An Endless Attraction by John Sypal

Issue 32

The selection here is a group of photographs I've compiled from the past several years.

There are definite themes that appear in my work which in turn inform pictures which are made later. Sometimes this happens while looking through the viewfinder of the camera and other times when looking through a loupe while hovered over a stack of contact sheets. These glimpses of the world are not images on which to substantiate a declaration of an entire country or its people. It's more of a personal matter.

It's about photographing and living through photographing without thinking about either as separate issues too much. In his sublime and sweetly concise book "A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics", Donald Richie attempts to explain a term dealing with the writing of essays called Zuihitsu, a concept where writing is not "the assumptions of the writer's controlling mind that are followed but, as the Japanese phrase it, the brush itself".

I think the camera makes a pretty good brush.

John Sypal is a Tokyo based artist.
To view more of John's work, please visit his website