When the kitten meows from the camera
At "Yodobashi Camera", right next to Tokyo's Akihabara railway station, you can find just about everything that visitors can imagine in their wildest photographic dreams - from the weird Toy Camera with plastic lens to the latest high-tech bolides from Asian camera manufacturers. Japan's photo scene is younger, more playful and livelier than Europe's photo trade behind the flashing neon signs of the building facades in Tokyo's trendy Shibuya district. Here, 7,000-euro camera babolides sometimes surprise with an optional shutter sound that imitates the meowing of kittens. Concerned that peeping toms might silently take pictures of strangers in public, Japan has stipulated that every camera must always emit audible shutter sounds. If desired, even the sound of a cat.
It is not only at Yodobashi that many a European visitor will sometimes feel like actor Bill Murray in the 2004 cult film "Lost in Translation": much seems surreal, garish and full of colourful contrasts to us in Nippon these days. Japan loves gimmicks and some of them quickly find their way to Europe ¬- such as the preference for the instant picture of the Fujifilm Instax cameras, with which not only Tokyo's teen girls like to take pictures.
Bondage sex and photographer's hotel
Under the conformity pressure of the big city, contemporary Tokyo offers many opportunities for small escapes into alternative counter-worlds. Photographers like Daido Moriyama are revered as cult figures, have been producing illustrated books in series mode for decades and have established themselves in the art world. Moriyama cultivated his cult star myth for many years in the circle of friends in Shibuya's "Lip Bar". In Osaka, the city of his birth, there is now an art hotel furnished exclusively with the pictorial icons of the 83-year-old master of street photography. Somewhat piquant in an image-maker who likes to shoot in Tokyo's seediest entertainment districts and says he loves it "when it stinks of man." Moriyama and his fellow artist Nobuyoshi Araki are probably the best-known photographers in Nippon today. Both provide us with controversial allegories of modern Japan with their photographs; in both, life and photography, the public and the private merge into an inseparable unity. Araki in particular, with his bondage sex images in the tradition of "Kinbaku", openly rebels against the prudishness that still prevails everywhere in the country. Is this why he is so revered by the young generation of artists?
Life in the parallel world
Tokyo virtually celebrates cultural contrasts, escapes from the conventions of everyday life. Where else would a museum of faecal culture be imaginable? Where, if not here, does the desire for cosplay blossom like this? The desire to slip into the role of fictional characters in a parallel comic world with fantasy uniforms of one's own devising is now also attracting hordes of European fans to Japan. Here, the photo scene has long since adapted to the trend with its own cosplay photo studios, photo blogs, anime clubs and books about the "Japanese hobby" and the art of cosplay photography.
Imaging "Made in Japan" or "Made in Germany" is once again the motto at PHOTOPIA Hamburg from October 13 to 16: at the Hamburg exhibition center, newcomers will meet global players and together they will take a look at the future of an industry that inspires millions of users around the world.
photo credit: Pexels
