Photography Curated by Sean Bonner

What is the mystery of photography? Why do we love the static image? What is it that these fragments of reality, frozen in time tell us? What is it about the photograph’s ability to transcend commonplace existence that has taken it from an unrecognized set of chemical reactions to the most popular and life-changing art-form the history of the world has ever seen?

Are we seeking knowledge of our place within the greater universal complexity? Or could it be that we are a conceited bunch of heretic animals in love with posing for and fawning over our own graven image? Is it not rather that we just love to command machines, fiddle with knobs, push brightly colored buttons and play with toys?

Ahh, toys. Ask most people when they started to fall in love with photography and many, if not most will hark back to the golden days of their childhood, when life was simpler, the sun shone brighter and film was, as the only option available, still cheap. Most photographers of today who were raised in the odd limbo generation of the 70s and 80s grew up on one or more of the futuristic Polaroid instant cameras kicking around the house. Or maybe you had the cartridge-based 110 film and disc cameras, invented by Kodak and popularized with the Kodacolor VR, or any number of short-lived point and shoot cameras, that weren’t toy cameras per se, but today can be found lining the discount bins of used camera resellers and garage sales alike, the world over.

When Fuji Camera introduced the Fujipet camera, marketed to a solely Japanese audience, this plastic camera would go on to introduce the hitherto western concept of leisure combined with the snapshot, for use by the whole family. From the instruction manual, “With the Fujipet Camera you can the pictures very easily just as you manipulate your knife and fork…The Fujipet Camera enjoys great popularity among children, mothers and all the members of the family and affords happiness in all homes.”

What about the Hong Kong novelty manufacturer Great Wall Plastic Factory, in first producing the Diana, which in turn spawned tens of hundreds of clones, that unwittingly launched the modern day toy camera revolution. They were just trying to make a fast buck. In doing so, they made history.

Thanks in large part to Mr. T.M. Lee – inventor of the Holga – is it true that anyone can be a photographer?

Despite all signs to the contrary, it was not the original goal of Mr. Lee, nor any of the other manufacturers, to make toys, but rather to ensure that people were fascinated and interested in creative film photography. As the Chinese middle class grew due to economic reform of the 80s – and with it buying power and hunger for better technology – many cheaper products, like Holga, lost ground and were nearly completely lost in the shuffle toward the new paradigm of the 90s tech boom.

As artists, amateur photographers and institutions of higher learning got in on the ground floor of the Holga Revolution, business boomed for Mr. Lee and Universal Electronic- largely in part to the Austrian-based Lomographic Society licensing and repackaging the Holga (as done with the glass-lensed Lomo LC-A – often thought of as a “toy” as well) in marketable and highly profitable kits. He was amazed at the resurgence of his twenty year-old baby, remarking it was “out of my imagination!” and smartly thought to capitalize on this newfound “Toy Camera” popularity by diversifying into a wider range of products. Add-ons for the Holga or completely new cameras (the Micro 110, 6×9/6×12 Pinhole, 3D Stereo, Twin Lens Reflex, a whole range of 135mm cameras, fish-eye lenses, color flashes, etc.) became profitable ways to expand into areas previously unimagined. The future was very bright indeed.

To ask what is the future of photography is too big for anyone to take on except in bite-size chunks. One might be well served to look back to the origins of capturing images for answers to why images- and especially those taken with shoddily-crafted plastic parts which often “leak” light, vignette uncontrollably, and capture images so randomly that the photographer would have no guarantee that any exposure will come out at all- have transfixed us deer-like in the headlights of a tsunami of cause and effect. Many of which have such wide ranging societal repercussions that we would be smart to admit no one really has any idea of what’s happening, let alone what’s on the horizon.

To extrapolate digital photography as a direct result of the Toy Camera boom, to say that Holga created the digital point and shoot in your mobile phone, to credit Hong Konger novelty and flash manufacturers with the digital paradigm as well as their own eventual decline, is not too far a stretch. What will emerge from the next few digital decades, after the Hipstamatic iPhone filter fad has worn off? A perpetual backlash against time-tested, though also time-consuming, archival methods or as Mr. Lee experienced when the unpredictable wave of economic tide turned the middle class Chinese off his product and hipsters on – a rebirth of interest in film and more importantly, sales?

Read the continued Interview with Holga Limited’s Christine So here.

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Only a few man-made structures lend themselves to automatic inclusion in science-fiction movies. Locations so out-of-this-world they have to be used as phantasmagoric shooting locations. San Diego’s Geisel Library, half the Statue of Liberty, the Bradbury Building…

On the Northern outskirts of Tokyo, the list also includes a drain. Also known by the fabricated name “G-Cans” (not an abbreviation of anything in particular), the Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel however is no ordinary drain, but a series of enormous, interconnected, underground facilities. Massive holding tanks, surge suppressors, huge pump rooms, networked tunnels, control rooms, inlets, outlets, overflows, and more – all fifty meters underground.

With one hundred kilometers of flood control tunnels, the overall project was started in 1992, with the G-Cans section finishing in 2009. Designed to provide flood control for the northern reaches of the greater Tokyo metropolis, the G-Cans element alone is massive on an unimaginable scale.

Photography: Ken Lee / Magnesium. Nikon F100 35mm and XP2 Super.

The two billion dollar G-Cans project is nearly six and a half kilometers long, with an interconnecting series of holding silos, varying in size up to sixty-five meters tall and over thirty meters in diameter. The largest holding tank is the massive “cathedral” – one hundred seventy-seven meters long and seventy-seven meters wide. Its roof is supported by sixty massive pillars, designed to provide both strength and low resistance to the swirling waters.

