Jim O’Connell Photographs, The Blog.

Click the photo for a slideshow.

The Dojunkai Apartments : The
Beginning of Apartment Living
　The current mainstream steel reinforced
concrete apartments that were built prior to
World War II are called Dojunkai apartments.
The Dojunkai was a foundation established
following the Great Kanto Earthquake to help
victims in need of shelter. It was an external
body of the Interior Ministry and was funded
by contributions from within Japan and
overseas. The Dojunkai supplied 12,000
housing units, including 2,500 apartments,
between 1926 and 1941. All of the
apartments were reinforced concrete structures
that placed a premium on earthquake
resistance and most of the properties were
three stories in height. In addition to having
proper electricity, plumbing and gas, each of
the units was equipped with flush toilets. At
the time they were built, these housing units
were well known and admired for their
leading-edge conveniences and technologies
such as elevators, steam heaters, telephones
and baths. The aforementioned comforts
proved to be very popular despite the
concern that the apartment style of housing
might not be well accepted as a part of
Japanese lifestyle.

Quoted from http://xrl.us/oq6bk

The delights from these food emporiums aren’t the sort of meals you serve up on a first date, nor are they the sort of places you eat at every day (unless you have a very good cardiologist). They’re guilty pleasures to be savored, food shared amongst trusted friends and select initiates in a ritual of indiscretion and indulgence; saying “let’s go grab a bag of sliders” is much the same as saying “let’s be bad” with a devilish glint in your eye.

Magnesium Photos» Magnesium Photos.

Photographer Brian Peterson of Zokyo fame and I have been working on a new project for the past couple weeks, working for hours a day with an open Skype call going, usually with at least a couple others on the line, discussing every little detail of how to put together our new site, Magnesium.

It’s almost ready to go, but I thought I’d spread around a little link love for the search thingies.

Photos I shot in Kawagoe for the New York Times:
The Tokyo of Yore - The New York Times > Travel > Slide Show > Slide 1 of 12


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Photos I shot in Kawagoe for the New York Times:

Here’s another slideshow of takes and out-takes from my Hokkaido assignment for the NYT:

Another new set of photos today from the piece I did in Hokkaido recently. There’s the article, as well as a slideshow of a dozen photos. Came out pretty nice, I think.

[From In Japan, a House of Steel - NYTimes.com]

Here’s another NYT assignment I did on Toyo Ito, an architect that’s been getting a lot of attention lately:
Inside the Exteriors of the Architect Toyo Ito - NYTimes.com

(Click the photo to open the slideshow, then look for the navigation buttons at the bottom of the slideshow.)

That was a fun shoot. It was the day after I had done the shoot for the Nakagin Capsule Tower and when I got home from that job, I had an email asking me to shoot Mr. Ito at his office in Aoyama.
We talked about the Nakagin Tower a bit and he told me how its architect, Kisho Kurokawa, had been an inspiration and an influence on all young architects of the time.

Mr. Ito was a warm and friendly man, stylish without being fussy and happy to talk about his work.

When I asked him how he came up with the idea for the opera house, he picked up an object that looked like a CD case and pulled the two pieces of plexiglass apart. Sandwiched between the two pieces was a sheet of flexible woven fabric, held to the two sheets with translucent fasteners. As he pulled it, the fabric was stretched into gentle curves, the same as you can see in the building. (Photos of him holding the model start at slide 52 in the presentation.)

To light the shoot, I used a single strobe, with a Gary Fong Lightsphere, a soft plastic attachment that looks a bit like some sort of Tupperware bowl. I always get comments on it and often feel self conscious when carrying it, but it does a fantastic job. I did some of them with a cable, allowing me to shoot with the flash off-camera, but in all honesty, I coule have skipped that and just shot it all on-camera.