The first number of our magazine

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2. Editorial Team
Batsceba Hardy - chief editor
Fabio Balestra
Robert Bannister
Davide Dalla Giustina
Michael Kennedy
Contributions
Lukasz Palka
Michael Kennedy
Gerri McLaughlin
Michael Dressel
Cover
Lukasz Palka
Graphic Design
Massimo Giacci
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Enquires or material for publication are welcome.
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- Adult Content -
© 2018

3. Index
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On The Streets of Tokyo
Lukasz Palka
On The Streets of Tokyo
Gerri McLaughlin
Out for Drinks with Michael Dressel
by John Tottenham
On The Streets of Tokyo
Michael Kennedy
(In)World-Stories
With Debby Masamba, John Hughes,
Angel Rodriguez, Andreas Mamoukas
Progressive Gang Stories
4/13 14/23
24/33 34/35
36/45 46/47

5. On the streets of Tokyo
by Lukasz Palka
Neon light bathes the rooftop in a red shimmer,
the dinge of machinery and ductwork set ablaze
against the grey night. The sign glows in the
distance, a circle of crimson surrounding a single
burning character: 源 — ‘gen’… ‘origin.’ I stare at
the glyph, gently flickering against the neo-
gothic façade of its building, casting hues of
pink and vermillion on nearby structures and
think back to my origin. How did I get here, on
top of this rooftop, one like any other, amidst
the concrete forest of Ginza?
A decade ago I stood on the Chuo commuter
line, which snakes its way through the heart of
Tokyo like a cortical artery, pressed against the
door with my duffel bag standing on its end
propped between me and a salaryman. Though
I didn’t know it at the time, we passed through
Kanda and Akihabara, and then Shinjuku, cut-
ting through forests of neon blazing along the
streets. I looked out from the train on the ele-
vated tracks in awe and wonder. The metropolis
seemed to stretch forever as the train passed
through from east to west, carrying a weary
traveler to his lodgings.
Years later and I shy away from the neon,
lurking deeper in the dark alleys and passages
of Kabukicho, searching for fleeting moments
like a cockroach for scraps. I come across the
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kitchen of a Chinese joint overflowing out into
the back alley. Dishes, barrels, bottles, and crates
all cast in fluorescent light, tinged green and vi-
olet. People pass in the distance, a waitress steps
out from the light into my darkness and watches
me for a fleeting moment, standing there
frozen, single cycloptic eye unblinking from the
black plastic corruption of a face— I aim my
camera down the cluttered passage.
My camera… The camera serves more as a
chamber for my thoughts than a tool for gath-
ering light. It is a vessel that allows me to ab-
sorb, distill, transmute, comprehend this
city—Tokyo, the great metropolis, the amalgam
of light, concrete, steel, glass, fiberoptic cable,
copper wire, track, asphalt, tunnels, bridges, pas-
sages, carriages, cars, trains, and people… people
filling every void and moment in the urban ex-
panse. All that, parsed and converted into a
two-dimensional digital image. Then it makes
sense to me. I can compute the data and cate-
gorize it and comprehend it. I need my camera.
I stalk down a smoke-filled alleyway, grey
clouds billowing out of charcoal grills, carrying
laughter and energy from crowded bars— like
narrow tenements crammed one right next to
the other in a neon slum, thin shared walls in-
terlinked like biological cells in some mecha-or-
ganic fungus.
I feel the heat wafting up from the stoked
coals as paper lamps cast their warm light into
my eyes. I move through the crowded alleyway
and peer into the establishments, poking my
third eye through a curtain, snapping photos
like some voyeur, an alien tourist, an observer
from the outside. I steal images, tuck them away
Lukasz Palka

