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Young Women Behind the Camera Craze in Tokyo

By Kaori Shoji, International Herald Tribune

Jan. 16, 1999

Walk down any main strip in Tokyo and you'll see them: fashionable young women with cameras hanging from their necks, scrutinizing photo ops with a professional eye. These girls are part of the "Hiromix Syndrome" — the sudden increase of wannabe photographers inspired by the 20-year-old camera gal Hiromix.

Hiromix is the closest approximation to a rock star with camera. Three years ago she was a high school senior, taking snapshots of her friends in Tokyo nightclubs. One fine day she sent the prints to a photo contest sponsored by Canon. This won her the Araki Award (one of the most coveted in Japan) and her first professional job.

Seemingly overnight, Hiromix had become the nation's youngest and hottest commercial photographer.

The Japanese have always had a thing with cameras but not until the emergence of Hiromix and a new generation of camerawomen did the relationship turn cozy. Photography had been male territory, staked out by super-serious artists like fashion photographer Kazumi Kurigami or the undisputed master Ken Domon, who spent most of his career shooting Buddha statues.

Women were expected to be on the other side of the lens, to pose and generate sufficient artistic aura. What female photographers there were followed the rules, based on a strict master-apprentice system. Fledglings fetched, carried and swept, besides mastering the technical jargon and lighting — all for at least three years before getting permission to look through the sacred lens.

Hiromix sidestepped all that, most likely in her red spike heels. She had never taken a course, never studied with anyone and wouldn't know a print dryer if she fell over it. She admitted freely that she didn't know what a strobe looked like but "it doesn't matter because my camera flashes automatically!"

To her the most important thing about a photo was the personality of the person who took it. Suitably, Hiromix's pictures are as casual and enigmatic as she is. She has been known to show up for work better dressed than the models in Spandex minis with nothing but a little furry bag for her instant camera. Her acclaimed self-portrait shows her in a bathroom, facing the mirror in black bra and tights.

Hiromix's latest achievement is "Japanese Beauty," a collection of young models she saw as having much potential but sadly underutilized by the Japanese fashion world.

"They all had stories to tell, their bodies and faces all eager for self-expression. And no one wanted to listen. Fashion photography in this country is standing still, while the clothes and the models clamor to march on."

Accordingly her shots highlight the models' faces, relaxed and liberated from the demands of modishness. Now other photographers are imitating her style — requesting no makeup, deploying artful blurs — to get that jagged, amateurish quality that critics are calling a major breakthrough in fashion photos.

If Hiromix is the grunge baby of the camera world, then Yuriko Takagi is its high priestess.

Currently 47, Takagi studied graphics and fashion design, then worked widely in Europe before switching to photography 10 years ago. Like Hiromix, Takagi never bothered with the proper channels but put together a photo collection and sprang it on the Japanese public.

From the start, her outlook and technique unnerved Japanese fashion photography. Her extensive knowledge of design and textiles gave her an edge over the clothes, while her unrelenting eye for human physique terrorized the models. Takagi felt that Japanese fashion was rigged, in a way "that separated clothes from people."

"They were saying that only supermodels had the right to wear beautiful clothes. I was in total disagreement," Takagi said.

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THUS she embarked on what would be her life project, to get the clothes to the people who really deserve to wear them, and shoot that. Collaborating with Issey Miyake, Takagi took several trunkloads of his pleated wardrobe series, and traveled to India.

There in remote villages and on country roads she approached the locals and asked them to wear these clothes, so she could take their pictures. To her surprise, most of them said yes.

The result: Issey Miyake outfits on old men rowing a boat, on children with grimy faces, on a woman suckling a baby, on youths working the fields and sweating from every pore.

The effect was stunning. The artifices of studio and runway were obliterated, and in their place just two basic things remained: bodies toughened by manual labor, adorned by beautiful materials.

Takagi's latest is a collection called "Skin," for which she took the project to Kenya, India, Thailand and Turkey. The wardrobe was supplied by Kozue Hibino, a costume designer specializing in commercials and theater. Hibino's works are inspired by the fantastical and surreal — they could dress a scene from a Brothers Grimm story one minute and a gala science-fiction production the next. Hats are her specialty and if she had lived in 17th-century France, no doubt the Bourbons would have made her the royal milliner.

Enthralled by the costumes and convinced that elsewhere on the globe lived the right people to wear them, Takagi loaded trunk after trunk and set out on her journey.

With women like Takagi and Hiromix to lead the way, manufacturers are releasing a new series of "girlie cameras" — compact and stylish models that double as accessories, to cater to an entirely new photographer market.

For the moment, it seems that cameras are the Tokyo girl's very best friend.

Kaori Shoji is a writer based in Tokyo.

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The elderly passenger sitting on the north-window side of that inexorably moving

railway coach, next to an empty seat and facing two empty ones, was none other than Professor

Timofey Pnin. Ideally bald, sun-tanned, and clean-shaven, he began rather impressively with

that great brown dome of his, tortoise-shell glasses (masking an infantile absence of

eyebrows), apish upper lip, thick neck, and strong-man torso in a tightish tweed coat, but

ended, somewhat disappointingly, in a pair of spindly legs (now flannelled and crossed) and

frail-looking, almost feminine feet.

