Saturday, November 5, 2011

Group 3, Mono, visits 'Parallelismo' at the Ricoh Ring Cube Gallery

Our group went to Ricoh Photo Gallery Ring Cube.  The gallery is located in Ginza.  It is managed by Ricoh, a maker of office automation equipment and cameras.  The gallery consists of two floors.  As the name Ring Cube shows, the shape of the floors is circle.  On one floor,  are many kinds of cameras made by Ricoh are displayed.  We can know the history of their products through the showing...

We saw the show which was called “Parallelismo”. The photographer of this show was Tomoyuki Suzuki. Mr. Suzuki was born in Tokyo in 1963. He studied architecture in university and worked as architect before he became photographer. When he worked as architect, he found the way of “Parallelismo”, as the best way to represent scenes, especially a row of houses and streets accurately on paper. I had never seen such unique pictures before. All photographs in “Parallelismo” had a narrow and long shape. They look like as if they are each one picture, but actually, each of them is made from many pictures.

Usually, we think picture is an image which was cut out a part of scene from whole seen. But in “Parallelismo”, Mr. Suzuki tried to take whole scene into one picture. Then, he tried to take pictures while he was moving little by little and united those pictures to make one. Although it is difficult to unite and arrange many pictures to resemble in one picture, he can do it. Because he studied architecture, he knows about structure of buildings and knows how to put things together. So he can make one whole scene from many pieces of scene. In one picture, Mr. Suzuki started taking the street from the left side in the daytime because on the left side, the sky is lighter than right side. And two street lamps in left side are not lighted. The right side of this picture was taken in the evening because the sky is darker than left side and street lamps in right side are lighted. It is so beautiful that the sky gets dark and street lamps are lighted gradually. If this is not “Parallelismo” picture, it is impossible to take those transitions in one picture. “Parallelismo” enables not only to make one whole scene from many pieces of scene, but also enable to describe time flow in one picture. I think this is the most appeal of the way of “Parallelismo”...

Before Parallelismo was invented, it was impossible to take a wide picture like the ones on display.  Even if you move your camera, you cannot take a picture well.  The three-dimensional world is dominated by perspective.  As Leonard da Vinci showed in The Last Supper, a vanish point is only one in each picture.  That is the problem.  If you move your camera, the pictures will be different images that have different perspective, and the relations of each other's perspective will fall into disorder.  You also cannot make a complete picture even if you only line the pictures up in a row. Parallelismo solves this problem.  This technique needs software named Photoshop.  First, you take pictures that become one of the sections of a panoramic photograph.  Second, you correct the distortions of the pictures and join them with Photoshop.  In this way, such a natural panoramic photograph is produced.
 As always, we welcome comments and feedback






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