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in my black box for later dissection: people rev-
eling in the 60hz flicker of fluorescent tubes,
minds dimmed by alcohol and elevated by the
buzz of human conversation.
My shutter clicks from the relative darkness
outside the bar— clack, clack, clack— moments
frozen, three dimensions compressed to two,
emotions encoded in pixels.
Mid-afternoon sunlight streaks between
rooftops 10-stories above the street as I crouch
in front of a collage of pipes, conduits, stickers,
graffiti, and shadows plastered on the side of a
building, focus ring gripped firmly between fin-
gers, camera held tight in the other hand, third
eye peering intently at the wall.
I repeat the process with a bicycle, its trian-
gles and circles extending the geometry of the
urban environment, its chrome fixtures blend-
ing with the city like a chameleon. Passersby
glance in the direction of my cyclopean gaze in
bewilderment— what could he be photograph-
ing here? A wall? A bicycle? What mundanity
could be worth photographing? All is mundane
in the metropolis.
I move through a crowd - slowly as though
encumbered by the harsh summer sunlight, the
sidewalk flanked by glass facades reflecting
quicksilver beams, spotlights cast on faces in the
crowd. I capture: a man’s face amidst a field of
black shadows, a woman in high heels and a lace
dress, flares of daylight exposing her silhouette,
a child’s reflection in the crystalline panels of a
clothing store. The summer heat bearing down,
I take refuge in the metro. I lurk against a col-
umn amidst yellow lines and blue panels. A girl
in a yellow sundress steps into frame. I don’t
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hesitate, depress the shutter, consolidate the
moment. The streets pull me along and my third
eye takes point. I follow the light like a dog
sniffing for the scent of meat.
Jazz flows gently from analog speakers fu-
eled by a turntable spinning vinyl. Thelonious
Monk’s piano is our guide as a good friend and
I make our way through cocktails in an under-
ground bar in Ikebukuro. We talk and spin
records on the antique jukebox recently pro-
cured by the bar’s master, Iwata-san.
The night grows long and soon the last
trains will have gone, the city entering its noc-
turnal stasis, not quite sleeping, urban metabo-
lism slowed to a gentle hum of traffic and
human activity. We step out of the bar into the
quiet night and stumble around outskirts of the
red-light district and find our way by chance to
a portal that leads to an elevated plane—a stair-
case to the rooftops.
We climb the 14-flights to the roof, and
amble through the machinery and vents and
wires of the rooftop and clamber up a latter
onto a water tank. From this gritty urban peak,
we look out onto the streets below, glowing,
pulsing brightly with neon light and the distant
screams and shouts of revelers.
It is here that my journey reached a point of
no return. From here on I would be a creature
of the city, a strange beast filling a niche in
which few others find creative sustenance. And
so, I find myself years later, on another rooftop
far across the metropolis, bathed in the red neon
light of ‘gen’ — 源 — ‘origin’. And I think back to
how I got here, and wonder where my third eye
will lead me next.
Lukasz Palka

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For the past decade, I’ve lived in the Orient -
more specifically along both Tokyo Bay and the
Han River that cuts through Seoul.
Nothing about my life has ever conformed
entirely to design. As John Lennon said in Beau-
tiful Boy, “Life is what happens to you while
you’re busy making other plans.”
Regardless of intention or chance, I consider
myself extraordinarily lucky.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve taken
the Limited Express from Yokosuka-chuo
Station-to-Shinjuku Station, considered the
world’s busiest train station, with 3.6 million
passengers a day.
My confused gaijin-look was no act. The sea
of humanity that poured through the Shinjuku
Station frequently overwhelmed me. Yet I was
wonderfully relieved that a Japanese male
would see that I was drowning in bewilderment,
and offer assistance. This doesn’t happen in
many other urban centers in the world.
It is impossible to be drawn to street pho-
tography while in Tokyo without acknowledg-
ing the legendary Daido Moriyama. He is
rightfully considered the Godfather of Street
Photography in Japan.
Yet Daido’s influence is everywhere. About
six months ago, I had just acquired a Ricoh GR
II and I was in Myeongdong, a trendy part of
downtown Seoul that easily lends itself to street
On the streets of Tokyo
by Michael Kennedy

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photography because of all the foreign tourists
that pass through this area.
One could write a book on the complex re-
lationship between the Japanese and the Kore-
ans - which has all the love-hate similarities
that exist between the English and the Irish.
That afternoon in Myeongdong, a younger
Korean street photographer with the same Ricoh
camera spotted me with mine and instantly
came toward me. We both recognized a lan-
guage barrier, since I really don’t speak anything
but English, and he was limited to Korean.
Yet the young man said only one word, and
we knew our connection: “Daido.”
In fact, he said it several times - for every-
one knows that Daido - who, in turn, is very in-
fluenced by the American William Klein (among
others) is the Gold Standard for so many street
photographers in this part of the world - and
well beyond this region. The power of art is that
it can transcend history and politics and remind
us that the cliché of The Family of Man is unde-
niable.
But that’s all the Korean young man said to
me: “Daido,” and then he receded into the
crowd never to be seen again.
The tie-in to Daido and the Ricoh GR II is
that years ago he asked the company to design
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Michael Kennedy

