Category Archives: Photography

Virtual Kyoto Gardens

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Kyoto’s own Mercury Software has put their excellent  360° panoramas of Kyoto gardens online, I learned yesterday afternoon from shacho Ian Shortreed, when I bumped into him buying bread. The virtual tours of two dozen or so of Kyoto’s finest temple gardens run in Flash served from Amazon S3 servers. Definitely worth an extended contemplative visit!

A decade ago, I made use of some of Ian’s work in my presentation at the ACM SIGGRAPH 2002 conference in San Antonio, Texas. Related work on a shape-processing based analysis of dry landscape gardens (枯山水) was later published in a short paper in Nature magazine and a more extensive one in the philosophy journal Axiomathes.

Though their main business is in multi-lingual writing tools, Mercury also sells the iTabi, a wabi-sabi iPhone/iPod pouch available in traditional Kyoto textile designs.

Izis is at Isetan

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Israëlis Bidermanas, nickname Izis, was born in Lithuania in 1911, and moved to Paris to study painting and escape anti-semitism. Bidermanas survived a Nazi prison camp and was a member of the French resistance during WWII. After the war he was active as a photojournalist making humanist street photos mainly in Paris and other locations, such as the debris of London in the aftermath of WWII. He seems to have been fascinated by the circus and his portfolio includes many photographs of circus performers and audiences.

The show at Isetan, in the Kyoto station building, ends on February 26th and is well worth seeing.

イジス写真展 －パリに見た夢－ IZIS PARIS DES RÊVES

2月2日(木)～2月26日(日)［会期中無休］
開館時間：午前10時-午後8時(最終日は午後5時閉館)
入館締切：各日閉館30分前<最終日：午後5時閉館>
入館料：一般 800円(600円)/高･大学生 600円(400円)/小･中学生 400円(200円)