About Jeff Austin of Tokyo Forgeries

I grew up in Tillsonburg, Ontario — a small town in southern Canada where nothing much happens — which turned out to be a decent place for a kid to learn to pay attention.  I fell in love with photography twice.  First in a high school darkroom, watching images rise out of the developer as if they'd always been there, waiting.  Then again, in film school, sitting in an editing room, splicing 16mm and 35mm strips together and learning that every frame is a decision.  The darkroom and the editing suite taught me almost everything I know about photographs.  They're both places where you slow down, where the work is physical, and where you can't cheat.

I came to Japan in 1999.  A girlfriend brought me; she's now my wife.  I haven't left.  Over the years, I've worked professionally across editorial, commercial, wedding, portrait, and architectural photography — which is another way of saying I've pointed a camera at almost everything a camera can be pointed at.  Somewhere along the way, Tokyo itself became the subject I kept coming back to.

Tokyo Forgeries is what I built around that work.  The name is a reminder I wrote for myself: forge, don't create forgery.  Every street photographer in this city is working in the long shadow of the masters, and it's easy — dangerously easy — to imitate instead of see.  The name keeps me honest.  It asks me to be original, to step outside my comfort zone, to look for something that belongs to me rather than recycling someone else's eye.

The vintage lenses come from the same instinct.  Modern glass is technically superior in almost every way, and I own some of it.  But vintage lenses are storytellers.  They're imperfect, full of character, and they carry a feeling that newer lenses can't reach.  A photograph made through old brass-and-glass isn't a capture — it's a collaboration with the lens and everything it remembers.  The ghost in the glass.

That's what I teach in the masterclass.  Not gear hunts.  Not Instagram tactics.  I teach people to create images rather than take them — to previsualize, to see in the heart or the mind before the shutter clicks, to answer the question what do I actually want this frame to hold? We walk in Tokyo together, and we work slowly.  If you leave with three images that mean something, that's the goal.  Dozens of throwaway frames aren't.

When I'm not shooting or teaching, I'm at home with my three kids, probably baking Canadian butter tarts — a habit I refuse to let Tokyo talk me out of.