PUBLIC MARKS with tags photography & location:japan

The person and the animal who represents the place are pictured in signboard. As for the signboard, the part of those faces is cut out. You can stick your face trough signboard and take photos.

These photos of men and women from different walks of life catered to foreign curiosity about the "exotic" Japanese. Most were taken in Beato's studio in Yokohama. Album courtesy of the Smith College Museum of Art.

A selection from a series of 42 hand coloured albumine prints – a process which used the albumen found in egg whites to bind the photographic chemicals to the paper – taken around 1880. The presence of the pictures in the Dutch National Archieff reflects a long relationship between Japan and the Netherlands, the result of an exclusive commercial relationship that would last for more than two centuries (1641-1855).

Miscellaneous Meiji Era Images Stereoviews / Magic Lantern Glass Slides / Chromolitographs

If you are interested in the field of Japanese photographs as a collector, researcher, dealer, curator or auction house then this book is, quite simply, indispensable. The author has written on and researched the subject for many years and has brought together in one volume the results of exciting new research and also data which has been gathered from long-forgotten and largely inaccessible nineteenth-century sources. Souvenir photographs of Japan, mostly hand-coloured, are extremely collectible today. However, it is usually very difficult to identify the photographer or studio from where they originated. Provided here is a list of more than 4000 such photographs which greatly assists the identification process. Finally, a unique index of over 350 photographers and publishers of Japan-related stereoviews is also included.

his photographic story is the first subject matter that Hajime would challenge himself to portray. The trigger to his passion dates back to a decade ago, when he was just 21 years old. Sitting in the college library he stumbled upon a book that portrayed the life of an ancient Japanese people living in mountainous ranges, only 30 years ago. The tribe was described as being quite apart from the Japanese society as we know it today. The book left a deep impression that marked him for life...

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

Traditionally – and this still holds true in many rural areas of Japan – the whole extended family would all live together under one roof. The same house with paper thin walls hosted husband, wife, her mother and his sister, children and elders, and so on… The only way couples could have sex (with privacy) was to check in to a love hotel.

Tokyo has always been known for its 'love hotels', elaborately designed spaces where denizens of one of the most densely populated cities on earth can steal a few moments intimacy in exotic surroundings. Some of the city's brothels are just as imaginatively kitted out. The imekura or 'image-clubs' are imitations of everyday spaces that offer clients an everyday fantasy complete with a woman who plays the part – a secretary in a boardroom, a schoolgirl in a classroom, a commuter on a subway, and so on. For a customer, imekura girl is merely a character who appears in one's internal pornography landscape. In return for that, he happily pays the price of 20,000 yen per 'play'. With that budget, anyone anywhere in Japan would be able to get an average hard-core prostitution service, but there are some men who rather choose to immerse themselves in a false fantasy world. They make phone calls on weekday mornings, make reservations with their favourite girls, and visit image-clubs. In a transient modern city where anything seems architecturally possible, the ultimate erotic fantasy is shown to be that of everyday life

Tokyo Hotel Story / Felale sexuality and subversion of gender stereotypes

Japan has always had a humpback-whale sized soft spot for kitsch: Hello Kitty meets Star Wars figurines, Godzilla shower toys, and Gundam-themed cafes, for an example. We also know that they have strange sleeping habits: they seem to be able to fall into microsleep in microseconds standing up in sardine-packed trains, and with capsule hotel rooms going for just $30 a night, you can pretend you've been buried alive in a plastic coffin.

Partners Meng Jin and Fang Er’s first collaborative photography project, Love Hotel explores the two artists’ ongoing interest in urban life, architecture, memory and found objects, and the inter-relationship between physical buildings, objects and their social context. The couple worked on-site within the framework of 3-hour ’rest’ periods in various ’short-stay’ hotels creating improvised, spontaneous sculpture works with the existing objects found in the rented love hotel rooms. Slightly amorphous structures, the rearranged inanimate objects hint at entangled anthropomorphic creations in this fantasy space devoid of actual human presence.

After seeing Josh off to the airport, I took the Yamomote line to Shibuya in search of a love hotel for the backdrop of an up coming shoot.  I walked right to the heart of Love Hill, so many hotels, with room after room, so many stories must exist behind all those doors.  As I wondered through the narrow streets, I looked at different lit of panels on the walls, each room, most occupied, but others weren’t, each with a different style, a photographers paradise.

Japan Kyoto Love Hotels by Peter Marlow

Love Hotels

"Contre la nuit ignorante, en suspens, une multitude de fenêtres éclairées, comme autant de promesses". Le projet Lost Highway raconte cette part commune à toutes les grandes cités, là où les frontières n'existent plus. « Il n’y a qu’une nuit, il n’y a qu’une ville, il n’y a qu’une seule route. » dit l’auteur.

Chantal Stoman est une photographe française qui vit et travaille à Paris. Elle a étudié la photographie à l’Hadassa Institute of Photography et est devenue photographe en 1996 avec, comme domaine de prédilection, la mode. Ses images ont été publiées dans la presse française et internationale. En 2002, elle trouve son style dans la « mode-reportage », démarche plus personnelle qui l’amènera à un travail reconnu dans le monde de l’art. Elle effectue son premier séjour au Japon en mars 2005, et est immédiatement fascinée par la relation incroyable qui existe entre les femmes japonaises et le Luxe en matière de mode. Elle décide d’en faire un projet personnel, « A Woman’s Obsession », une exposition et un livre qui parcourent le monde et rencontrent un vif succès. « Lost Highway » est un nouveau projet réalisé au Japon en 2008. Sélectionné pour la Nuit Blanche 2009, il est exposé pour la première fois au cœur de Paris dans la station de métro Chatelet et s’apprête à voyager dans plusieurs capitales européennes. Depuis, Chantal Stoman continue de collaborer avec la presse et travaille actuellement à la réalisation de projets personnels s’inscrivant dans une démarche artistique. Les images de Chantal Stoman sont réalisées en film argentique dans la tradition de la photographie classique fine art.

This project was established by a small group of Japanese curators, gallery owners, and fine art photographers in mid-February of 2012. Samson Yee worked as a photo editor at Japanese publisher Kodansha’s Courrier Japon for three years before moving to London. Our two main advisors are Ito Tstuyoshi from Projectbasho and the Onward summit in Philadelphia, and gallery director Takeki Sugiyama of gallery TANTOTEMPO in Kobe.

“Notes Japan-Photo.info” is a sideblog for short notes mainly on Japanese photography and culture.

I am very fond of this series which was photographed by Asako Narahashi at several places around Japan in 2000-2003. The curator Michiko Kasahara (today working at the MOT) was instrumental in promoting the series when she included the series “half awake and half asleep in the water” in the exhibition Kiss in the Dark: Contemporary Japanese Photography.

Fraction Magazine Japan features the best of contemporary photography, bringing together diverse bodies of work by established and emerging artists from Japan and Asia.