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a small, light camera that allowed for a quick,
near silent operation on the street. There’s noth-
ing intimidating about the no-frills camera, and
this is exactly what Daido requested.
Yet to be in Tokyo and to emerge from the
Shinjuku Station, there’s more than the legend
of Daido on these streets. This is also where his
contemporary, Araki, did some of his more
mainstream photography - if one considers the
sex clubs of Shinjuku’s once notorious Red Light
District a conventional subject. This specific
world vanished in the early 1990s, when Tokyo
cleaned up an image that was a bit too much
for the gaijin tourists.
Nonetheless, both Daido and Araki tore up
the rules of photography in 1968 with Provoke
Magazine, and turned polite Japanese society
on its head.
Today, the influence of Daido - and, perhaps
to a lesser degree, Araki (“A” for audacity), may
be seen in the mainstream work of Tatsuo Suzuki,
considered one of the best modern Tokyo street
photographers. He lives in Shibuya, and street
photography is his life - which is to say, he did
the unthinkable and walked away from a well-
paid career some years ago to be do what we all
want to do: be ourselves, answer to no one - and
somehow be financially independent.
Michael Kennedy

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Michael Kennedy

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Michael Kennedy
For me, Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac are
two American writers who stopped walking the
wheel as pointless wage-slaves, and helped
change society by the courage of their convic-
tions as artists - writers both in their respective
examples.
Suzuki is hardly alone in Tokyo as a first-
class and inspirational street photographer.
There are many more, of course. In many ways,
Suzuki and his street photography colleagues,
have picked up where Daido and Araki left off
with Provoke Magazine and now offer Void
Tokyo, a regular publication in both print and
digital format that showcases some damn fine
examples of life in a city that spills over with
abundant examples of humanity in all its dif-
ferent degrees of expression.
I returned to Tokyo last winter, after an ab-
sence of seven years. The entire time I have lived
in Seoul - another very vibrant city in the Ori-
ent. I’m no authority on anything, but the
Japanese and the Koreans are very much alike -
and yet also quite different.
One example of differences is on the issue
of being photographed in public. All street pho-
tographs know to walk a fine line: Do you ask
for permission - or for forgiveness? Do you dis-
cretely manipulate circumstances so that if you
are in plain view of a subject on the street, you
watch as they walk around you - or do you try
to box the subject into walking straight at you?
Do you delete images when confronted by an
unappreciative subject - or do you tell them in
words or body language: fuck off.
In Korea, there are laws that protect citizens
from unwanted photography in public. Yet I’ve

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Michael Kennedy
never encountered any problems, and I do tune-
up exercises on the subway. So far, so good.
If there are any similar laws in Japan, I’m liv-
ing in state of ignorance is bliss. But based on
my experiences, the Japanese are totally un-
fazed as subjects of street photography - at
least in Tokyo.
Shinjuku is a great place to hit the streets
with a camera - but Harajuku is far superior for
my tastes.
Some cities… some neighborhoods have an
immediate buzz that is an unmistakable source
of energy and inspiration. Harajuku, has it going
on with its colorful street art and fashion scene,
with quirky vintage clothing stores and cosplay
shops along Takeshita Street.
If this is a bit much, there are more tradi-
tional, upmarket boutiques lining leafy Omote-
sando Avenue.
Seoul can’t quite match Tokyo for the selec-
tion of neighborhoods that offer countless re-
wards for street photographers, but
Myeongdong in the downtown area of Seoul
comes in close to Harajuku.
My American friends back in the states
wonder when I will come to my sense and re-
turn to the United States. More importantly, I
wonder when they will come to their senses, and
come to the Orient, where cities like Seoul and
Tokyo are 2.5 hours apart by plane.
Buy the ticket, take the ride.

25. On the streets of Tokyo
by Gerry McLaughlin
25
I decide to stop for a coffee, I choose a large
windowed, sun streamed corner cafe, the light
inside is an exquisite blend of shadows, con-
trasts and highlights, the coffee is not bad too.
I position myself on a sunny window seat to
watch Tokyo stream by.
I hadn’t planned to shot through the win-
dow but you know how it goes, I take a sip of
coffee and put my camera to one side, I take an-
other sip of coffee and start to compose the
scene, I pick up my camera and put the coffee to
one side.
The something relentless about Tokyo that
makes me want to shoot and shoot and shoot. I
want to capture as much as I can every time I’m
here. Perhaps it’s living too long in conservative
central Europe that I feel set free to work and to
really be me here in the Tokyo streets.
There is an order here, an unspoken system
perhaps where in the midst of one of the worlds
most populous cities life ebbs and flows and the
spaces between are where I find my creativity
sparked and moved with possibilities. I take a lot
of pictures and let the themes develop in an in-
tuitive almost unconscious way.
From the vibrant street life of Shibuya and
Shinjuku to the quieter back streets of Taito-ku,
where you can still find Obaasan tending her
plants quietly among the concrete and steel that
arose after the war. Tokyo has that feeling of
ancient and modern meeting all over it. It’s a
city of discovery for a photographer, I never
hurry in Tokyo it’s a place that offers many ways
to shoot what I call The Beautiful Ordinary, the
daily tasks and ways of everyday people going
through their city in their routines and foibles!
Strangely enough I don’t feel like a stranger
in Tokyo, I’m an outsider and freak so I blend in
here! The city streets welcome me open-armed.
I find comfort in its masses and the strangeness
I see, I’m comfortable with the unusual and the
bizarre colliding with the banal and the ancient.
This inspires me and treats that restless lonely
urge inside of me which drives my street pho-
tography.
And if you’re lucky you can still meet a pig
walking in downtown Shitamachi!

