Project Basho: "The Innate Joy of Making Things with Your Hands" — An Interview with Tsuyoshi Ito
“No matter how advanced technology becomes, there is always going to be someone who wants to learn how to knit.”
So explains Tsuyoshi Ito, Project Basho’s founder and program director, conveying his conviction about traditional craft and human nature. This belief in “the innate joy of making something with your hands” is what fuels his organization, Project Basho. The photographic resource center in Old Kensington began with Ito’s passion for photography and his desire to share it with other enthusiasts. The first classes were held at Tsuyoshi’s dining room table in his small apartment in Old City and continue today at the renovated building on Germantown Avenue.
Students come from all over Philadelphia and its suburbs, as well as New York and points further. In a world increasingly made up of zeros and ones, Project Basho refuses to let the traditional craft of analog photography—including countless historic and alternative processes—fade away.