ANALOG ARCHIVES: KYOTO

In 2006 I took a personal trip to Kyoto. My friend Michi said I would like it. At the time I was living in New York City and she said, “Don’t go to Tokyo. It’s a big city. You live in a big city. You’ll like Kyoto.” Michi had been born and raised in Tokyo so I took her word as Gospel. So off I went with a paper ticket, American Express traveler’s checks and a guidebook. In my camera bag was my trusted Pentax 67 and rolls of Kodak Portra color negative film. I should write a whole post on the Pentax 67. The world looks sexier through the viewfinder of that camera. It’s a beast (essentially a 35mm SLR on steroids) and makes the most satisfying thudding sound as its giant mirror goes up and down. A close friend from Bavaria referred to it, ironically, as a “Panzer Tank”. Everything is done manually from exposure settings to focusing the lens and you were either an intuitive genius or you never left home without a light-meter. Back then it was used almost exclusively by fashion photographers. The first time I had ever seen one was years before when I was working as a motion picture PA on a music video that Bruce Weber was directing and walking into his assistants hotel room to find them peeling roll after roll of medium-format film into this immense mountain in the middle of the bed. I’d never seen so much film in my life.

But back to Kyoto. I had found a room in a modest, traditional little ryokan called the Three Sisters that catered exclusively to foreigners, right in the heart of everything. Breakfast was served every morning in a common little tatami-matted room and your choices were - American, English or Japanese. After a morning or two of American or English (I can’t remember) my courage and curiosity got me to order the Japanese breakfast which immediately caught the interest of everyone else at breakfast. I had made a few friends at that point - a lovely elderly English couple who were very much on a pottery pilgrimage and were taking charge of my itinerary to that end, and an equally lovely young Australian couple who were combining vacation with the hope of some work. Luke was a writer who contributed somewhat regularly to the Australian Financial Review Magazine and had pitched them on a travel story. We started palling around and going to dinner and he was intrigued by my giant camera and decided he would reach out to me to see images if he sold the story. So of course he did and six months later I landed on the cover of Life&Leisure: Sophisticated Traveler.