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Gerry McLaughlin

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Gerry McLaughlin

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Gerry McLaughlin

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Gerry McLaughlin

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Gerry McLaughlin

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Gerry McLaughlin

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Gerry McLaughlin

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Gerry McLaughlin

34. (In)World -
Debby Masamba
Angel Rodriguez

35. - Stories
John Hughes
Andreas Mamoukas

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37. Out for drinks
with Michael Dressel
by John Tottenham
37
It would be a triumph if one could write an
essay about street photography without resort-
ing to the words ‘dignity’ and ‘compassion,’
which seem to be de rigueur whenever the sub-
ject is addressed. And Michael Dressel is defi-
nitely a street photographer. For years he has
been tirelessly traversing the streets of his
adopted city of Los Angeles — among other
cities — documenting high and low, mostly the
latter.
Passionately cynical and possessed with a
spirited world-weariness, Dressel sits in a bar
that is slowly filling up with the evening crowd.
“I’m not weirdly compassionate or anything,” he
says, speaking perfect English in a German ac-
cent. “It isn’t about compassion. The bottom line
is that we’re all struggling through this some-
how. We’re all staggering through the merciless
coldness of the universe. We have homes, bank
accounts and jobs, but it’s a thin protection.
We’re all going to die.”
Dressel frequently dispenses morbid quips
that evince a healthy awareness of mortality
and acceptance of fate: a sensibility shaped by
his formative years in East Germany - of hitch-
hiking trips undertaken in the bleakest of win-
ters (a far cry from the beat odysseys that
inspired them) and two years spent in an East
German prison for attempting to climb the
Berlin wall. It was following this character-
building stretch of hard time that he moved to
Los Angeles, in the mid-1980s, and found em-
ployment as a sound editor. “When I was in-
volved in Hollywood,” he says, “people always
tried to get me to go to parties attended by big
shots. I’d rather talk to the janitor. Names: I
don’t care about names. These are not interest-
ing people.”
From a large portfolio he pulls out a photo-
graph of a hard-eyed woman in a wheelchair.
Her eyes are hard to look into; they have seen
things you never want to see and ruthlessly re-
turn the viewer’s gaze. The woman seems to be
challenging the photographer, sizing him up,

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questioning his motives, perhaps wondering
what’s in it for her. Engagement with the sub-
ject is visible, and so powerful is her expression
that it took several views before I noticed the
painted image of a benign Dr. Martin Luther
King adorning the store shutters that serve as a
backdrop. Dressel’s work often exhibits a sensi-
tivity to the visual ironies and serendipitous am-
biguities of signage and advertising.
“The greatest mystery of all is reality,” says
Michael, quoting Max Beckmann’s maxim. “Not
everything has been photographed by every-
body yet,” he adds, quoting one of his own.
Cocktails were flowing and young people
were swarming around us until we became a
graying island in a sea of blooming youth.
I continued leafing through the portfolio. A
photograph of a woman with a walking cane,
broken in health and weighed down with care,
warily eyeing an approaching cop, weighed
down with weaponry, starkly attests to power-
lessness in the face of injustice, while a photo-
graph of three sweet and hopeful young
mothers wheeling baby carriages past the en-
trance to a strip joint in the soft and forgiving
evening light distinctive to Los Angeles contains
an irresistible poignancy. It feels like the end
here, both sanctuary and termination: a soft
place of harsh realities where a sun that once
meant something barely brushes against the
world. Dressel zeroes in on the pitiless underside
of this beguiling and illusory softness, captur-
ing lives of quiet desperation and loud compla-
cency from the well-heeled to the down at heel,
the self-obsessed to the dispossessed.
“You’ve got to walk around a lot,” he says.
“The more you walk, the more you see; you wan-
der and wait, sometimes you stop. I like eye con-
tact, a natural situation where it’s acknowledged
that we saw each other, that’s important.”
These moments of connection are strikingly
evident in the gritty musicality of Dressel’s por-
traits of mariachi performers clowning around
and carnival revelers twerking for the camera at
street festivals. Amidst all this movement, some
of Dressel’s most arresting images capture mo-
ments of stillness in the city. Slumped in de-
spondency at a table outside a Berlin bar, a
solitary drinker stares down at the table while
clinging to the cheap consolation of beer and
tobacco. Back in LA, a dog stands guard in the
window of a timeless rooming house, in which
Michael Dressel

