All posts filed under: Portrait

Japanese Masters: The Blacksmiths of Sakai

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Although I am primarily a photographer based in Tokyo, you’ll often find me traveling to random cities and towns to find artisans and craftsmen to photograph as part of my ongoing personal project to document as many as possible. Here is one of many that I have met along the way! The Knives of Sakai from Irwin Wong | Photographer on Vimeo. The city of Sakai is a mere thirty minute drive from the neon-soaked streets of central Osaka – so close in fact that it feels like I never left. Still, the streets of Sakai are markedly different from the gaudy and brazen Osaka fare – there are fewer shops and zero tourists. A light rail trundles through the main thoroughfare. I notice other things as I drive towards my destination: a high frequency of workshops that advertise some kind of metal-working trade – polishing, smithing or sharpening. A high percentage of the shops are shuttered, their buildings too aged and run down to be operational. There are a few still open. I pull …

Japanese Masters: The Last Maiko in Gifu

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Although I am primarily a photographer based in Tokyo, you’ll often find me traveling to random cities and towns to find artisans and craftsmen to photograph as part of my ongoing personal project to document as many as possible. Since the beginning of 2017, Zeiss has partnered with me to produce a series of videos, photos and text for their newly updated Lenspire blog. Now with this year coming to a close, I’ve decided to post the start of the series on my blog to show you folks where it all started. Please visit the original piece here where there are many more links to nearly a whole year’s worth of master artisans. Anyway, here’s the article below, enjoy! The Last Maiko in Gifu from Irwin Wong | Photographer on Vimeo. It’s twilight in Gifu, and the lights of the city sparkle prettily on the Nagara River. My assistant Will and I are standing on the bridge closest to where the boats dock, and as we watch, several pleasure boats peel lazily away from the harbor and …

Tokyo Portraits – Yuusaku Maezawa for Wall Street Journal

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Being an English and Japanese speaking photographer based in Tokyo, I’m lucky enough to be able to get editorial jobs that require someone who can operate without a costly translator. However, when I get the opportunity to photograph the same person multiple times in the same year for various outlets, I definitely know I have found my place in the market. The person in question is Zozotown CEO Yuusaku Maezawa, an avid art collector who was definitely the man of the hour having purchased a Basquiat for a record sum at auction last year. I had photographed him earlier in the year for Forbes and now the wonderful people at the Wall Street Journal gave me another opportunity to photograph him, this time at his luxurious apartment in the heart of Tokyo. Mr. Maezawa certainly remembered me from our last encounter and this shoot was much more relaxed and fun than the other one, due to our familiarity. With so much expensive artworks lying around I was a little nervous about bumping into anything, but …

Youtube Superstar: Kurt Hugo Schneider

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A while ago I had the opportunity to photograph Youtube musician and producer Kurt Hugo Schneider when he was visiting Tokyo. For those of you who haven’t heard of him (although you probably have), Kurt is possibly what you would call a new media superstar – he’s the king of Youtube music with an incredible 7 million+ followers on his channel, he’s an amazing musician and producer, been on Ellen, Oprah, worked with Aviicii, been featured in WIRED magazine, and that’s not to mention his raw talent and ability to get things done. Did you I mention he’s also a super nice guy on top of all that? Strangely enough, the first time I came across Hugo’s work was not via his wildly successful Youtube channel – in fact it was on a Starcraft II gaming channel called HuskyStarcraft in which he does a parody of Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’ called ‘Banelings’. In case you don’t know what a Baneling is a Zerg unit in Starcraft that sprays acid everywhere after it runs up to you …

Playstation VR Portraits

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With Tokyo Game Show coming up this weekend I’d like to introduce some portraits I shot for the wonderful folks at Polygon, one of the world’s top websites dedicated to video game journalism. The article that these photos accompanied was about the long road of development of Playstation VR – the virtual reality headset for – you guessed it – the Playstation soon to be released around the world. The article itself is very in-depth and definitely worth a read; you can check it out on the Polygon website here: http://www.polygon.com/2016/3/9/11174194/the-making-of-playstation-vr. For my part – I was glad to meet Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Interactive Entertainment (that’s basically responsible for making the Playstations that I have frittered away so many hours of my life on), and although we were required to shoot all of the photos in the Sony Interactive Entertainment offices, I think I managed to get something interesting out of each portrait I made. Here’s Shuhei Yoshida with the headset. And of course we had to photograph him with it on. For those wondering, …

