Alfie Goodrich Print Catalogue, 2024
www.japanorama.darkroom.com
“Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.” Garry Winogrand
A few words about this catalogue... Hi. I’m Alfie and welcome to this little sample of what you can find in my on-line print store at japanorama.darkroom.com Like many independent creators, during the recent Covid pandemic, I spent some time setting up ways of generating additional income on-line. Darkroom helped with that and continues to do so. It’s by no means perfect and my collection there is by no means thoroughly representative of my back-catalogue or my daily work as a photographer. But, it’s getting there on both fronts. One thing the site can be a little challenging for is showing you in just a few clicks the full range of photos I have available as prints. So, with that in mind - plus the fact I just love designing magazines, brochures and books - I decided to put this little catalogue together. So you could see some of what’s available in my store and enjoy flicking through the pages to discover, hopefully, some pretty pictures. I’ve been in Japan for 25 years. On and off for the first six or seven years, full time for 18. It’s my home. And I’ve been fortunate enough through my work to visit all 47 of its prefectures. Whilst there are a few photos in here from overseas, the bulk of what you’ll find was shot here in Japan. It’s a fascinating country for photographers and despite all my years here, I’m still very far from bored of it. I hope you enjoy this little photographic journey. And perhaps even enough to want to buy a piece of my work to have on your wall or as a gift. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, do drop me an email (address on back cover) as I’m more than happy to upload photos to the store just for you. Thank you. Photo by Liz Mpenzi
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Oh So Japanese My print store is organised in collections, the first of which is entitled ‘Oh So Japanese’. Home to some of the images I’ve shot here in Japan which are unmistakably of this place. Festivals, the architecture, the street scenes - a selection of subjects and scenes that will hopefully feel imbued for you with an essence of Japan. On these few pages dedicated to this collection, you’ll find images from Tokyo, Kyoto, Nikko and
more. Spanning a number of genres of my photography and spread across a colour palette that hopefully suits a space on a wall or a desk in your home or the home or office of a friend or loved one. Colours are important. If there’s a particular palette you’re looking to match, let me know. I’ve doubtless got a shot that’ll fit!
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The Built Environment Our built environment is instrumental, I feel, in shaping our life experiences. I moved to Japan and set up home in Tokyo. A far cry from the rural idyll of Monmouthshire, Wales, where we were living before. My response to this tectonic change of environment has been to seek out beauty in the lines, to chase the light and reflections at all times of day and night. To seek out subjects that draw the eye and hold my attention. There’s also a few shots here from overseas but the bulk is from Japan. page | 10
Whether it be the grand vista or just some details of a particular building, the city has me in constant thrall. I’ll often describe it as ‘my studio’, for it plays out as such in my work: placing a client’s car or a model in a ‘set’, having first studied the way the light plays across it at a certain time of day. I hope you enjoy this little trip through a few of my favourite ‘stages’.
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Mount Fuji Despite the city always changing around where we live, we still have a view of Mount Fuji from right outside our front door. Ever-present in my daily life, this most perfectly shaped strato-volcano is a daily source of wonderment and power for me. Whether it be viewed across the urban sprawl of Tokyo or the quiet, lapping waves of a bay, Mount Fuji constantly reacts to the weather, the light and her foreground. Offering up a changing and varied selection of vistas that never fail to enthrall me. Quiet for now, she’s also a reminder of the violent natural forces that have shaped and constantly effect Japan. Truly awe-inspiring!
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“with clo and mist brief mom hundred brought t fulfillmen
Ma
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ouds in a ment a scenes to nt”
atsuo Basho
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Night in the City Like many, Japan’s urban spaces saturated my eyes and mind through movies and animation. Ridley Scott’s first Blade Runner movie in 1982 played a large part. As did his Black Rain just seven years later. My own journey into the unique night scape of Tokyo began around ten years later. Armed originally with a Nikon film camera, then a Fuji medium format rangefinder, I first began to explore the rich patchwork of backstreets and wide
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neon drenched avenues. Digital cameras opened up a new landscape, of constantly and infinitely customisable white balance and lights-on post-production, where anything was possible. My first ten years in Tokyo were perhaps my most prolific in terms of nighttime street photography. Going back through that work now excites me to get out again, more and more.
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The Street “Have you had a good life, enough to base a movie on?”, said Jim Morrison in his American Prayer. Words that resonate strongly with me every day I’m out with my camera. For life is, for me, very much like a movie. It’s how I see the world in front of me. And Tokyo’s wildly disparate street vistas offer up a different movie around every corner. This city in particular, but many other Jap-
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anese cities too, feels for me like a thousand villages all strung together into a whole. With everything from 35mm to large format, wide lenses to super-telephoto, I have and continue to explore this all-day-allnight, living-breathing, intensely cinematic mise-en-scène.
