What Richardson’s Apprentice Made Instead

Keiichi Nitta spent years working under Terry Richardson—which, if you’ve been paying any attention to how that story eventually played out, is a detail worth noting. Richardson made a career out of treating his camera like a weapon and calling it edginess. What Nitta apparently extracted from that orbit isn’t the predatory posturing but something stranger: a visual recklessness that feels genuinely feverish rather than deliberately transgressive.

His collaboration with Spiral Chord is completely unhinged. Not in the way that gets called "provocative" in press releases, but in the way where you finish watching and can’t quite reconstruct what you just saw. It has a logic, I think—or something that functions like one—but it moves too fast to grab onto. Richardson is a perverted pig, and his legacy is mostly wreckage. But Nitta seems to have come out the other side with something that actually points somewhere interesting.