CEO Portraits: Masaaki Kanai of MUJI

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Quick post today guys; this one is a portrait of MUJI CEO Masaaki Kanai that I photographed back in 2014. Japan is known as an exporter of many things but Nordic-style furniture is not one of them. That’s where furniture and lifestyle juggernaut MUJI come in – their empire of natural fibers and wood grains has expanded across the globe in an explosive fashion over the last few years. I met Mr. Kanai at the MUJI headquarters in Japan for about twenty minutes and was able to make a variety of portraits before my time was up. On a side note this is the photo shoot that made me decide to give Nikon the boot once and for all – I used my Nikon D4 (quite a high end camera I’d say) and the number of back focused and otherwise unusable shots due to under-performing auto focus made me so fed up that I sold the whole system and bought a into the mirrorless system instead. But that’s a story for another day!

Tokyo Bars – Bar Ben Fiddich in Shinjuku

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Tokyo is a great place to be a photographer. In a city this big you’re going to find a lot of world class institutions, and one such institution that Tokyo is not lacking in is cocktail bars. In this post, budget airline carrier Jetstar commissioned me to photograph one certain Bar Ben Fiddich for their in-flight magazine、and let me tell you, photographing bars are some of the shoots that I most look forward to. Mainly because you get to drink the subject matter afterwards! Bar Ben Fiddich is located in Shinjuku, and would have been impossible to find if I hadn’t been told about it. The feel when you walk in is similar to that of an apothecary or the potions room in Harry Potter – the shelves behind the bar are lined with big glass jars filled with all manner of exotic spices and seasonings. The owner Kayama-san is actually a big absinthe fan, and studied in Switzerland in order to learn how to make it himself. I tasted a little of his home-brewed absinthe …

Tokyo Portrait Photographer Irwin Wong (1)

Portraits: Kengo Kuma

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As a portrait photographer in Tokyo I get to meet some cool people, but occasionally I’ll meet a legend. Case in point, ridiculously awesome architect Kengo Kuma. In addition to crafting some of the most recognizable buildings in Tokyo, Kengo Kuma has recently become a household name in Japan as the man who will design Japan’s National Olympic Station for 2020, after the government scrapped Zaha Hadid’s original design for being too expensive. He also beat out fellow Japanese architect Toyo Ito (who I also photographed here) to get the gig. I was fortunate enough to visit him in his moments in his office photographing him for Blueprint Magazine a few years ago. Seeing as I’m working my way through Japan’s top architects little by little, will anyone hire me to photograph Shigeru Ban or Tadao Ando? I’d love to add them to my Pokedex. Anyway, short post today but I’ll definitely be back soon with some ACTUAL GEAR POSTS because I definitely want people to follow me and we all know that camera prOn is the …

Tokyo Photographer Irwin Wong - Nissan Design Center (34)

Car Stuff: Nissan Design Center in Atsugi, Japan

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Back in the day, when I was a young whippersnapper in Australia, my friends and I used to have dreams of owning a sweet import Japanese sports car so we could go drifting in the Dandenongs and pretend we were in some mountain drift racing group. We were fucking stupid, now that I think about it. Years later the impulse towards suicidal driving is gone but the love of Japanese cars still remains. Cars like the Toyota Supra or MR-2, Mazda RX-7, Honda S2000 or NSX, Mitsubishi Evo, Subaru WRX, all such automobiles as to set the pulse racing with thoughts of irresponsible speeding and reckless endangerment of other motorists on the rubber-streaked roads of Melbourne, Victoria. High amongst them all though, were the offerings from Nissan: the turbocharged Silvia and the 180SX, the svelte Fairlady Z or best of all, the mighty Godzilla itself, the venerable GTR Skyline. The mere thought of owning such street machines was enough to bring a hotheaded youth to full tumescence. To us, Nissan was the company that made cool, fun, daring …

Portraits: Nakai Akira – Rauh Welt Begriff (RWB)

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So I meet a lot of people as a portrait photographer – it’s part of the job. Another part of the job is that the people who end up in front of my lens are generally pretty interesting people, which makes a lot of sense, because there are not many magazines out there who will pay me good money to go and photograph a regular someone who no one wants to read about. This fact notwithstanding however, there are a lot of times when I’ve gotten an email or a call about a job to go photograph someone, and I’ve never heard of that person or their company. This is not particularly unusual, because there are a lot of interesting people in the world and they each have their own thing going in their personal circle of influence, which just hasn’t happened to intersect my own yet. Exploring all of these circles that add up together to create the vast and varied weave of humanity is what keeps this job interesting and fun. So when I got a call to …