Japan Photographer | Blog | Jérémie Souteyrat

Publication :: Le Monde (Fr)

Jérémie S — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:21:04 +0000

My portrait of Hisayuki Suekawa, Shiseido ‘s CEO, was published in Le Monde newspaper on November 30. It was shot at the top of the Shiodome tower in the Shinbashi area. Suekawa-san was not really confident when I asked him twice to step back closer to the window…

More pictures of Hisayuki Suekawa.

Publication :: Fukushima, 6 months on

Jérémie S — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:01:19 +0000

(A late notice for those who are not following me on Facebook or Twitter.)

The Fukushima crisis has not ended yet. Everyday, there are updates about the nuclear accident in the news. The news are less worrying than before but more detailed information are progressively coming up: tainted beef meat, hot spots in the Kanto area (200km from Fukushima nuclear power plant), children with high internal radiation exposure, etc…

For an assignment from The Guardian weekend magazine, I went to Fukushima area again in August, with Jonathan Watts, a Beijing-based British journalist. The Guardian planned to run a story about the life of Fukushima residents six months after the tsunami. Our story was the headline of the magazine.

In July, I had also proposed to French magazines I am in contact with, to work on a similar story . But since the 6-month tsunami anniversary in Japan coincided with the 10-year anniversary of the WTC terrorist attacks in New York, French magazines were not interested in stories about Japan. Eventually The Guardian picture editor contacted me late July for this job.

During my visit to “Citizen’s Radioactivity Measuring Station” NGO in Fukushima City, I discovered this device to measure food radioactivity. I am not sure who paid for it but the CRIIRAD is an independent French NGO, created after Tchernobyl accident, which specializes in the analysis of radioactivity in the environment. DAYS Japan is a photoreportage magazine in Japan, led by Ryuichi Hirokawa. Using his long experience of Tchernobyl disaster, M. Hirokawa has been helping Fukushima residents since the accident.

Fukushima city, July 31st - At the Citizen's Radioactivity Measuring Station, a Japanese NGO, residents can bring food to check its level of radioactivity.

Fukushima city, August 1st 2011 - Worrying about radiations, Masami Takano, 34, is moving to Shiga prefecture, 450 km away. His mother is in tears watching his departure. She also plans to leave, within a few months.

You can see more pictures here.

I also photographed a pregnant women taking shelter in Tokyo who was suffering from depression. We first went to the local supermarket she used to go but we were kicked out for taking pictures without authorization.

: Tokyo, August 9 2011 – Sachiko Masuyama, 29, checking the origins of vegetable in a supermarket. She escaped from her house in Minami-Soma (Fukushima prefecture), 25km from the nuclear power plant, in May. She took refuge in a public housing unit in Tokyo with her 2 children and her husband. She is pregnant and will give birth in November.

Then she agreed to drive me to the place where she lives with her husband and her two children. A 34 stories public housing building in the Tokyo bay area. She was so worried about the health of her baby that one time she thought about suicide.

Tokyo, August 9 2011 - Sachiko Masuyama, in her new appartment in Tokyo on the 29th floor.

Sachiko Masuyama is better now. She still lives in Tokyo and is supposed to give birth on November 11 2011, a lucky day I hope!

Here are the tearsheets of the story in The Guardian WE magazine. The text was longer than expected so the pictures are quite small. But I like the layout.

You can read the powerful text of this story here.

Tokyo no ie (Tokyo houses) project in progress

Jérémie S — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 07:46:55 +0000

A few pictures of the Lodz festival exhibition catalog, featuring my work about contemporary houses in Tokyo, 東京の家 (Tokyo no ie). This work is still in progress and as you may notice, new pictures were shown in this book.

For those interested in Tokyo architecture, I highly recommend Tokyo metabolizing exhibition currently displayed in Tokyo, which was first shown last year in Venice architecture biennale. If you can’t make it to Tokyo, you can buy the interesting catalog.

Publication :: La Vie (fr) – Fukushima, nuclear refugees

Jérémie S — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 15:53:07 +0000

My assignment for La Vie, French weekly magazine, about Fukushima nuclear refugees. It was published on 16 pages in two issues. The first issue deals with the evacuation area, around the 20km perimeter and in the newly evacuated villages (Iitate, Kawamata, Minami Soma, Katsurao and Namie). The second part is about nuclear refugees, in Tokyo and in shelters of Fukushima prefecture.

1/2 :

2/2 :

More pictures and captions are available for both nuclear refugees and the evacuation zone.

The magazine was interested in a multimedia piece as well. Every interviews I did were recorded and some were included in this video (available in French here) :

Anti-nuke protest in Tokyo

Jérémie S — Sat, 21 May 2011 10:40:52 +0000

Protests are really not common in Japan, except on three occasions :

- Workers on May 1st

- Residents against US military bases in Japan/Okinawa

- Right-wing nationalists (almost every week)

Now we can probably add anti-nuclear power plants protests to the list. Since the quake and Fukushima accident, there has been almost a demonstration a week in Tokyo.

