ProgressivE-zine #1

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Editorial Team Batsceba Hardy - chief editor Fabio Balestra Robert Bannister Davide Dalla Giustina Michael Kennedy

Contributions Lukasz Palka Michael Kennedy Gerri McLaughlin Michael Dressel

Cover Lukasz Palka

Graphic Design Massimo Giacci

All articles and illustrations contained in the magazine are subjected to copyright.

Any form of utilization beyond the narrow limits imposed by the law of copyright and without the express permission of the publisher is forbidden and will be prosecuted.

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Enquires or material for publication are welcome.

We accept no responsability for unsolecited material.

- Adult Content Š 2018

Index

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On The Streets of Tokyo Lukasz Palka

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On The Streets of Tokyo Gerri McLaughlin

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Out for Drinks with Michael Dressel

by John Tottenham

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On The Streets of Tokyo Michael Kennedy

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(In)World-Stories With Debby Masamba, John Hughes, Angel Rodriguez, Andreas Mamoukas

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Progressive Gang Stories

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On the streets of Tokyo

by Lukasz Palka

Neon light bathes the rooftop in a red shimmer, the dinge of machinery and ductwork set ablaze against the grey night. The sign glows in the distance, a circle of crimson surrounding a single burning character: 源 — ‘gen’… ‘origin.’ I stare at the glyph, gently flickering against the neogothic façade of its building, casting hues of pink and vermillion on nearby structures and think back to my origin. How did I get here, on top of this rooftop, one like any other, amidst the concrete forest of Ginza?

A decade ago I stood on the Chuo commuter line, which snakes its way through the heart of Tokyo like a cortical artery, pressed against the

door with my duffel bag standing on its end propped between me and a salaryman. Though I didn’t know it at the time, we passed through Kanda and Akihabara, and then Shinjuku, cutting through forests of neon blazing along the streets. I looked out from the train on the elevated tracks in awe and wonder. The metropolis seemed to stretch forever as the train passed through from east to west, carrying a weary traveler to his lodgings.

Years later and I shy away from the neon, lurking deeper in the dark alleys and passages of Kabukicho, searching for fleeting moments like a cockroach for scraps. I come across the

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kitchen of a Chinese joint overflowing out into the back alley. Dishes, barrels, bottles, and crates all cast in fluorescent light, tinged green and violet. People pass in the distance, a waitress steps out from the light into my darkness and watches me for a fleeting moment, standing there frozen, single cycloptic eye unblinking from the black plastic corruption of a face— I aim my camera down the cluttered passage.

My camera… The camera serves more as a chamber for my thoughts than a tool for gathering light. It is a vessel that allows me to absorb, distill, transmute, comprehend this city—Tokyo, the great metropolis, the amalgam of light, concrete, steel, glass, fiberoptic cable, copper wire, track, asphalt, tunnels, bridges, passages, carriages, cars, trains, and people… people filling every void and moment in the urban ex-

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panse. All that, parsed and converted into a two-dimensional digital image. Then it makes sense to me. I can compute the data and categorize it and comprehend it. I need my camera.

I stalk down a smoke-filled alleyway, grey clouds billowing out of charcoal grills, carrying laughter and energy from crowded bars— like narrow tenements crammed one right next to the other in a neon slum, thin shared walls interlinked like biological cells in some mecha-organic fungus.

I feel the heat wafting up from the stoked coals as paper lamps cast their warm light into my eyes. I move through the crowded alleyway and peer into the establishments, poking my third eye through a curtain, snapping photos like some voyeur, an alien tourist, an observer from the outside. I steal images, tuck them away

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in my black box for later dissection: people reveling in the 60hz flicker of fluorescent tubes, minds dimmed by alcohol and elevated by the buzz of human conversation.

My shutter clicks from the relative darkness outside the bar— clack, clack, clack— moments frozen, three dimensions compressed to two, emotions encoded in pixels.

Mid-afternoon sunlight streaks between rooftops 10-stories above the street as I crouch in front of a collage of pipes, conduits, stickers, graffiti, and shadows plastered on the side of a building, focus ring gripped firmly between fingers, camera held tight in the other hand, third eye peering intently at the wall.