39. 39
twisted curtains, an old air conditioner, a bro-
ken wrought iron railing and a ‘For Rent’ sign
are visible.
“There aren’t many places like that left,” I re-
mark.
“Wherever I go I end up photographing sim-
ilar things, a society in dissolution,” says
Michael. “The more I’m around the less I under-
stand. You have to decide if you’re going to use
that as a form of liberation or a reason to de-
spair... all this running-around-all-day stuff is
lame. One has to endure the boredom of exis-
tence in order to figure out what it’s all about.”
Not that almost everything doesn’t have
that effect but listening to Dressel often makes
me feel I haven’t lived fully enough or thought
deeply enough about things; he possesses a re-
freshing and enviable engagement with life and
his conversation is an unpredictable and inspir-
ing ride. At first I keep up, but my flagging en-
ergy and meager fund of discourse is soon
exhausted, and as the evening wears down I fall
into the role of a mumbling, overstimulated lis-
tener and just enjoy the flow of his eloquence.
My ear has been twisted off but it has been a
worthwhile ear-twisting — which can’t be said
about most dithyramblers — and I have been left
with something to think about.
I stared balefully at the insipid beauties and
arrogant young upstarts who were responsible
for the frequent eruptions of squealing, giggling
and yelling on the other side of the room, with
constant brain-curdling ejaculations of “cools,”
“likes”, “awesomes”, and “Oh my Gods.”
“The world is too full,” said Michael. “But
we’re making room soon... It’s coming for us,
we’re in the crosshairs, we’re in direct range.” If
a friend, as I have sometimes thought, is some-
body one can talk about death with, then
Michael is a true friend.
“The problem nowadays is there’s too much
Michael Dressel

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Michael Dressel
of everything. Too much intelligence, too much
beauty, too much art,” he continued. “But as full
as the world is, even if you only do one thing,
that one thing should be really good. To leave a
record of how you saw things, your personal
view. There’s some validity to that: people do see
things differently.”
Over the course of his life, Dressel has seen
things differently, and he has mastered several
mediums. As a younger man, he produced a sub-
stantial body of work as a painter in a style that
embodied a direct line of descent from German
Expressionism and was equal to anything that
was around at the time. But he didn’t put it out
there. His sense of urgency about producing the
work itself has never been matched by a corre-
sponding desire to display the results of his en-
deavors, until now.
“The curtains are coming down anyway pretty
soon,” he says. “I might as well put it out there.”

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Michael Dressel

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Michael Dressel

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Michael Dressel

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Michael Dressel

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Michael Dressel

46. Progressive Gang Stories
www.progressive-street.com

48. in this issue
Michael Kennedy is an American photographer, writer, and
reconteur who lives in Seoul. Although photography has
always been his passport into other worlds, he has also
managed to write hundreds of love letters to several women
with names that begin with “S”.
Gerri McLaughlin is a Scottish born wanderer currently living
near Basel, Switzerland. After leaving the world of professional
kitchens some years back he found himself in a position
to indulge his passion for street photography and is often be
found wandering the streets of major urban centres at all times
of the day and night with a pocketful of change and head
full of jazz…
Contributors in Progressive Gang Stories : Batsceba Hardy, Robert Bannister, Niklas Lindskog, Lukasz Palka, Jinn Jyh Leow, Michael Kennedy,
Fabio Maddogz Balestra, Stefania Lazzari, Orlando Durazzo, Davide Dalla Giustina, Patrick Monnier, Gerri McLaughlin, Alexander Merc, Peppe Di
Donato, Mark Guider, Karlo Flores, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Alphan Yilmazmaden, Marion Junkersdorf, Inés Madrazo Delgado.
Michael Dressel
Hier mehr
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/f-scott-hess/
everyday-empathy-in-the-p_b_8340574.html
Lukasz Palka
Photographer: www.lkazphoto.com
Director (business) at EYExplore Photo Adventures