The Japanese Photographer Subverting Gender Roles Through Uncensored Images
Japanese born, New York–based photographer Sarai Mari was raised in a small mountain town in Japan; a self-proclaimed rebel who couldn’t wait to decamp to a more diverse, urban environment. At 18, she left home, arriving soon after in Los Angeles (by way of Tokyo), where she soon got hooked on photography. “The first photo I remember taking was of the Pink Building in Venice Beach,” Mari remembers. “That’s the picture my school teacher gave me a big compliment on in the class. I was over the moon because I had a zero experience being praised in general before.”
It was the start of a trend: After school, Mari was immediately snapped up by a Spanish magazine and relocated to New York to shoot for them. Then, after stints in Tokyo and London, where she worked for the likes of Dazed and Confused and Harper’s Bazaar UK, Mari moved with her family back to New York City, where she currently lives and works.
Mari’s photography, which she says is deeply indebted to Helmut Newton, is a naked — literally — look at sexuality, gender, and personal identity. Her first book, in fact titled Naked, was a series of female nudes; the follow-up Speak Easy, published by Damiani this year, included male subjects as well (not to mention such names as Janice Dickinson and Clara Paget). [While working on this piece from a diner, Mari’s site was blocked by the Wi-Fi network as being “pornographic”; but Mari’s photos are anything but exploitative.] Highlights include photos of a woman lying facedown on a bed, legs up, a pineapple perched between her backside and her thigh-high-stockinged legs; an Arbus-eqsue grainy, full-frontal diptych of a young man in a messy East London backyard; and a tattooed young woman perched a barstool with her blonde mermaid hair cascading down to the small of her back.
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