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Steve McCurry, “Geisha in subway” (2007), Kyoto, Japan
This picture reflects the juxtaposition of an ancient tradition in the modern world. The woman is the epitome of elegance in a utilitarian, stark, unromantic setting. It captures the paradox of the classic in a hurried world.Earlier this month, Photo Booth looked at the New York City subway over time. This week, they’ve curated a selection of contemporary images from subways around the world. Click-through for a slideshow: http://nyr.kr/10JfLhy
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A festival in Syowa Village, where, as a result of depopulation, a majority of residents are elderly.
Two years ago today, Japan was devastated by an earthquake and tsunami that killed over fifteen thousand people and affected hundreds of thousands more. With a magnitude of 9.03, it is believed to be one of the most powerful earthquakes to hit Japan. The disaster also set off one of worst nuclear crises in history: after the earthquake and tsunami, large amounts of radioactive materials were released from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, contaminating the city for years to come.
Q. Sakamaki, a Japanese photographer, has been photographing the effects of the earthquake and tsunami since 2011. “The radiation is still leaking. The evacuated worry about their future—many might lose the chance to ever return. As a result, more than sixty per cent of the evacuated develop P.T.S.D., often leading them to commit suicide,” he says.
- Richa Sinha. Click-through for a gallery of photographs from the one-year anniversary: http://nyr.kr/Y508Oe
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“His best works are able to catch the viewer immediately but, at the same time, provoke the viewer to search for more information below the surface,” Ferdinand Brueggemann of Galerie Priska Pasquer, in Cologne, tells Jessie Wender of photographer Shomei Tomatsu, who died at age 82 in Okinawa this past December.
Continue reading about the artist: http://nyr.kr/11xQuGD
(Source: newyorker.com)
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The Harukists, Disappointed
Roland Kelts on Japan’s reaction to Haruki Murakami not winning this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature: http://nyr.kr/WiEsyk
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"For much of the last decade, as Sheldon Adelson and other American casino investors plunged deeper into business in Macau, analysts liked to predict that the Americans would clean up the town. Perhaps, but one doesn’t hear that as often these days, at a moment when some of Macau’s old habits have reasserted themselves. That’s the thing about the Golden Bamboozle: it pulls you in."
— Evan Osnos on Sheldon Adelson’s campaign donations and Macau casino money: http://nyr.kr/NgLeio -
Following last week’s post on global street-style bloggers, I wanted to check in with Shoichi Aoki, who began photographing street styles in the nineteen-eighties. The Japanese photographer has created three magazines on the subject: Street features London street style and street snaps at Paris and New York Fashion Week; Fruits focusses on street snaps of girls from Harajuku, Tokyo; and Tune collects snaps of Harajuku’s boys. He’s also published two books.
- On our Photo Booth blog, a slide show of more of Aoki’s work and a brief Q. & A.: http://nyr.kr/HbhugY -
Lost & Found: Salvaging Snapshots in Japan
Sunday marked the one-year anniversary of last year’s disasters in Japan, and last week on Photo Booth we posted a slide show of images of the aftermath. One of the most powerful visual representations of this recovery, though, came not from professional photographers but from ordinary citizens. The Lost & Found Project is an exhibition that grew out of the Salvage Memory Project, a volunteer effort from across the country which has recovered some three quarters of a million photographs that had been lost in the town of Yamamoto during the earthquake and tsunami. According to the artist Munemasa Takahashi, who leads the project, they’re “mostly snapshots of special family occasions and holidays that anyone would take.” Each photograph was washed, digitized, and numbered according to where it was found, and twenty thousand have been returned to their original owners.
- For more selection of photographs from the project: http://nyr.kr/GDwYyf -
Among the Yakuza: Haruto Hoshi Photographs Jake Adelstein
For Peter Hessler’s profile of the American crime reporter Jake Adelstein in the January 9th issue of the magazine, the photographer Haruto Hoshi shadowed Adelstein through the Tokyo underworld about which he writes. Hoshi was an obvious choice to photograph Adelstein. While in his late twenties, Hoshi sold drugs for his best friend, who had recently joined the yakuza. Unhappy with the direction his life had taken, Hoshi was unsure how to right his path without abandoning his friend. Fate and the police intervened, and Hoshi was arrested and served time in prison. It was during his incarceration that he first considered becoming a photographer, and upon his release he enrolled in night school. The rest, as they say, is hisutori.We asked Adelstein to caption Hoshi’s photos from their time together, and he kindly obliged. For more photographs, with Adelstein’s captions:
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Daido Moriyama: Photo Books While You Wait
Above, a selection from Daido Moriyama’s “Printing Show” images. For more of Moriyama’s work, and how these “Printing Show” images came to be: http://nyr.kr/t2KBY6
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In August, we commissioned the photographer Kyoko Hamada to photograph in the disaster area of Fukushima for Evan Osnos’ piece on Japan in this week’s issue. Hamada was a natural choice: her photographs are quiet and refined; her composition deliberate and clean. She captured the eerie feeling that permeated the towns she visited in Fukushima, and was able to accomplish the most difficult task of photographing what wasn’t there, or wasn’t necessarily visual: the immeasurable loss of life and livelihoods, and the looming threat of the nuclear fallout whose effects are still unknown.
