Love is Best doubletruth series 01
by Alka Singh
For my flickr friends and B.
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First published in India, 2010, by
www.number21pix.in flickr page: www.flickr.com/doubletruth email: alka@number21pix.in Š Alka Singh 2010.
Printed in Bengaluru, India, by pothi.com.
number21pix.
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Introduction
I first visited Tokyo in May 2008 for the research of a documentary we were going to make for NHK, the largest public TV broadcaster in Japan. This culture is more complex than my words can conjure and thats why the best medium for me was photographs. I have been to the city three times and this time (November 2009) I looked at the city from all I had assimilated in my last two visits; and a little more that my camera saw. This is the first country that I have stayed the longest in, met and came to know many people, worked closely with two of my favorite things- films and manga. Tokyo started out from the very beginning as a journey about terminologies. The idiomatic language had so many unique feelings in it, that I was made to wonder whether I actually felt them. Had I ever tried to give a name to an affection for a fictional character? Or to be perceived as an unfashionable or socially inept obsessive person and in self-mockery call myself ‘a rotten girl’? I realized while making these pictures that I could perceive more distinctly when I took them in black and white. More so because I mainly photographed Tokyo’s information swamp, Shibuya, among other areas. Black and white is also very convenient for printing. I found many little photo books by Japanese photographers in black and white which were very intensive simply because of its small size and the black and white form. It seemed ideal for archiving and my purpose too is the same.