I repeat the process with a bicycle, its triangles and circles extending the geometry of the urban environment, its chrome fixtures blend-

ing with the city like a chameleon. Passersby glance in the direction of my cyclopean gaze in bewilderment— what could he be photographing here? A wall? A bicycle? What mundanity could be worth photographing? All is mundane in the metropolis.

I move through a crowd - slowly as though encumbered by the harsh summer sunlight, the sidewalk flanked by glass facades reflecting quicksilver beams, spotlights cast on faces in the crowd. I capture: a man’s face amidst a field of black shadows, a woman in high heels and a lace dress, flares of daylight exposing her silhouette, a child’s reflection in the crystalline panels of a clothing store. The summer heat bearing down, I take refuge in the metro. I lurk against a column amidst yellow lines and blue panels. A girl in a yellow sundress steps into frame. I don’t 7

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hesitate, depress the shutter, consolidate the moment. The streets pull me along and my third eye takes point. I follow the light like a dog sniffing for the scent of meat.

Jazz flows gently from analog speakers fueled by a turntable spinning vinyl. Thelonious Monk’s piano is our guide as a good friend and I make our way through cocktails in an underground bar in Ikebukuro. We talk and spin records on the antique jukebox recently procured by the bar’s master, Iwata-san.

The night grows long and soon the last trains will have gone, the city entering its nocturnal stasis, not quite sleeping, urban metabolism slowed to a gentle hum of traffic and human activity. We step out of the bar into the quiet night and stumble around outskirts of the red-light district and find our way by chance to

a portal that leads to an elevated plane—a staircase to the rooftops.

We climb the 14-flights to the roof, and amble through the machinery and vents and wires of the rooftop and clamber up a latter onto a water tank. From this gritty urban peak, we look out onto the streets below, glowing, pulsing brightly with neon light and the distant screams and shouts of revelers.

It is here that my journey reached a point of no return. From here on I would be a creature of the city, a strange beast filling a niche in which few others find creative sustenance. And so, I find myself years later, on another rooftop far across the metropolis, bathed in the red neon light of ‘gen’ — 源 — ‘origin’. And I think back to how I got here, and wonder where my third eye will lead me next.

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On the streets of Tokyo

by Michael Kennedy

For the past decade, I’ve lived in the Orient more specifically along both Tokyo Bay and the Han River that cuts through Seoul.

Nothing about my life has ever conformed entirely to design. As John Lennon said in Beautiful Boy, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Regardless of intention or chance, I consider myself extraordinarily lucky.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve taken the Limited Express from Yokosuka-chuo Station-to-Shinjuku Station, considered the world’s busiest train station, with 3.6 million passengers a day.

My confused gaijin-look was no act. The sea

of humanity that poured through the Shinjuku Station frequently overwhelmed me. Yet I was wonderfully relieved that a Japanese male would see that I was drowning in bewilderment, and offer assistance. This doesn’t happen in many other urban centers in the world.

It is impossible to be drawn to street photography while in Tokyo without acknowledging the legendary Daido Moriyama. He is rightfully considered the Godfather of Street Photography in Japan.

Yet Daido’s influence is everywhere. About six months ago, I had just acquired a Ricoh GR II and I was in Myeongdong, a trendy part of downtown Seoul that easily lends itself to street 15

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photography because of all the foreign tourists that pass through this area.

One could write a book on the complex relationship between the Japanese and the Koreans - which has all the love-hate similarities that exist between the English and the Irish.

That afternoon in Myeongdong, a younger Korean street photographer with the same Ricoh camera spotted me with mine and instantly came toward me. We both recognized a language barrier, since I really don’t speak anything but English, and he was limited to Korean.

Yet the young man said only one word, and we knew our connection: “Daido.”

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In fact, he said it several times - for everyone knows that Daido - who, in turn, is very influenced by the American William Klein (among others) is the Gold Standard for so many street photographers in this part of the world - and well beyond this region. The power of art is that it can transcend history and politics and remind us that the cliché of The Family of Man is undeniable.

But that’s all the Korean young man said to me: “Daido,” and then he receded into the crowd never to be seen again.

