©Manabu Yamanaka

Last night my friend Martine was over, doing some scanning of her images for her forthcoming exhibition in Kichijoji, Tokyo, Feb 10-28th (show info is on her blog). Whilst here we swopped the usual “have you seen this work?”, “do you know this photographer?” type conversations….and Martine showed me this work, by Manabu Yamanaka with which I wasn’t familiar…..

Yamanaka-san seems to find beauty in humans who he thinks are elevated above “normal
human being to a level whose some of the greatness of Buddha is manifested”. It’s quite interesting work, and I found the texts that he wrote for each project interesting to read, but be warned to view one or two of the sets of images you may need to have a strong stomach. Some of the image quality doesn’t seem so great, not sure if that is what he intended, as a style, or if it could just have been done better perhaps.