Loving the World Without Improving It
Mari Kojima grew up in Shimane, a prefecture pressed against the Sea of Japan coast—not exactly a fashion capital. After a year in Tasmania and years studying fashion design in Chicago and New York, winning competitions along the way, she went back to Japan. Now she shoots photographs, works in consumer electronics, DJs on the radio. The kind of life that looks scattered from the outside and makes complete sense once you see the work.
Her photos are colorful without being garish—saturated the way a good memory is saturated, not the way an advertisement is. She shoots friends, strangers, bleeding noses, bare asses, the aftermath of nights that clearly went somewhere worthwhile. Nothing looks posed. Nothing is trying to mean anything. It all just looks like life, which is harder to achieve than it sounds.
She documents it on her blog, "We Are The Little Island Management." A photographer who trained in fashion and ended up back in the province she started from, making something quieter and stranger and more personal than anything the industry she trained for could commission. I keep returning to it.