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TOKYO 1991-1996
My career as a photographer was kick started after I landed in Tokyo in late 1991. This was well before the days of digital photography, I was largely self taught and had become entranced by the magic of the darkroom. What I lacked in experience I made up for in gusto. With in a year of landing I was fortunate enough to be shooting portraits for major magazines.
It would continue for the next five years, until I left Japan to start a family in the West. All these years later I look back on this period as being seminal. There was an innocence and simplicity, an honesty of the engagement with the magazine editors and subjects. I didn’t know how good I had it.
Though I would continue to shoot portraits of figures in business, politics and the arts in the following decades, these portraits shot during my Tokyo years stand out for me as being the most distinctive. The subjects, visiting Japan to promote their movie or album, were mostly happy to connect with a native English speaker and that resulted in a trust and empathy between the two of us. For the most part, the subjects and I bonded as outsiders in a foreign culture, and as such free from its many strictures.
The other part of the alchemy was the use of analogue film ... as a photographer I was always aware of the number of frames I had left on the roll, which helped keep you in the moment, and I could take time out to chat with the subject while having to reload film. Though time was always limited, there wasn't the seemingly limitless shooting as is the case with the new digital cameras.
Shooting a portrait you’re in the subject's life for a matter of minutes. The job at hand is to connect with the subject, to built an empathy, capture a truth by peeling away at least a few layers of onion skin from the facade. As a gig I cherished it, it had nothing to do with the persons fame or notoriety, this was my great passion.
Here follows a selection of those portraits shot during my Tokyo years ...