Pierfrancesco Celada was in Japan a couple of months ago working on a long-term project about Japanese cities. This video is the result of some time he spent at Magnum’s New York office. It may tend a little towards the “sad Japan” angle, but it’s only showing a small segment of Pierfrancesco’s work. It’s sometimes hard to find sensible work made about Japan by foreign photographers, but Pierfrancesco has a good attitude about Japan, and I’m sure that the final project won’t be full of despair. He’s actually held back some of his best shots from this video.

BONUS PIERFRANCESCO CELADA VIDEO:

Here he is interviewed on the streets of Osaka by a Japanese TV show. (Skip to about 1:00) Pierfrancesco plays a very good straight man to the hosts.

John posted some nice photos of an exhibit called “The Beach,” by Reiichi Murakami. On his recommendation I went and checked it out, and I enjoyed it. I think it might be the pinnacle of Japanese amateur photography: while it goes off in a few different directions, Murakami spent 10 years putting it together, and the overall quality really comes through.

Still, a funny thing happened in the gallery, where Murakami’s show was being displayed next to some (“breathtaking” I assume) photos of nature:

No one else was looking at Murakami’s work, except for one guy…

…using the exhibition space as a place to sit down and flip through a catalog! Oh well.

In his post, John highlighted group photos. I liked Murakami’s solo portraits:

It’s just about three months on from the earthquake and tsunami, which means that the situation in Tohoku is now well outside of the Western news cycle. Things here in Tokyo also appear to be normal, but this is not a city where you can overhear people’s feelings walking down the street. Everyone knows that things won’t be the same again.

There are a couple of new things to report about the ROLLS TOHOKU project, which I still think has provided some of the best images to come out of this disaster. For one thing, there’s an entirely new set of images online, taken about two months after the tsunami hit. The site is also a bit more user-friendly now; images load much faster and you can use the arrow keys to flip through the slideshows.

Finally, there’s some exciting news for people in Europe, which is that the entire ROLLS project will be exhibited this summer at Fotografiska, Stockholm’s photography museum. The dates are July 7 – August 28. The exhibit is coordinated by Marc Feustel, who also wrote an article about ROLLS which you can read in the recent edition of Foam. or on his blog.