The basic design function of G-Cans is to re-channel potential flood waters from one watercourse to another, balancing and regulating the water flow to ensure flood surges and river breaches are kept to a minimum. As well as natural water flows, a turbine hall, equipped with ten megaWatt of Pratt & Whitney pumping capacity, can move over two hundred thousand liters of water per second into the adjacent Edo River. That’s enough water to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool in just over one second.

Photography: Skorj / Magnesium.

Construction of the main tunnels utilized a conventional Tunnel Boring Machine (“TBM”) and a two-layer lined tunnel – supporting framework and internal smooth sleeves for water flow. Ground water freezing was undertaken with large-scale expander insertions into the surrounding rock, with condensate forming on their many coupling heads, the now-removed expanders resembled alien spawning stations.

Standing meters below the previous high-water mark, with the sound of compressors and dripping water in the distance, is a remarkably surreal experience. The damp languid air adds to the feeling of potentially being swallowed up by a flooding wave as it careens through the tunnels, sweeping everything to its doom along the way. Fifty meters below the surface, fifty meters below the suburbs, with the kids playing soccer on the fields of Saitama above our heads, riding bicycles through the tunnels as we explored really added to the off-world feeling.

Since completion, the tunnels, side chambers, and main “cathedral” hall have been used in making a Tetsujin 28 film, a Range Rover commercial, numerous other TV spots, and some of the photographs here were used in the source rendering for a computer game.

While the main tunnels are now off-limits for access, the control room, above-ground infrastructure, and main cathedral are sometimes available for tours during the non-typhoon season. Bookings are available for Japanese speakers via their main website.

Please contact licensing@magnesiumphotos.com or use the Contact form for more information on licensing these photographs and others on this issue.

Along with two other photographers, I am sitting in a rented car. As we sit parked on a sparsely lit dock in the south of Japan, we are watching the sun rise. Even before our arrival it feels like a unique journey; short-hop commuter flights, business hotels, a rented Honda rep-mobile, plotted routes on topographical maps, ramen dinners and konbini breakfasts.

It is 04:30, and after having driven through the early hours from Nagasaki to a remote fishing village in search of our boatman, we are ready to embark on the final leg to our ultimate destination – Hashima. An abandoned island-city, Hashima remains untouched in the nearly forty years since its 5000 or so occupants vacated by boat, taking with them only a few scant possessions.

With mining operations established in 1810, on an island less than 500 metres long, Hashima’s well known legacy includes it once being the most densely populated place on earth, housing what was Japan’s tallest building, and its first large-scale reinforced concrete apartment block. The erroneous claim of this island city being shelled by the US Navy in World War Two, ‘as it looked like a battleship’, contributes to the legend of Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island, evident in the popular local nickname for Hashima.

Coming across a few fishermen, who are enjoying their last cigarette before returning home, we are gruffly told our boatman is on the other side of the dock. Approaching him within earshot of his companions, he mumbles nothing more than our departure time, and walks off. At sea, our boatman’s demeanor changes immediately to a jovial, entertaining host arranged at the behest of our sponsors, telling us stories of the sea, and of his Hashima. Forty-five minutes later, he lands us on Hashima, and three of us scramble ashore with a day’s supplies, cameras, and more film than I have ever carried.

After giving us his promise to return before sunset, our boatman maneuvers off station, leaving us alone with the silence of Hashima, awed, and not really sure of what to do next.

Photography: Ken Lee / Magnesium. Nikon F3 20mm and XP2 Super.

The feeling of being in some far off post-apocalyptic land is immense. To experience a place where every way you turn is abandoned desolation, immediately overwhelms; you do not need to imagine what it would be like to stand in a once occupied city after a plague, The Bomb, or at the end of time.

Everything from the hospital, the school, factories, apartments, the bathhouse, the gymnasium, and the shrines stands vacant. Dark canyons of fallen lumber fill the streets, collapsed roofs abound, the detritus of a modern life is scattered under your feet as you walk – washed from the buildings by the wind, the rain, and the sea.

With little more to hear than a plaintive sea bird, and ominously the occasional clattering sound of falling masonry and concrete, we step over telephones, sake cups, toothbrushes, broken toys, milk bottles, and curiously, dental tools, all laying under foot as we scramble over what were once streets, and through the vacant buildings.

It is tempting to try and extract a man-against-nature message when coming to Hashima. The message here however is simply one of isolation, the feeling of vulnerability, and the opportunity to travel back in time to explore the lives of a coal mining island-city; to experience a snapshot of life in Japan from the 1960s and 1970s.

I cannot speak for my companions, but over the course of a day on Hashima as we document what we see, I go from being a photographer intent on making some serious commentary with my work, to gawking like an American tourist in Paris.

With the declining need for coal in the 1970s, Mitsubishi closed operations over a period of a few short months, ferrying the inhabitants back to the mainland with not much more than what they could carry. What they left behind in 1974, is the Hashima you see now.

Photography: Skorj / Magnesium. Polaroid Type-665.

With the passing of ownership and control from the Mitsubishi Mining Corporation to the local Prefecture Office, a 220 meter public walkway has now been opened on the south end of the island. Twice-daily tours, either as a stand-alone Hashima access ticket, or as part of a regional historic pass, are now available. Hashima, as we experienced it, will most likely disappear with the expected advent of the eager day tripper.

Please contact licensing@magnesiumphotos.com for more information on licensing these photographs and others on this issue.

For more on abandoned Japan, click here.