streets — artists still gravitate toward their interests.

Ito hopes to establish a Philadelphia-Japan cultural exchange, and he plans to lead annual trips to Ishikawa, with a return trip tentatively scheduled for the spring. He isn't sure how Japan's rural residents will react to a tour group from America — it's why he's glad his group is tiny, since 30 camera-toting Americans crashing a fishing village would probably freak out the populace, even if the visitors are artists.

But with his fluency in English and Japanese, Ito plans to act as an intermediary, and hopes to build a trust that will keep the groups returning, possibly evolving into a "sister city" scenario where Japanese photographers from the region show at Project Basho's gallery and vice versa. (The gallery has a head start on this, having exhibited Shozo Tomioka's "Images from the Noto Peninsula" in May. Plus, a show by Koichiro Kurita is scheduled to open on Sept. 11, while the tour group is attending a local festival in Suzu, Japan.)

When the tour group returns, an exhibition of their resulting work will be pulled together in Project Basho's gallery — a much better place to show off vacation photos than a dusty album.

(j_vettese@citypaper.net)

For more information on Project Basho's trip to Japan, visit their blog: http://japanphototour.projectbasho.org.