Zōkyō

Our crew just returned to Tokyo from our first visit to the earthquake and tsunami-affected areas of Ishinomaki and Onagawa. We went in effort to visit the victims and help rebuild and restart their family photo albums. While we put together a report about our humbling experience there, have a look at what they were up against.

This gives you some scale. Nothing but the roof of this building was above the wall of water and earth that engulfed the town of Onagawa. This was their train station.

Hey Photog Friends!

Wish I had thought about this earlier! I’m heading up to Tohoku in just a few hours, with a small crew of people, a mobile photography lab, and a car full of empty photo albums. We’re gonna try to help people affected by the earthquake get a fresh start with new family photo albums. We’re gonna shoot the participants, print the photos on the spot, and fill the first few pages of these albums to get them started. But it JUST dawned on me that they may have no way of filling the rest of the pages, i.e., no camera! DUH! So… I’m gonna offer all my old cameras loaded with film to the participants. And while I have many, it probably wouldn’t hurt to have many more. And digital is probably the way to go but you know how Japanese love their film too!

So… Anybody have an old digital (or working film) camera they don’t use and are willing to donate to this cause? Anybody happen to be able to pass anything off in the next 2-3 hours in, say, Shibuya? If yes, send me a mail immediately and I’ll arrange to meet you.

This is expected to be the first of several trips we will be taking for this effort from now until March and so if you can’t rally with such late notice, but still have cameras (or albums or anything photo related or whatever) probably in the near future is fine. Get in touch with me and will figure it out.

Thanks for your consideration and look out for more news on this…
Brian

UPDATE: We are leaving now, so can’t meet anybody now, but be in touch. Also it was suggested I add a paypal account if anybody wants to make a donation to this effort. For the time being, please direct any funds for this project to payment@zokyolabs.com. Thanks again!!!

Photo by Shiho Fukuda

“To pragmatists, the letter Z is nothing more than a phonetically symbolic glyph, a minor sign easily learned, readily assimilated, and occasionally deployed in the course of a literate life. To cynics, Z is just an S with a stick up its butt.

Well, true enough, any word worth repeating is greater than the sum of its parts; and the particular word-part Z can, from a certain perspective, appear anally wired.

On those of us neither prosaic nor jaded, however, those whom the Fates have chosen to monitor such things, Z has had an impact above and beyond its signifying function. A presence in its own right, it’s the most distant and elusive of our twenty-six linguistic atoms; a mysterious, dark figure in an otherwise fairly innocuous lineup, and the sleekest little swimmer ever to take laps in a bowl of alphabet soup.

Scarcely a day of my life has gone by when I’ve not stirred the alphabetical ant nest, yet every time I type or pen the letter Z, I still feel a secret tingle, a tiny thrill…

Z is a whip crack of a letter, a striking viper of a letter, an open jackknife ever ready to cut the cords of convention or peel the peach of lust.

A Z is slick, quick, arcane, eccentric, and always faintly sinister – although its very elegance separates it from the brutish X, that character traditionally associated with all forms of extinction. If X wields a tire iron, Z packs a laser gun. Zap! If X is Mike Hammer, Z is James Bond. If X marks the spot, Z avoids the spot, being too fluid, too cosmopolitan, to remain in one place.

In contrast to that prim, trim, self-absorbed supermodel, I, or to O, the voluptuous, orgasmic, bighearted slut, were Z a woman, she would be a femme fatale, the consonant we love to fear and fear to love.”

— Tom Robbins

“I think the monkeys at the zoo should have to wear sunglasses so they can’t hypnotize you.”
~ Jack Handy