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Trains, planes & automobiles I grew up in a three-storey townhouse, on a busy main road in Canterbury, Kent, England. Our second floor lounge had a floor to ceiling window that stretched almost all thew way across the front of the house. It had a commanding view of the road and - with my I-Spy books in hand - spent many a day watching the cars, counting the cars, noting the types, brands and colours. I was a Car Spotter.
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Aeroplanes, trains, boats, hovercraft.. vehicles of all stripes, fascinated me. And, surprise surprise they still do. The passion is what has fueled my work and I’m fortunate enough to work with a lot of the world’s most famous brands. This subject matter is also a hobby for me. Things I collect with my camera. Here’s a few faves for you to enjoy, too.
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Textures & abstracts Photography is not just my job. It’s not just my hobby. It’s literally who I am. And as such I’m never not looking at the world in front of without thinking about making a photo of some part of it. As a professional photographer especially, I think it’s crucial to have an exercise regime that keeps my eyes and mind fit for purpose. Like any other creative person, there are days when I feel very un-creative. Days I feel in a rut. One needs ways out of such funk. I’m
no good to myself or a client if they phone me up and ask about a job and find me deep in a hole of creative self-loathing. So, I have exercises. I keep fit, I collect things with my camera, as these days I’m decidedly not into collecting actual stuff any more. And searching for beauty in the most mundane of things is time so very well spent.
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Autumn One used to be able to set a watch by the prompt arrival of each season in Japan. No more, given the fragile and in many cases broken state of our climate. But, no more pleased am I to see a season arrive than autumn. Why? Summer is unbearable here in Japan, especially for a Brit like me. And when summer’s crushing humidity, brutally sharp light
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and plague of mosquitoes gives way to autumn’s cooler breezes and rich colour palette, it is tonic for both the eyes and body. Many marvel at sakura here. And it is indeed a magnificent site. But for me autumn is both king and queen.
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Winter Soon after arriving in Japan to live, I spent a few days in Hokkaido on a government-run press junket, run to promote the coming G8 summit. I’d experienced odd snowy days here and there on previous trips, but that trip was my first time in Hokkaido and first time in a ‘proper Japanese winter’. A few of the images in this collection are from then: from Hakodate’s geometric masterpiece, the Goryokakku Fort. Japan can be quite the winter wonderland and this gallery is a mix of scenes from the snowy north but also scenes from those rare one-day-ayear snowfalls in Tokyo. Trans-formative days. Magical days, when the city becomes a chilled hush of monochromatic spectacle.
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Flowers Flower photography is one of my little zen hobbies. And, odd as it may sound, a kind of Man Cave for me, as we live in a bijou flat in central Tokyo, and I tend to make space for myself outside not in. With quiet, beautiful subjects to capture with my camera. Many of the flowers here are very close to our home. I’m fortunate enough to have a canal just
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ten minutes walk from the house. In different seasons, it surges with colour and is surrounded on one whole side by large blocks of public housing. Each flat a light outside the door. I call it The Bokeh Factory. Flowers relax me. I hope these do the same for you.
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Natural Landscapes The Japanese Archipelago contains, in my amateur estimation, pretty much every climactic landscape there is. Save for deep desert, perhaps. Although there are extensive dune sets in Tottori and Shikoku, to name two. But, from Hokkaido in the north, all the way down to the far reaches of the outer is-
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lands like Haterumajima and Ishigaki, Japan basically has something of everything; snows as deep as a house is high, arid mountains, marine marshes, tropical primeval forests. Into my fourth decade experiencing it, and I still feel like I’m just scratching the surface!
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Infra Red As an art student in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, I experimented with both colour and monochrome infra-red films. Shooting, developing and printing them. It was, in short, both a fascinating and thoroughly frustrating journey. Occasionally rewarding drops in a photographic thunderstorm of perpetual fuck-up and occasional chemical poisoning. Even holding the developing tank in warm hands would fog the film inside.
lending me a converted DSLR, which had its IR-cut filter removed, rendering it solely an infra-red spectrum camera. All hail instantly visible results and experimentation without risk of bankruptcy or hospitalisation! Hurrah! Such fun.
So, fast-forward to 2010 and a student of mine
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ALFIE GOODRICH photographer www.alfie.photography www.japanorama.darkroom.com alfiejapanorama@gmail.com +81(0)90 9971 7805