In the end it’s all about the full term obsession. It’s something I’ve seen in Japanese photography quite a lot. A photographer is so obsessed with a topic or series, that it just comes through the pages. You might not like the photographs at all, but there is this eerie amount of time that somebody has spent into putting the big picture together and fill it with cryptic statements here and there. It’s like a short term project is something good to look at, while a long term one is something good to think about. It’s permeated with intention and choices. You just know that a photograph is not there because there wasn’t a better one; it’s there because it is the photograph that the author wanted to be there.

From a conversation with Joni Karanka on LPV.

This seems fairly accurate to me. I wonder what other impressions of Japanese photography are out there among people outside of Japan. I don’t even know which Japanese photographers are widely known besides Moriyama, Araki and maybe Hosoe Eikoh. Does Rinko Kawauchi ring any bells? She has a show up in New York right now.