A first look at the Yashica EZ F521 from Japan Exposures on Vimeo. It’s small, light, bears a quality name and there is a lot of plastic involved: welcome to the Yashica EZ Digital F521, a camera released in Japan yesterday with a price tag just around US$100 (click here to purchase). Don’t let the big name “fool you” though,... 

I‘m sure some will accuse me of stoking the panic fire of “order now or regret later”, but I’m going to use that gambit here because with all four books I’m introducing in this post, we’re talking of items where the stock is very low and basically, once they’re gone, they are gone. Two of them are over 10 years... 

Aya Takada was born in Kanagawa, Japan in 1973. She studied photography at Tokyo School of Visual Arts and graduated in 1994. In the late 1990s she produced her own large format art photo magazine, named AREA. She was a member of Galeria Q from 1998 to 2005. During that period she exhibited her photos numerous times, and multiple times under the Fragrance... 

Naoki Ishikawa, Sayuri Naito, and Koji Onaka are among the Japanese photographers featured at the “Voyages” exhibition on view now in Paris. (Via) Tweet... 

Ivan Vartanian is an author, editor, and book producer who has been based in Tokyo since 1997. Later this month, two publications will get added to a growing list of books he has been involved with: Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s and Yasuzo Nojima: Modern Photography. Ivan has also written, co-authored, and edited numerous illustrated books... 

Takashi Homma talks about Japanese photobooks from the 60s and 70s (in Japanese only). Tweet... 

2005 interview with Manabu Yamanaka, whose work has just been published in the book Gyahtei. (Via) Tweet... 

The great, criminally under-heralded Michio Yamauchi tweets about going through his contacts on a rainy day, and his plans to publish a photo book next year of work from Taiwan and Tokyo. Tweet... 

We are pleased to announce an addition of a Panasonic Lumix GF-1 version to our popular range of hand-made leather camera cases. The Lumix GF-1 is Panasonic’s answer to the Olympus E-P1. Unlike the Digital Pen this Lumix has a much more utilitarian feel, making it the perfect everyday camera. A quality camera case will make this plain and elegant... 

I had heard earlier this year that Nobuyoshi Araki was not in good health, and the recent lack of Araki news and new photobooks from the man who has been so prolific up to now seemed to bear that out. Now, on the occasion of his new photobook, Tokyo Zenritsusengan, Araki has revealed to the public at large what only his close friends and associates...