PAUL TAKEUCHI

is a Brooklyn-based photographer. He has won numerous grants and awards, and his work has been widely published and exhibited internationally.

MISCELLANEOUS WORK

When you photograph obsessively, the majority of your images never end up in any particular active series. Here is an assortment of such photos, grouped loosely by whatever category I've assigned in hindsight.

In the late 90s, when digital sensors were not very sensitive nor high resolution, I was scanning film and using photoshop to make images. I made a bunch of cityscapes, including this image from my RGB Buildings and Building Mosaics series.

When I first learned to develop in the darkroom, Tri-X was my favorite film, then TMax, and Ilford Multigrade Fiber was my preferred printing paper. I printed my 35mm negatives full frame with the edges visible in the prints.

AI

Our days are numbered. The generative AI imaging tools are in their infancy, but improving very, very quickly. Anyone who's work is desseminated online will be affected, from writers to researchers to analysts to artists and filmmakers. And of course the news media and public. I've been experimenting with generating content around my very tightly cropped compositions. There's a reason I leave out everything you don't see in my frame. But it is shocking how good and how quickly Adobe and Stable Diffusion can generate believable, if apocalyptic, "content." Below are a few of my experiments.

White Brick Silhouette, 2003, 2023 (AI) — White Brick Silhouette, Tokyo, 2003, 2023, AI Generated

YELLOW SERIES

I've been surprised by how many times I've been drawn to yellow accents in my compositions. Like a highlighter on a monochromatic page, an exclamation of caution on a country road. Click a photo to see slideshow.

Prospect Heights, 2020. — Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, 2020.

PCH, 2013. — Pacific Coast Highway, 2013.

BOKEH, FLARE, SENSOR OVERLOAD, FILE DAMAGE

While I'm not a bokeh hound, I do love the cinematic discs of colored lights in backgrounds. Flare is often another intentional "defect" I try to capture when using backlight. And on early sensors like the Nikon D300, there was a strange purple and green bloom that would happen when sunlight hit the sensor through certain lens coatings or the exposure was too little to handle the dynamic range. Finally, in the days of mechanical hard drives, there could be data errors when saving or copying image files, resulting in surprising mechanical colored bands, graphically beautiful, especially when the images weren't for a professional job. Click a photo to see slideshow.

CHINA, GRACELAND, NEW ORLEANS

These 3 sets of black and white images were taken within a year of each other and printed simultaneously, so I've grouped them together. In 1991, near the end of my life in Tokyo, I spent 5 weeks travelling around China, two years after the Tiannemen Square massacre. In February 1992, I drove cross-country, looking for a city to relocate. I passed through Memphis, New Orleans, Santa Fe, before settling--briefl--in San Francisco. Click a photo to see slideshow.

Tits for Beads, 1992 — Mardi Gras, 1992.

EXPLORATIONS

In the late 90s, I was using a hybrid of film and digital, often scanning film, importing into Photoshop and sometimes exporting back to film and printing in the darkroom or inkjet. Here are a few from my Building Mosaic, Building RGB, and Breasts & Bridges series. And some other miscellaneous images, including some from my ongoing typologies obsession. For my Generative AI experiments, see below. Click a photo to see slideshow.

PCH Sunset, 2013 — From the Building Mosaics series, 2004.

NYC

After, Tokyo, my favorite city for street photography is New York, where I've lived for over 25 years. Click a photo to see slideshow.

JAPAN, ETCETERA

Most of my Japan photographs never make it into any particular series. These range from still life to shop window documentation to highlights from my travels. Click a photo to see slideshow.

Naoshima, 2006. (Winogrand meets Sugimoto) — Naoshima, 2006.

TRAVEL

Outside of Japan and Asia, I've travelled extensively in Europe and the U.S. Here are a few images from those trips. Click a photo to see slideshow.

Catacombs, 2008 — Catacombs, Paris, 2008.

NATURE

I dont get to spend enough time in nature, but when I do I like to discover the infinite ways sunlght influences compositions and my occasional encounters with wild life. Click a photo to see slideshow.

Canoe Meadows Wildlife Sanctuary, Pittsfield, MA, 2018. — Pittsfield, MA, 2018.

GENERATIVE AI EXPERIMENTS

TOKYO CROSSING UNCROPPED

I wanted to test what Adobe's new Firefly Generative AI technology could extrapolate from a minimum of feed content at the edges of my precisely cropped images from my Tokyo Crossing series. The resulting square images are if I'd photographed Blade Runner meets Francis Bacon distressed streetscapes with a Hasselblad and a wide angle Distagon lens. The technology does not allow high resolution renderings so the results are quite soft and impressionistic.