A home for Moving Sinker—and a few stories along the way

I have launched a dedicated website for Moving Sinker.

Why msinker.com?

The name is simply m, short for “moving”, plus sinker: msinker.com, pronounced “em-sinker dot com”.

I could also have registered movingsinker.com, but it is rather long and harder to read. To my eye, msinker is easier to read and looks more stylish. So msinker.com it was. It has quite a nice ring to it, does it not?

I also own the domain ajing.net. I am still thinking about what to do with that one.

This is a slight digression, but collecting domain names has been a hobby of mine for years. My main target is, of course, .com. If a name is something I really want and the .com is unavailable, I sometimes take the .net. Sometimes I register both. At the time of writing, I have more than 50 domains.

Painting and photography

I am an artist, and the domain bearing my full name is my painting website: setsuomino.com.

I originally worked as a photographer, and there is a website for that work too: ramsses.com. The links at the bottom of that page lead to my current work.

The photographs there are black-and-white portraits, shown as original prints. The people in them were active in the industry at the time. Several of the images near the top show the same person, photographed on commission from FRIDAY, the model agency. They asked me to shoot on several occasions.

Many of my subjects were male models. Two or three caught Toscani’s eye through my photographs and went to Paris to work on Benetton shoots.

One of my assignments from that period appears in a back-issue listing for Esquire: “On The Shore”, with the Japanese subtitle 「渚のプリントシャツ」—printed shirts by the shore. It is in April 1991, Vol. 5, No. 4. The listing is here: Esquire’s April 1991 issue.

To me, it was the leading magazine of its day, both in authority and in the quality of its work. I was invited to a party where Nagaharu Yodogawa gave a talk and Hiroshi Kamayatsu performed.

At one point, the person standing in front of me turned around and gave me a sharp look. It was Dave Spector, the familiar face from television. Hmm… this was quite a gathering.

Some memories of Tokyo

I spent about 40 years in Tokyo and saw all sorts of things. I remember the first Häagen-Dazs shop in Aoyama being next to Baskin-Robbins, known in Japan as “31”. I used to go to both. Shops that appeared along Omotesando and in Aoyama often went on to expand nationwide.

In my recollection, Uniqlo’s first shop was beside the railway between Harajuku and Shibuya. A friend who worked in hair and makeup said, “Someone I know has opened a shop. Apparently it is popular and getting attention. Let us go and have a look.”

So we went. “Fleece, hmm…” I was not particularly interested at the time. Who would have imagined it becoming such a huge company?

A job I turned down

Most of my work was fashion photography, though I sometimes did advertising too. Once, I turned down a job I did not like the sound of. This is an interesting one.

An advertising agency called, saying that a well-known photographer had recommended me. “The shoot will be on location in Paris…” And here came the interesting part: “The sponsor is extremely overbearing, and doing absolutely everything their way is a condition of the job. But the fee is at the very top end. Also, a dark-blue filter must stay in front of the lens under all circumstances.”

In other words, the advertiser was ******* 7 star… you can work it out. Ha!

That is one of the curious sides of the world. Really, you encounter all sorts of things.

Some days you catch fish, and some days you do not.

Hmm… no, that is not quite the same thing.