The largest one was held in Koenji on April 10, one month after the beginning of the events in Fukushima nuclear power plant. Almost 15,000 people gathered in a colorful, noisy and young protest. Such a difference with May 1st usual demonstrations…

My pictures of the demo were published in France by Zoom Japon, Courrier International and Causette :

Here are more pictures.

Kazuo Kitai (北井一夫)

Jérémie S — Sat, 07 May 2011 10:45:34 +0000

It has been a while since my last post. I was quite busy at the end of February and beginining of March, working on assignments for magazines and on an editorial piece about the architecture of the new Embassy of France in Tokyo, which should be published in July. On March 11 at 2:46 pm, I was just about to finish this assignment and taking the last pictures when the Tohoku earthquake hit Japan.

Unfortunately I left Japan for a few weeks, due to nuclear fears and family pressure, before coming back to work at the beginning of April. Life goes on, or tries to, for the refugees up North.

I was invited yesterday to the opening ceremony of a photography exhibition by Aki Tanaka at Tosei Gallery in the Nakano area. There I met Kunihiro Takahashi, CEO of the gallery and of the publishing company – a very dynamic and cheerful guy, focused on analogic photography. His face lit up when I told him that the picture on my business card was shot on film 6 years ago, in contrast to with his disappointment when I admitted that I take only digital pictures now… But his affection for film photography conducted him to select very talented film photographers, most of them on close to retirement (if photographers do retire, I am not sure about that…).

After asking me if I liked the book I was looking at, he simply gave it to me as a gift. I had known him for only 10 minutes and he offered me one of the books he was supposed to sell in the bookshop. So nice of him. 高橋さん、ありがとう！

Here are some pictures of this book, 1970年代NIPPON (Seventies in Japan) by Kazuo Kitai. I did not know this photographer, but now I am looking forward to meeting him at his next exhibition in the gallery in January 2012. The distance and the composition of his pictures reminds me Raymond Depardon’s in the 80′s. There are numerous books in Japan with black and white film pictures, but few are this interesting.

More books by Kazuo Kitai on Japan exposure.

A nice review of the “Spanish nights” book by Street Level Japan.

Men street style in Harajuku

Jérémie S — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 03:19:37 +0000

Publication :: Businessweek (Usa)

Jérémie S — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 03:39:10 +0000

A 100Yen shop picture of mine published in Bloomberg Businessweek this week.

More pictures of 100 Yens shop.

Publication :: L’Express (Fr)

Jérémie S — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 15:16:59 +0000

After having spent much money for Christmas, announcers are broke. For the first issue of the year, editors have to add extra contents for their magazine not to look too skinny. Good for me, as I had this assignment for “L’Express”, a French weekly news magazine. They published a special issue about creativity in Japan, as the first issue of 2011.

French issue cover (left) and International issue cover (right)

This was a long 3-week assignment, 25 pages about youth, fashion, design, architecture and food. I shot hundreds of pictures, mostly portraits. The picture editors chose two pictures from my archives for the two opening double pages spreads, the first one was taken at the famous Shibuya crossing and the second one in the Koyasan Oku-no-in cemetary.

The cover picture was much more recent, as it was captured on the 30th of December, my last day of shooting and the day before the editors put the magazine to bed. Actually it was the last but one picture I shot for the whole assignment. I spent the afternoon searching for a “beautiful, fashionable and young Japanese girl in front of a beautiful background”. I went by bicycle to Harajuku, Omotesando and Shibuya, the best spots ever for this kind of assignment. I didn’t shoot much on that day, searching in the crowd for the most beautiful girl in town. Sometimes I was able to stop them for a short time, sometimes I just shot them without asking. Here are two other pictures of this “cover shooting” day and the uncroped version of the final picture :

In the coming weeks I will publish a few posts about this assignment and more generally about architecture, food and design. Stay tuned.

Publication :: Ulysse magazine (Fr)

Jérémie S — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 14:41:03 +0000

Two pictures of mine in this month’s issue of Ulysse magazine (France), about Japanese food.

One of the picture was taken at Rengejo-in temple in Koyasan and is part of my work “Koyasan, birthplace of Japanese buddhism” (2010).

The other one is a portrait of Shuzo Kishida, 35, the youngest Michelin-three-starred-chef in the world. I shot this picture last year during an assignment for a French TV program (“Toqué de Tokyo” with Antoine de Caunes, broadcasted on Canal +) in his restaurant in Tokyo, Quintessence. Unfortunately this part of the documentary was cut and doesn’t appear in the final editing, so I’m glad that the talented chef can be introduced in France thru another way. You can notice the HF Microphone on the picture…

More pictures of Japanese food very soon.