The tie-in to Daido and the Ricoh GR II is that years ago he asked the company to design

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a small, light camera that allowed for a quick, near silent operation on the street. There’s nothing intimidating about the no-frills camera, and this is exactly what Daido requested.

Yet to be in Tokyo and to emerge from the Shinjuku Station, there’s more than the legend of Daido on these streets. This is also where his contemporary, Araki, did some of his more mainstream photography - if one considers the sex clubs of Shinjuku’s once notorious Red Light District a conventional subject. This specific world vanished in the early 1990s, when Tokyo cleaned up an image that was a bit too much for the gaijin tourists.

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Nonetheless, both Daido and Araki tore up the rules of photography in 1968 with Provoke Magazine, and turned polite Japanese society on its head.

Today, the influence of Daido - and, perhaps to a lesser degree, Araki (“A” for audacity), may be seen in the mainstream work of Tatsuo Suzuki, considered one of the best modern Tokyo street photographers. He lives in Shibuya, and street photography is his life - which is to say, he did the unthinkable and walked away from a wellpaid career some years ago to be do what we all want to do: be ourselves, answer to no one - and somehow be financially independent.

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For me, Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac are two American writers who stopped walking the wheel as pointless wage-slaves, and helped change society by the courage of their convictions as artists - writers both in their respective examples.

Suzuki is hardly alone in Tokyo as a firstclass and inspirational street photographer.

There are many more, of course. In many ways, Suzuki and his street photography colleagues, have picked up where Daido and Araki left off with Provoke Magazine and now offer Void Tokyo, a regular publication in both print and digital format that showcases some damn fine examples of life in a city that spills over with abundant examples of humanity in all its different degrees of expression.

I returned to Tokyo last winter, after an ab-

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sence of seven years. The entire time I have lived in Seoul - another very vibrant city in the Orient. I’m no authority on anything, but the Japanese and the Koreans are very much alike and yet also quite different.

One example of differences is on the issue of being photographed in public. All street photographs know to walk a fine line: Do you ask for permission - or for forgiveness? Do you discretely manipulate circumstances so that if you are in plain view of a subject on the street, you watch as they walk around you - or do you try to box the subject into walking straight at you?

Do you delete images when confronted by an unappreciative subject - or do you tell them in words or body language: fuck off.

In Korea, there are laws that protect citizens from unwanted photography in public. Yet I’ve

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never encountered any problems, and I do tuneup exercises on the subway. So far, so good.

If there are any similar laws in Japan, I’m living in state of ignorance is bliss. But based on my experiences, the Japanese are totally unfazed as subjects of street photography - at least in Tokyo.

Shinjuku is a great place to hit the streets with a camera - but Harajuku is far superior for my tastes.

Some cities… some neighborhoods have an immediate buzz that is an unmistakable source of energy and inspiration. Harajuku, has it going on with its colorful street art and fashion scene, with quirky vintage clothing stores and cosplay shops along Takeshita Street.

If this is a bit much, there are more traditional, upmarket boutiques lining leafy Omotesando Avenue.

Seoul can’t quite match Tokyo for the selection of neighborhoods that offer countless rewards for street photographers, but Myeongdong in the downtown area of Seoul comes in close to Harajuku.

My American friends back in the states wonder when I will come to my sense and return to the United States. More importantly, I wonder when they will come to their senses, and come to the Orient, where cities like Seoul and Tokyo are 2.5 hours apart by plane.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

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On the streets of Tokyo

by Gerry McLaughlin

I decide to stop for a coffee, I choose a large windowed, sun streamed corner cafe, the light inside is an exquisite blend of shadows, contrasts and highlights, the coffee is not bad too.

I position myself on a sunny window seat to watch Tokyo stream by.

I hadn’t planned to shot through the window but you know how it goes, I take a sip of coffee and put my camera to one side, I take another sip of coffee and start to compose the scene, I pick up my camera and put the coffee to one side.

The something relentless about Tokyo that makes me want to shoot and shoot and shoot. I want to capture as much as I can every time I’m here. Perhaps it’s living too long in conservative central Europe that I feel set free to work and to really be me here in the Tokyo streets.

