I’ve made a couple of posts about Emi Fukuyama before – I think she’s worth paying attention to. The photo above was part of Totem Pole Photo Gallery’s “Shinjuku X TPPG” exhibit, which featured work about Shinjuku from Totem Pole’s five members. It was very well done, including a free black-and-white magazine for the first 250 people to visit. From the link above you can see a few more images from the show.

Anyway, I was really impressed with this photo. It has all of Emi’s hallmarks – something in the foreground obscuring your view, a really muted range of tones – but this time I get an almost sinister feel from her work. It’s like looking at Tokyo in a fun-house mirror; I’ve seen a million photos of this building, and seen it in person plenty of times, but I’ve never seen it look like this before.

I received an email message a few days ago from a reader who said he had been really moved by Emi’s work. I may have said it before, but I am looking forward to bigger things in the future from Emi.

So with a couple of friends, I’m bringing the traveling photography exhibit “Dr. Karanka’s Print Stravaganza“ to Tokyo. It was started by Joni Karanka, a photographer living in Wales who found himself frustrated that “the access to photography has become universal, but its display has become very hard.”

The idea of the Stravaganza is that anyone in the world can send in their prints, which are tacked up on a wall somewhere before being packed off to the next destination. This means that if you hurry, you can send in a print or two and have them added to the group. So far this exhibit has gone up in America, Europe and Asia (7 places so far), and after Tokyo we’re hoping to bring it to the 2010 Higashikawa Photo Festival.

If you’re in Tokyo, the exhibit is up from July 3 to 16, and there will be a number of parties at the gallery. As you might imagine, the stresses of writing an internationally recognized blog about photography are many, and to unwind I sometimes play records as “DJ I Am Baseball”—I want to register http://www.iamdjiambaseball.dj but it looks like domains in Djibouti run on the expensive side. Anyway I will be playing our opening party on July 3, from 7:00pm. I guarantee a good time, plus mention Street Level Japan for my infinite good will in honoring your song request! It’s a 500 yen to get in, which gets you either a beer or a zine we’re making.

There’s also a BBQ on July 11, check our blog (in Japanese) or just email me for more information. I’ll be hanging out on basically all weekend days it’s up.

The space, Gallery Septima, is located near Tachikawa, but it only takes about 40 minutes to reach from Shinjuku. If you want to send prints, you can find the gallery’s address right on their site.

Hello to people coming from La Pura Vida, where I wrote a little bit about Aya Fujioka, and she provided over 20 photos from “I Don’t Sleep.”

I’m hearing that this site is still setting off some antivirus software. If you were brave enough to make it this far, rest assured – I know what happened, it happened a few weeks ago, I fixed it 100%, and I’m not sure what’s required to tell the software that it’s fine. (Time, I assume)

Since we’re here, Mark King’s last photo post was sickeningly good.