About About About About About
Goroです。
I’m Goro。
Actually, that’s the nickname my girlfriend gave me a few years back. One fine day she approached out of the blue and said: “I was putting some thoughts into your name.. I mean your real name.. and it came to me that ‘Goro’ would be a much better match. Like.. it would be much more you!” She looked me in the eye, smiled big, and started nodding.
..so, I’m Goro,
walking the streets of Tokyo shooting people.. with my camera.
SPECIAL THANKS TO
@Boicot
who created this amazing profile picture.
My first camera was a.. uhm.. I’ve to admit, that I have no clue, I don’t even remember the brand. My mother gave it to me when I was about 10. It was a small, old, worn film camera with a dusty viewfinder. The photos I got back from the development shop were kind of square-ish, also here I don’t recall what format that was.
But it was MY camera, I loved it. I shot mostly nature and architecture because I was way too shy to aim at people. I’d give a fortune to get this camera and the photos back, however, I’m afraid they’re gone forever.
Aside from that, I didn’t own a camera for a very long time. Instead, I used the devices of my Mom, the silver-brown Polaroid SX‑70, the Canon Sure Shot EX, or the Canon EOS 100 SLR. I took nature and architecture, but mostly travel photos. We kids in the ’90s didn’t take so many photos, simply in the absence of affordable and practical (as in small) equipment. Nevertheless, I still have a few boxes of photographs from this time. To me, it is inaccessible at the moment since I stored it with some other emotionally valuable goods back in Berlin, where I grew up. As soon as I’ll be visiting this city again, I’ll definitely take the time to dig out this treasure box.
I started shooting people in the streets when smart cell phones did not yet have cameras. In 2007 I bought myself a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T100 (one of these flat pocket-size digital compact cameras), which was way too expensive for the specs it came with.. a shitty resolution, not enough space on any affordable memory card, and the battery was always empty, you surely remember. Unfortunately, all this material is gone as well.. probably lost by “A:\>format c:” which you had to perform at least once a year on these old Windows machines. Also, the captures I took later, during smartphone times but pre-cloud times are gone.. somewhere rotting on a forgotten external hard drive, I guess.
So I decided to start over, just straight from the beginning. With my iPhone 6 Plus. That was in 2016.
one loud image
First I read a 101 on how to slowly grow an organic group of followers on Instagram. Those smart people on the internet said, that you need to find your niche, a recognition factor, a catchy user name, a nice profile picture, and a clean grid/portfolio. However, that’s so much easier said than done. Alone the passe-partout for my photos, I changed 5 times in one year, I still cannot decide if black and white or color, and also my “niche” the street photography, gets blurry here and there.
Then I started to visit as many exhibitions as possible. Admittingly not a hard task since I love to do that anyway. I met some amazing artists and was able to network and socialize myself into the community of street photographers in Tokyo.
Over the next years I “upgraded” my “camera” to an iPhone 10 and iPhone 12 Pro. The quality of those pictures was actually not bad at all, but clearly still not good enough. It’s a pretty plain experience to shoot with an iPhone only.. autofocus, wide-angle, no depth.. yawn.
For my birthday, I bought myself a second-hand SONY α6600 with a 3.5-5.6/18-135mm lens.. a game-changer! As a photographer, I had to start from scratch. That meant I had to do my studies again. I read how-to books, browsed the work of known and unknown photographers, and trial & errored as if there was no tomorrow.
The problem is, now that I tasted blood, I fell deeply in love with that bigger SONY α7 body and I want that 28mm lens, too! 😀 (The beginning of a never-ending story.)
And then I arrived at web3.
Coming from Instagram, Twitter felt like stepping from an Old Men’s Diascope Club into the IKEA kindergarten ball box with way too many kids in it. Suddenly everything switched from slow-motion to fast-fast-forward, from quiet to noisy, from muted colors to shrill. Twitter (CT to be precise) has a lot of “background noise” which irritated me a lot initially. ‘Shill you NFTs!’ all over the place, spaces, and all these replies and tweets and RTs and QTs from people you don’t even follow yourself, but your followings follow.. holy camoly.
It’s not that I never had a Twitter account before. Actually, I use Twitter (sometimes more, sometimes less) since 2008 already. The dynamic and tone in CT however are so much more positive and supportive than it is in the general parts of Twitter. It didn’t take me long to realize what a great community I had landed in. Even if these people are not as “touchable” as the connections through the galleries and exhibitions, I really love the community. Selling has become secondary, much more important is to not miss out on the GMs!
Published Series
ZOOM TOKYO — 2023
AWAODORI — 2023
TOKYO 28 — 2023
TOKYO PINK! — 2023
D2FAULT TOKYO — 2022-2023
SHIBUYA TRICK — 2022
DEEPER OKINAWA — 2022
DEFAULT TOKYO — 2022
TOKYO CHROMATIC — 2021
DEEP OKINAWA — 2021
TOKYO BLUES — 2020-2021
MON AMOUR TOKYO — 2017-2019
Street Photography
Street photography, also sometimes called candid photography, is photography conducted for art or enquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places. Although there is a difference between street and candid photography, it is usually subtle with most street photography being candid in nature and some candid photography being classifiable as street photography. Street photography does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment. Though people usually feature directly, street photography might be absent of people and can be of an object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic.
The street photographer can be seen as an extension of the flâneur, an observer of the streets (who was often a writer or artist).
– Wikipedia