His sloppy socks were of scarlet wool with lilac lozenges; his conservative black

Oxfords had cost him about as much as all the rest of his clothing (flamboyant goon tie

included). Prior to the 1940s, during the staid European era of his life, he had always worn

long underwear, its terminals tucked into the tops of neat silk socks, which were clocked,

soberly coloured, and held up on his cotton-clad calves by garters. In those days, to reveal a

glimpse of that white underwear by pulling up a trouser leg too high would have seemed to

Pnin as indecent as showing himself to ladies minus collar and tie; for even when decayed

Mme Roux, the concierge of the squalid apartment house in the Sixteenth Arrondissement of

Paris where Pnin, after escaping from Leninized Russia and completing his college education in

Prague, had spent fifteen years–happened to come up for the rent while he was without his

faux col, prim Pain would cover his front stud with a chaste hand. All this underwent a change

in the heady atmosphere of the New World. Nowadays, at fifty-two, he was crazy about

sunbathing, wore sport shirts and slacks, and when crossing his legs would carefully,

deliberately, brazenly display a tremendous stretch of bare shin. Thus he might have appeared

to a fellow passenger; but except for a soldier asleep at one end and two women absorbed in a

baby at the other, Pnin had the coach to himself.

Now a secret must be imparted. Professor Pnin was on the wrong train. He was

unaware of it, and so was the conductor, already threading his way through the train to Pnin’s

coach. As a matter of fact, Pnin at the moment felt very well satisfied with himself. When

inviting him to deliver a Friday-evening lecture at Cremona–some two hundred versts west of

Waindell, Pnin’s academic perch since 1945–the vice-president of the Cremona Women’s Club,

a Miss Judith Clyde, had advised our friend that the most convenient train left Waindell at 1.52

p.m., reaching Cremona at 4.17; but Pnin–who, like so many Russians, was inordinately fond

of everything in the line of timetables, maps, catalogues, collected them, helped himself freely

to them with the bracing pleasure of getting something for nothing, and took especial pride in

puzzling out schedules for himself–had discovered, after some study, an inconspicuous

reference mark against a still more convenient train (Lv. Waindell 2.19 p.m., Ar. Cremona 4.32

p. m.); the mark indicated that Fridays, and Fridays only, the two-nineteen stopped at Cremona

on its way to a distant and much larger city, graced likewise with a mellow Italian name.

Unfortunately for Pnin, his timetable was five years old and in part obsolete.

He taught Russian at Waindell College, a somewhat provincial institution characterized

by an artificial lake in the middle of a landscaped campus, by ivied galleries connecting the

various halls, by murals displaying recognizable members of the faculty in the act of passing on

the torch of knowledge from Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Pasteur to a lot of monstrously built

farm boys and farm girls, and by a huge, active, buoyantly thriving German Department which

its Head, Dr Hagen, smugly called (pronouncing every syllable very distinctly) ‘a university

within a university’.

In the Fall Semester of that particular year (1950), the enrolment in the Russian

Language courses consisted of one student, plump and earnest Betty Bliss, in the Transitional

Group, one, a mere name (Ivan Dub, who never materialized) in the Advanced, and three in the

flourishing Elementary: Josephine Malkin, whose grandparents had been born in Minsk;

Charles McBeth, whose prodigious memory had already disposed of ten languages and was

prepared to entomb ten more; and languid Eileen Lane, whom somebody had told that by the

time one had mastered the Russian alphabet one could practically read 'Anna Karamazov’ in the

original. As a teacher, Pnin was far from being able to compete with those stupendous Russian

ladies, scattered all over academic America, who, without having had any formal training at all,

manage somehow, by dint of intuition, loquacity, and a kind of maternal bounce, to infuse a

magic knowledge of their difficult and beautiful tongue into a group of innocent-eyed students

in an atmosphere of Mother Volga songs, red caviare, and tea; nor did Pnin, as a teacher, ever

presume to approach the lofty halls of modern scientific linguistics, that ascetic fraternity of

phonemes, that temple wherein earnest young people are taught not the language itself, but the

method of teaching others to teach that method; which method, like a waterfall splashing from

rock to rock, ceases to be a medium of rational navigation but perhaps in some fabulous future

may become instrumental in evolving esoteric dialects–Basic Basque and so forth–spoken

only by certain elaborate machines. No doubt Pnin’s approach to his work was amateurish and

light-hearted, depending as it did on exercises in a grammar brought out by the Head of a

Slavic Department in a far greater college than Waindell–a venerable fraud whose Russian was

a joke but who would generously lend his dignified name to the products of anonymous

drudgery. Pnin, despite his many shortcomings, had about him a disarming, old-fashioned

charm which Dr Hagen, his staunch protector, insisted before morose trustees was a delicate

imported article worth paying for in domestic cash. Whereas the degree in sociology and

political economy that Pnin had obtained with some pomp at the University of Prague around

1925 had become by mid century a doctorate in desuetude, he was not altogether miscast as a

teacher of Russian. He was beloved not for any essential ability but for those unforgettable

digressions of his, when he would remove his glasses to beam at the past while massaging the

lenses of the present. Nostalgic excursions in broken English. Autobiographical titbits. How

Pnin came to the Soedinyon nïe Shtatï (the United States). 'Examination on ship before landing.

Very well! “Nothing to declare?”

“Nothing.” Very well! Then political questions. He asks: “Are you anarchist?” I

answer’–time out on the part of the narrator for a spell of cosy mute mirth–’“First what do we

understand under 'Anarchism’? Anarchism practical, metaphysical, theoretical, mystical,

a

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10 Things to Give Up

onlinecounsellingcollege:

1. Trying to please, and be acceptable, to others

2. The fear of making a mistake

3. The fear of change

4. The fear of the future

5. Guilt or shame that’s tied to your past

6. Beating yourself up or putting yourself down

7. Over-thinking

8. Living by your feelings

9. The desire to get even with others

10. The tendency to procrastinate.

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