_valerian

Last night at a bookshop in Matsudo I picked up, flipped through, and promptly went to the register with the latest issue of Phat Photo.
This issue’s theme is “Photographers in their twenties”, and opens with pictures of some brilliant albums Araki made when he was 25 years old. Then, a few pages later (and this is why I slapped down 750 yen at the counter) one is treated to an enviable* and beautiful 8 page spread of the photography of Chicagrapher Brian Ulrich.

I’ve been keeping up with his blog and the whole mid-west photo scene via the internet (and for a little bit while I was in Nebraksa), all the while thinking that this is something that Young Japanese Photographers need to know about. And now they will. The ones who buy the magazine at least. Which is pretty much the same group of folks that “Young Japanese Photographers” as a title encompasses. My Japanese is not near as good as I know it better be by now but overall the article and interview was pretty good. I’d like to say something special about his work, but if you head on over to Brian’s blog you will get a far more comprehensive and articulate overview of his photography and philosophy than I would be able to say here in this entry.

A few pages after Brian’s article are several more pages of other up-and-coming 20-something Japanese photographer’s self portraits which are reinforced with letters to the readers. Letters that are a lot like the self portraits- super slick, laced with Japanese Irony (sitting in the woods with a foam frog hat and a pentax 67) and All The Rage in terms of photo style. Shin Suzuki also got a page in there.

Phat Photo is a tremendously popular photo magazine for younger photographers. If I had to imagine the demographic of it’s audience I’d guess that it serves the young photographer market in the way that nothing in the states comes even close to doing. Look Look is fairly damn close in a few ways, but Phat Photo is really like if the interns at Nylon and Aperture got together, came across a shit-load of money and then made one of the best looking photo magazines out there. It would cover the latest in the contemporary photo world, review cameras and then have a few pages with fashion suggestions as for what to wear from the actual photo shoots all through one’s trendy gallery exhibition reception party. It is not something I go home with regularly, but if you had to get just one make it this issue for Brian’s work.

* I took a load of photos to their office last year in hopes of getting some work published but instead was asked to teach the staff English Conversation ( I said I’d do it for free), and to keep on trying with my pictures. We never did get together for the english learning.