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I wrote this as a post to the Japan Photo Yahoo group but what the heck I will put it here too.

Howdy-

There is an interesting show in the RECRUIT building in Ginza–
A young urban attractive 20 something female photographer (who was there but not really in a mood to talk) took a lot of photographs of other 20 something young urban attractive people in Tokyo, doing all sorts of things that involve life and sometimes death. The Life aspect is covered from conception (In bathtubs and other places) to birth, to breast-feeding babies, etc. And the next photograph might be of a dead mouse on the sidewalk.

A site with more information could be this

Some sample photos are in the right side colum.

The Leica Gallery is showing the work of the winner of this year’s Oskar Barnak award, a collection of nice, safe, beautiful modernist pitcures taken at Coney Island. The runners up also took nice, safe, beautiful pictures of other places as well. The work ran from ok to fairly (and safely) amazing. Everything would look right at home in next year’s Leica catalogs. As a disclaimer I must say that I take nice, clumsy, and often, ugly pictures. But I like them anyway.

Below the Leica gallery is another photo space, with an exhibition of photographs taken by members of the Japan Classic Camera Association (something like that) and below each photograph of close up flowers and shadows in and around staircases, is another photograph of the classic camera that they used when taking the top photo.

There was another art gallery in Ginza that I stopped by which had an impressively large line drawing of a nude woman on the wall, done with black duct tape (Insert Red Green joke here).

I would just like to add how great it is to live in Tokyo and to be able to see so many photographic exhibitions all the time. This sure beats getting in a car and driving for 4 hours to Kansas City to see art.