In Arrears

Astute readers realize that the first of the month is usually the day I publish a new, witty, thought-provoking article chock-full of scrumptious photos. At least the semi-astute realize this. The truly astute realize only the timing aspect of that sentence is accurate. The subjective element is definitely a personal delusion, which I’m able to maintain by a failure to revisit any of my old posts after publication — allowing me to keep the whole witty and scrumptious fantasy alive.

This month, however, I have no such narrative to maintain because I simply haven’t the time for droll humour nor succulent photos. I’ve just travelled to Tokyo for my first trip in five years, and finally made good on my 2019 pledge to basically shoot only film on my next visit. Back then, I thought that next visit would occur in 2020 and not 2024, so I’ve made a few changes to my 2019 film pledge. Originally, I’d planned to take an M6-TTL and a TC-1. But here, in the reality of 2024, the M6 turned into an Olympus OM-3Ti and the TC-1 became a Fuji Natura Black 1.9. I was also coerced into taking the Fuji BYU-N 16 golf camera just to screw with my mind.

I’m now back from Japan with half-a-bag full of film to develop, scan and process — a time consuming endeavour, which prevents their inclusion in this article. Fortunately, I did find a sliver of extra space in my bags, and filled it with the little Ricoh GRIII, which I used only twice: once for an hour on the second night, when I mistakenly grabbed it instead of the Natura Black; and once for the final hour before coming home, when all my film cameras were packed. So all of this article’s accompanying photos sprang forth from those two short Ricoh sessions.

Illustrating a post with only digital photos does feels a little ULTRA-2009-ish to me; particularly since I’ve shot 99% of my photos on film these past several years. Also much like a 2009-ish article, they aren’t a very compelling collection of pixels, but they do effectively illustrate the point of this article: which is that it has no point. But at least, by posting something, I continue to honour my pledge (made 16 years ago) to never go a calendar month without penning a new article. Granted, I publicly relieved myself of this requirement nearly 7 years ago, but I still honour it out of… um… actually, I’m not sure why I continue to honour it.

I’ll be developing and scanning Tokyo negatives for the next several weeks. Hopefully, some will be good enough to propagate my “scrumptious photos” delusion, and maybe even trigger a witty and thought-provoking article idea. More likely, I’ll just be making excuses for a failure to live up to this ideal. It is, after all, what I seem to do best.

©2024 grEGORy simpson

ABOUT THE PHOTOS : Home: Dogenzaka, Potato, and Shibuya: East Side were all shot with the Ricoh GR III on the night I accidentally grabbed it off the coffee table, instead of the Fuji Natura Black 1.9. Eatin’ and Steppenwolf were also shot with the Ricoh GR III, but in the afternoon before boarding the train to Narita. Come to think of it, Bar Graph of Developer Processes was also photographed with the Ricoh GR III, but its sole purpose is to document a subset of the backlog of film currently waiting to get dunked in developer and spun on my B’s Processor.

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