Kishin Kaidan | Shomei Tomatsu | Complete Text Now Updated
Kishin Kaidan｜Shomei Tomatsu — the final sections are now live.
The members-only version has now been updated through the last two sections: “The Workshop Is a New Medium” and “The One Who Can Be Called a Rival Is Myself.” With this update, the full article is complete.
In “The Workshop Is a New Medium,” Tomatsu speaks about the Workshop Photography School not simply as a place for teaching technique, but as a new form of communication. For him, the classroom becomes a medium: a small, direct space where the distance between the person taking photographs and the person looking at them can become shorter.
This idea also responds to the limits of print media. In a magazine or printed page, photographs usually move in one direction, from the photographer toward an unseen reader. In the workshop, however, response becomes immediate. The photographer and the viewer can meet each other more directly.
The final section, “The One Who Can Be Called a Rival Is Myself,” moves from Shinoyama and Araki to the question of rivalry itself. Tomatsu suggests that rivalry only appears when people share the same ground and the same goal. In an age where everything has become relative, the real rival may no longer be someone outside oneself, but oneself.
Looking back over the whole conversation, what remains is a series of basic but difficult questions: why we photograph, how we look, how photographs reach others, how a photographer changes, and how one keeps returning to the beginning.
The members-only version now includes the full article:
- the original Japanese text of the interview
- a full English translation
- a full Traditional Chinese translation
Read the complete version in Members Only:
https://www.fofofoto.com/members-only
