Three articles I’m most proud of
A heady Tokyo homecoming for Caroline Polachek
The Japan Times
Many artists express an affinity for Japanese culture, whether that’s through traditional crafts, anime or aesthetics. For American pop singer Caroline Polachek, her kinship to Japan is more subliminal, because from the age of 1 through 7, Tokyo was her home.
Polachek even spoke Japanese during this time, having attended a local primary school for two years before her family relocated back to the United States. “(Growing up bilingual) really trains your ear for phonetics and sonics at a young age,” Polachek says via video chat from her label’s office in Shibuya, “especially in Japanese, which is such a delicious and beautiful language.”
Hiroshi Sugimoto on time, existence, and building space
British Journal of Photography
It is a humid day in mid-July in Tokyo when I visit Hiroshi Sugimoto’s studio. Gazing up from the hot grey tarmac, the seven-storey building looks distinctly ordinary. A small lift takes me to the fifth floor, and at the end of the corridor is an unassuming white door.
As I go through, I am overwhelmed by a sense of serenity. A cobbled stone path opens up to an elegant tea room with wooden flooring, bare white walls, and a raised tatami platform. Large slabs of stone repurposed from a 15th-century Shinto shrine line the balcony, which stretches across the east side of the apartment. Away from the noise and clamour of one of the most populated cities in the world, it feels like coming up for air.
Protesters, pop stars and pioneers: these shocking, arresting and extraordinary photographs shifted how women are seen in the world.
Select work
Remembering the miners’ strike, 40 years on (The Guardian)
Mariko Mori’s Anime-Inspired Critique of Gender in Japan (Aperture)
Why still life art is more subversive than you think (The Guardian)
Films that give the Japanese perspective of the atomic bomb (The Japan Times)
For the love (and ecstasy) of Great British Festivals (The Face)
Send Nudes: Are naked selfies exploitative or healing? (BJP)
A cultured guide to Tokyo (Another)
The indigenous Mexican town that drove out the cartel (Huck)