There is an order here, an unspoken system perhaps where in the midst of one of the worlds most populous cities life ebbs and flows and the spaces between are where I find my creativity sparked and moved with possibilities. I take a lot

of pictures and let the themes develop in an intuitive almost unconscious way.

From the vibrant street life of Shibuya and Shinjuku to the quieter back streets of Taito-ku, where you can still find Obaasan tending her plants quietly among the concrete and steel that arose after the war. Tokyo has that feeling of ancient and modern meeting all over it. It’s a city of discovery for a photographer, I never hurry in Tokyo it’s a place that offers many ways to shoot what I call The Beautiful Ordinary, the daily tasks and ways of everyday people going through their city in their routines and foibles!

Strangely enough I don’t feel like a stranger in Tokyo, I’m an outsider and freak so I blend in here! The city streets welcome me open-armed.

I find comfort in its masses and the strangeness I see, I’m comfortable with the unusual and the bizarre colliding with the banal and the ancient.

This inspires me and treats that restless lonely urge inside of me which drives my street photography.

And if you’re lucky you can still meet a pig walking in downtown Shitamachi!

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Debby Masamba

(In)World Angel Rodriguez

John Hughes

- Stories Andreas Mamoukas

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Out for drinks with Michael Dressel

by John Tottenham

It would be a triumph if one could write an essay about street photography without resorting to the words ‘dignity’ and ‘compassion,’ which seem to be de rigueur whenever the subject is addressed. And Michael Dressel is definitely a street photographer. For years he has been tirelessly traversing the streets of his adopted city of Los Angeles — among other cities — documenting high and low, mostly the latter.

Passionately cynical and possessed with a spirited world-weariness, Dressel sits in a bar that is slowly filling up with the evening crowd.

“I’m not weirdly compassionate or anything,” he says, speaking perfect English in a German accent. “It isn’t about compassion. The bottom line is that we’re all struggling through this somehow. We’re all staggering through the merciless coldness of the universe. We have homes, bank accounts and jobs, but it’s a thin protection.

We’re all going to die.”

Dressel frequently dispenses morbid quips that evince a healthy awareness of mortality and acceptance of fate: a sensibility shaped by his formative years in East Germany - of hitchhiking trips undertaken in the bleakest of winters (a far cry from the beat odysseys that inspired them) and two years spent in an East German prison for attempting to climb the Berlin wall. It was following this character-

building stretch of hard time that he moved to Los Angeles, in the mid-1980s, and found employment as a sound editor. “When I was involved in Hollywood,” he says, “people always tried to get me to go to parties attended by big shots. I’d rather talk to the janitor. Names: I don’t care about names. These are not interesting people.”

From a large portfolio he pulls out a photograph of a hard-eyed woman in a wheelchair.

Her eyes are hard to look into; they have seen things you never want to see and ruthlessly return the viewer’s gaze. The woman seems to be challenging the photographer, sizing him up,

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questioning his motives, perhaps wondering what’s in it for her. Engagement with the subject is visible, and so powerful is her expression that it took several views before I noticed the painted image of a benign Dr. Martin Luther King adorning the store shutters that serve as a backdrop. Dressel’s work often exhibits a sensitivity to the visual ironies and serendipitous ambiguities of signage and advertising.

“The greatest mystery of all is reality,” says Michael, quoting Max Beckmann’s maxim. “Not everything has been photographed by everybody yet,” he adds, quoting one of his own.

Cocktails were flowing and young people were swarming around us until we became a graying island in a sea of blooming youth.

I continued leafing through the portfolio. A photograph of a woman with a walking cane, broken in health and weighed down with care, warily eyeing an approaching cop, weighed down with weaponry, starkly attests to powerlessness in the face of injustice, while a photograph of three sweet and hopeful young mothers wheeling baby carriages past the entrance to a strip joint in the soft and forgiving evening light distinctive to Los Angeles contains

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an irresistible poignancy. It feels like the end here, both sanctuary and termination: a soft place of harsh realities where a sun that once meant something barely brushes against the world. Dressel zeroes in on the pitiless underside of this beguiling and illusory softness, capturing lives of quiet desperation and loud complacency from the well-heeled to the down at heel, the self-obsessed to the dispossessed.

