Category: Photography

2026 Photo Club Exhibition

I’m a member of a photo club, the Hikari Shayukai, and we have a public exhibition at a local park every spring.

This year’s just finished, so it’s time for a bit of reflection.

Unlike past years, the exhibition this time was held the week after the annual ume blossom festival, so we knew from the start that attendance would be lower than usual. Oh top of that, we had heavy rain three days out of five. The Saturday and Sunday were sunny, luckily, but still we had less than half the 1,000 or so we usually get.

Still, people did show up, and I had some very interesting interactions with guests over my pictures.

Here are the pictures I showed, and stuffed of the thoughts I have on them now.

Haniwa

This picture was taken atop a local kofun, or ancient burial mound. I like the colors of the clay haniwa against the blue sky. The biggest reaction to this one was surprise at the location. Even people who live in the town where it was taken didn’t seem to know the mound was there.

Fire Dragon

This is a bit of a miracle picture. I had my son hold a lit sparkler-type firework and move it while I took a long exposure, and this is the shape it took.

Reactions to this were mostly bafflement. What is it? How did you take it? But there was a lot of wonder about it, which is mostly what I wanted.

Sundown

This seemed to have a lot of impact. The vibrance of the colors and the banding of the sky, along with the sunstar, really caught people’s eyes. But what got me was how many people wanted to know exactly where I took it, down to the name of the little island at the right edge of the photo.

I don’t know the name. I’m not sure if it matters?

Traffic

I’m not even sure how to explain this. I took it through the window of a double decker sightseeing bus rolling through Roppongi, Tokyo. I wanted to catch the chaos of the night lights and the feeling of the big city at night. I mostly just wanted to play around with light.

Most people just ignored it, but some seemed almost entranced by it. I got a lot of guys with cameras asking how I took it, and why. They got up close and seemed to try to decipher each pixel.

I’m ok with that reaction.

It’s always great to get the reactions of non-photographers to my pictures. It gets clarify my successes and failures.

And it just feels more meaningful to show prints like that

Winter Waterside Birds

A bit of a foot problem has cut down my walking range quite a bit, but I still managed to get out to the river yesterday afternoon to see the ducks flocking in. Mallards, Teal, Pintails, the gang’s all here. I also spotted a blue rock thrush for the first time this season, and my constant companion the kingfisher also made an appearance.

A blue rock thrush, its back blue mottled with gray and black, perches on a concrete embankment. It is looking over its shoulder toward the left side of the frame.
Blue rock thrush making sure I get its good side.
A kingfisher perches on a diagonal leaning reed, looking down.
Kingfisher on the prowl
A very felegant looking northern pintail duck swimming across a rippling river surface. It has a brilliant white breast, brown head, and a grayish body with delicate wavy patterns. Its tail is long and sticks up at an angle.
Northern Pintail, the most elegant of ducks.

Is it art?

I feel like “artist” is one of those terms that people should hesitate to self-apply, because the meaning and impact of art is subjective on the part of the audience. The practice of creation, it seems to me, should be goal enough for itself. You have something in you and it wants to get out. What happens after that, when people encounter whatever it is that you put out into the world, is where art is born. When people are moved, or inspired, or angered, or utterly untouched. So, if someone experiences art in your creation, they can call you whatever they want.

So, the way I see it, calling yourself an artist feels to me a bit like calling yourself sexy. You can do it, but what really matters is what other people say.

I am well aware that many (most?) other people are going disagree with me on that. As well they should. I’m certainly not one to tell others how to define themselves or what they do. This is more about how I have never, ever, considered myself engaged in “art” or being “an artist.” Writing, translation, photography, this is all stuff I do because it’s just what I do. Because I want to, or need to. Not because I’m trying to to be “an artist.” I don’t really think much about if what I am making is “art.”

Until, maybe, now.

I have written before about being in the Hikari Shayukai photography club. Two years in, I’ve grown increasingly unsure about it. It has motivated me to just keep taking pictures, which has helped improve my basic technique immensely. And the regular exposure to other people’s vision and dedication has been valuable, too. But I worry about the aesthetic gap between the teacher and me. I am frequently frustrated because I fail to see why he chooses many of the “winning” photographs he did. They often strike me as bland, or common, or sometimes utterly incomprehensible. Regardless of the actual merits of a given photo—something I’m not nearly as qualified to judge—I just felt unable to understand the teacher’s expectations and standards, hence my ongoing failure to meet them.

For the last meeting, I didn’t have a lot of my regular selection of landscapes, birds, or city windows to submit, so I decided to say to hell with it and include some selections from a recent photo shoot I did for creative purposes, taken without any consideration for the club meeting at all. My wife and I went out to an abandoned railway tunnel and she posed for me to take some, well, ghost pictures. I set the shutter for a long exposure and she would move in front of the tunnel to create blurred, spectral images. After a bit of post processing in black and white, they really worked. Some of them were downright chilling. Which is exactly what I wanted.

I had a vision, took action, and achieved that vision. That felt good.

I submitted three of the series, and when the teacher saw them, he immediately and emphatically got it. He took them as a set and understood what I had been trying to achieve without any hesitation. Not only did the set get chosen as the top submission for the month, he recommended I enter them into the Yamaguchi Prefectural arts competition next spring. In the two years I’ve been attending these club meetings, that’s the first time he’s made such a specific, and emphatic, recommendation.

Which sounds, to me, like someone who knows the topic deciding that something I created is art. That felt really good.

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. “Show us the goods! Where’s this art at?!” And I’d love to show you the pictures, but I was specifically told not to publish them anywhere yet because that could disqualify them from competitions. Which, I mean, if this guy who actually judges photography competitions thinks I have a chance, who am I to argue?

What I can do is show one of the series rejects, which gives a sense of the mood but wasn’t quite what I was aiming for.

A blurred figure walks away from the camera toward a barely visible, pitch black arch in a hillside.

Even now, I can see what’s wrong with it… The hands are too clear, the posture carries the wrong emotion, and the hat distracts. But it’s close. And like I said, the sense is there. Maybe this one isn’t art, but hey, who am I to say?