Ken Kitano, from Flow and Fusion -- Tokyo Dome Profile by Yu Hidaka for Japan Exposures. Please also see our extended gallery of Kitano’s work. Note: click on images to see large The photographs of Ken Kitano are both extremely concrete and highly philosophical at the same time. Kitano, whom the critic and curator Vince Aletti picked as one of... 

The medium of photography was invented out of our strong desire to create a likeness of our reality — and ourselves in it. We then learned that the camera would see what our eyes never could — time being brought to a standstill. However, in actuality during the early days of the medium the relationship of photography and time was quite the... 

Nipporini is the pseudonym of the well-known commercial photographer Takahiro Wada, and a mash-up of the photographer’s hometown of Nippori in Tokyo, and the famed film director Federico Fellini. Wada’s “Nippori Guidebook” project and “Nipporini” persona as it were are a homage to his hometown, even as it also seems... 

Japan Exposures is pleased to present the work of Shinji Abe, who at 26 is one of the youngest — if not the youngest — photographers we’ve featured. It may come as something of a surprise to readers of this website, but Abe is one of a rather sizable group of young photographers who not only embrace film, the darkroom, and the vagaries... 

Photo-eye recently posted their annual “Best Books” feature, with a whole host of photographers and photo people submitting their top 10 books of 2009. Naturally I was interested to see what Japanese books made the grade, but was rather disappointed that on the whole so few Japanese books were chosen. This is I’m sure due in large... 

Introduced by Silas Dominey for Japan Exposures. I first saw Tomoyuki Sakaguchi’s images of suburban Tokyo when I was in my third year of a photography BA and something of a transparency film snob. Everything had to be film, and the only purpose of digital was quick and dirty snapshots. Sakaguchi’s work was the catalyst that suddenly pointed... 

Text by Silas Dominey for Japan Exposures. Adapted from his dissertation The Japanese City: Representations of Tokyo After the Bubble Burst. Takashi Homma’s extended photographic survey of Tokyo remains, to my mind, the most complete and persuasive body of work completed on the city. (With one caveat, that is: Nobuyoshi Araki’s fictive, sexualised... 

Manabu Yamanaka’s Gyahtei, published earlier this Fall, brings together Yamanaka’s six major series focusing on societal outcasts, including street children, homeless, the physically deformed, and the elderly. Working in a similar vein for over 25 years, each series might take up to four to five years to complete. Yamanaka doesn’t... 

Masashi Asada, from Asadake (2008) Review by Dan Abbe for Japan Exposures. Earlier this year, a friend mentioned to me that he’d recently seen an award-winning show at the Konica Minolta gallery. It had apparently made a real impression on him, so when I next found myself in Shinjuku I decided to stop by. As it turned out, the show was “Asadake”... 

A year has passed again and it is time for me to prepare for the annual JRP chapter exhibition, starting Tuesday next week. Last year I showed four landcape images, taken on 8×10. This time it is all 35mm, eight photographs taken this summer during my summer holiday in Europe. Actually I am rather surprised that after feeling to struggle with...