“You’ve got to walk around a lot,” he says.

“The more you walk, the more you see; you wander and wait, sometimes you stop. I like eye contact, a natural situation where it’s acknowledged that we saw each other, that’s important.”

These moments of connection are strikingly evident in the gritty musicality of Dressel’s portraits of mariachi performers clowning around and carnival revelers twerking for the camera at street festivals. Amidst all this movement, some of Dressel’s most arresting images capture moments of stillness in the city. Slumped in despondency at a table outside a Berlin bar, a solitary drinker stares down at the table while clinging to the cheap consolation of beer and tobacco. Back in LA, a dog stands guard in the window of a timeless rooming house, in which

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twisted curtains, an old air conditioner, a broken wrought iron railing and a ‘For Rent’ sign are visible.

“There aren’t many places like that left,” I remark.

“Wherever I go I end up photographing similar things, a society in dissolution,” says Michael. “The more I’m around the less I understand. You have to decide if you’re going to use that as a form of liberation or a reason to despair... all this running-around-all-day stuff is lame. One has to endure the boredom of existence in order to figure out what it’s all about.”

Not that almost everything doesn’t have that effect but listening to Dressel often makes me feel I haven’t lived fully enough or thought deeply enough about things; he possesses a refreshing and enviable engagement with life and his conversation is an unpredictable and inspiring ride. At first I keep up, but my flagging energy and meager fund of discourse is soon exhausted, and as the evening wears down I fall into the role of a mumbling, overstimulated listener and just enjoy the flow of his eloquence.

My ear has been twisted off but it has been a worthwhile ear-twisting — which can’t be said about most dithyramblers — and I have been left with something to think about.

I stared balefully at the insipid beauties and arrogant young upstarts who were responsible for the frequent eruptions of squealing, giggling and yelling on the other side of the room, with constant brain-curdling ejaculations of “cools,” “likes”, “awesomes”, and “Oh my Gods.”

“The world is too full,” said Michael. “But we’re making room soon... It’s coming for us, we’re in the crosshairs, we’re in direct range.” If a friend, as I have sometimes thought, is somebody one can talk about death with, then Michael is a true friend.

“The problem nowadays is there’s too much 39

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of everything. Too much intelligence, too much beauty, too much art,” he continued. “But as full as the world is, even if you only do one thing, that one thing should be really good. To leave a record of how you saw things, your personal view. There’s some validity to that: people do see things differently.”

Over the course of his life, Dressel has seen things differently, and he has mastered several mediums. As a younger man, he produced a sub-

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stantial body of work as a painter in a style that embodied a direct line of descent from German Expressionism and was equal to anything that was around at the time. But he didn’t put it out there. His sense of urgency about producing the work itself has never been matched by a corresponding desire to display the results of his endeavors, until now.

“The curtains are coming down anyway pretty soon,” he says. “I might as well put it out there.”

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Progressive Gang Stories www.progressive-street.com

in this issue Lukasz Palka Photographer: www.lkazphoto.com Director (business) at EYExplore Photo Adventures

Michael Kennedy is an American photographer, writer, and reconteur who lives in Seoul. Although photography has always been his passport into other worlds, he has also managed to write hundreds of love letters to several women with names that begin with “S”.

Gerri McLaughlin is a Scottish born wanderer currently living near Basel, Switzerland. After leaving the world of professional kitchens some years back he found himself in a position to indulge his passion for street photography and is often be found wandering the streets of major urban centres at all times of the day and night with a pocketful of change and head full of jazz…

Michael Dressel Hier mehr http://www.huffingtonpost.com/f-scott-hess/ everyday-empathy-in-the-p_b_8340574.html

Contributors in Progressive Gang Stories : Batsceba Hardy, Robert Bannister, Niklas Lindskog, Lukasz Palka, Jinn Jyh Leow, Michael Kennedy, Fabio Maddogz Balestra, Stefania Lazzari, Orlando Durazzo, Davide Dalla Giustina, Patrick Monnier, Gerri McLaughlin, Alexander Merc, Peppe Di Donato, Mark Guider, Karlo Flores, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Alphan Yilmazmaden, Marion Junkersdorf, Inés Madrazo Delgado.