Year of Making and Journey of a Naïve Book Maker

A brief update on Jinny Street Gallery and announcement of the new book series.

Hello, fellow walkers. Happy New Year! …is a phrase I started in my previous dispatch. I announced the opening of the Jinny Street Gallery and its inaugural exhibition. It’s been a hectic year, so much so that I’ve nearly lost touch with my writing and perhaps even my photography skills. Nonetheless, the gallery is about to host its tenth show, coinciding beautifully with its first anniversary.

To celebrate this milestone, Lorenzo and I thought it fitting to revisit our debut exhibition, but with a fresh lineup of artists. I’m happy to introduce Johan Brooks, Veronika Ikonnikova, Tasuku Innami, and Mateusz Urbanowicz, who will be exhibiting with us at Tokyo Flâneur Vol. 2. For those familiar with the Tokyo art circuit, these names might resonate with a certain familiarity. Interestingly, apart from Johan and ourselves, the group predominantly comprises non-photographers. The surprising response to Jinny’s previous exhibitions, like Ropetine, Precious Waste, and Michibiki, highlighted the gallery’s inclination towards mixed media. With this surge in interest, I decided to step back from showcasing my creations within these streetlamps starting next month. Initially, my work was meant to help ‘fill in’ the nascent gallery’s spaces, a role now rendered obsolete.

Tokyo Flâneur Vol. 2 starts on January 19 and concludes on February 18, 2024. You can see my work — Moments I Stood Still — at streetlamps 3, 9, 16, 20, 28, 36, and 37.

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“Making”

During each Dead Week, I dedicate my time to planning the upcoming year. There’s a peculiar satisfaction in this exercise. It neatly patches the void in my mind where productive procrastination usually lurks, ensuring I have no excuse for further delay in the remaining eleven and a half months. A key part of this annual ritual is selecting my Yearly Theme. This is not about charting goals or succumbing to the cliché of resolutions, but rather, it’s about setting the direction — picking a degree point on my compass of interests and things I want to do.

While I won’t delve into the specifics here, this year’s theme is Making (with a generous side note of “While Traveling,” enclosed in parentheses). This encompasses making photographs, making books, making(?) walks – you get the idea.

In this newsletter, I invite you to join me on one of these Making adventures — an Out of Memory book series.

Out of Memory is a photographic diary-style project that has been evolving alongside my written diary, Almanac, which I’ve diligently maintained every single day since January 2019. Almanac is by far the longest-running continuous thing I have ever done. About six months into writing it, as someone who identified more as a photographer than a writer, I was struck by the trivially obvious idea of taking daily photographs to complement my journal entries. While I didn’t manage to capture photos every day, over time, I amassed a significant collection that subtly echoed my emotions and state of mind over long stretches of time. By the end of 2019, this collection had grown into a 180-page magazine-style book.

Now, five years later, I’m still at it. Each time my memory card fills up—a reason for the project’s name—I begin working on the next volume. After completing eight volumes with a total of eight copies, I’ve decided to take this project to the next level.

And this is where the journey starts.

In the upcoming issue, I will delve into the objectives behind the book series. I’ll discuss my motivations for creating it and how I plan to tackle a new format and sequencing, the actual process of making physical books, and a venture completely new (and terrifying) to me — selling these books.