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One of the most difficult things that I think a photographer can do is to go for a walk down the street where they've lived for many years and take great images; the everyday becomes wallpaper for all of us. The flip side of the coin, of course, is that the unfamiliar frequently seems to offer an excess of opportunities, and the task is to weed out the universally valid from the superficially appealing. I was aware of this when I began photographing in Japan in 1990, and I lived with these photographs for a number of years before making a final selection. I like to think that in an urn-full of burning incense or a pair of absurdly kitsch animal-shaped pleasure boats on a lake lie images that constitute more than a gaijin's first gawp at the exotic East. To me, they capture a little of that hidden, off-beat beauty which the 'alien eye' is in a far better position to reveal. view
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