So in Part Two of my Japan journal we left off with it being Sunday and my not knowing what to do. Well, I really didn’t do much. Sunday, you know. Walked around some, snagged a couple strong photos, bought a couple more Beatles LPs, but went back to the hotel early to rest up for my final week in Tokyo…

When I travel, I like to hit extremes, so here I am going from Kinosaki Onsen, a sedate town near the western coast in which the whole point is to wander from one hot-springs spa to the next (the only question being: how many baths does one person need, or can bear, a day? In my case, three) back to Tokyo for Halloween night…

I’m taking a short break from reviewing photobooks for the magazine here, off to Japan, traveling with my wife, with three main purposes: to look for classic Japanese photobooks to bring home; to take enough pictures to make a book of my own; and to write about it all here. The following is Part 1 of my Tokyo Journal…

Here’s the thing with street photography, it’s too easy to just take pictures of people walking down the street. And pictures simply of people walking down the street, or bunched up on it, or even a solo soul taking in the sun, are just about as interesting as walking down the street yourself…

In my last review for Photobookstore Magazine, I wrote of Morten Andersen’s roughly 8 x 12–inch, 300-plus-page, full-bleed-color photobook on his travels to the so-called Third World. Here I’m writing about Nick Sethi’s roughly 8 x 12–inch, 400-plus-page, full-bleed-color photo book simply of India…

Here’s one way to make sense of the world now, the unsettling of the old order, the historical tipping point we all seem to be on…

The dream springs eternal. Hit the highway (preferably along fabled Route 66) and discover America. Jack Kerouac did it, so did Robert Frank. So what that was over sixty years ago … the soul of America has to be out there somewhere, right?…

In my last review for Photobookstore magazine I looked into how story works in photobooks. By story I meant something less than an out and out narrative, but also something with a shape reminiscent of a story: a beginning, an end, and at least the feel of a narrative arc as we move through the book. In effect I was talking about the photobook as a form of literature…

How important is an actual story to a photobook? By story here I mean almost literal narrative, with characters and situations: a mini-movie or a play in photos. Clearly the best photobooks carry aspects of story such as theme, structure, motion, even narrative drive—can’t wait to turn to the next picture. But an actual story?…

Nobuyoshi Araki doesn’t need me to write about him. He probably doesn’t need anybody to write about him at this point, five hundred or so books in (or is it five thousand?), and a long, serpentine, impressive career behind him (with, one hopes, much more to come). I mean, what is there to say anyway?…

First comes the hunger. An actual physical urgency to make pictures. I feel it all the time, especially if I haven’t been out shooting for a couple days. I’m in New York City. I hit the streets, take the subway to different parts of town, camera ready, more important, my mind ready, seeing everything—it’s the seeing everything, the way my eyes sweep the streets, wanting to catch every subtle detail—any movement, gesture, even color fluctuation—that might make a picture…

Here’s the one time I met Saul Leiter. It was a couple years before his death, he was signing a new book at his gallery on East 57th St. There was this jolly, smiling, army-and-navy-surplus-store-dressed old guy, rings of silver hair circling his face, sitting at a table with a pen and an array of rubber stamps and ink pads…