During your holiday season check out Tetsu's site. It's not the easiest thing to navigate through, especially since it's in Japanese, but there's a myriad of fun in there (though I'd advise you not to look if naked Japanese girls aren't your thing). It's all shot in the photo diary style that is hugely popular here.
I caught up with Tetsu at one of his shows last week, and he told me that most of the girls are his friends, they aren't models, or model wannabes, and he likes to capture the "everyday" much in the tradition of photographers like Araki and Nan Goldin. He says the appeal is to document everyday in a "real" way, making his works accessible and also voyueristic.
He words it quite cutely on his homepage:
"born in oita, i, tetsu tominari, have lived in kagoshima and fukuoka
and currently reside in tokyo.
originally an aspiring musician, i found my true calling as a photographer in 1996.
my work is a study of the everyday movements in the lives of my fellow homo sapiens.
i find my inspiration in the space between the ordinary and extraordinary.
if you have work for me, if you would like to model or if you just want to bother me,
you can email me or find me on the message board.
the message of "photo'n'roll" is "be real" and "keep taking photographs".
Unglamourous but also unpretentious, the point and shoot aesthetic became somewhat of a fashion trend, especially with photographers like Hiromix, starting a girl diary boom. Her first book, taken with a Kodak Instamatic supposedly influenced photographers like Terry Richardson, changed the look of advertising and fashion photography in Japan periodically, pissed off thousands of photographers with Hasselblads and spawned a million craptastic cameras users all over the country.
MAQI
United Kingdom
October 2004
DEC 27, 2006 09:41 AM