Laurie Says:

I’m off to BlogHer tomorrow. Really looking forward to the “Our Bodies, Our Blogs” panel. I’ll be blogging about the panel and the conference from there. For folks who are involved in Second Life, the conference will be there as well.

And I’m going to back to Japan. I’ll be in Japan for the exhibition of 38 of the Women of Japan photographs (with bilingual texts) at the Pacifico Convention Center Convention in Yokohama, as an exhibit of Nippon 2007 (the World Science Fiction Convention). The exhibition runs from Aug 31 to Sep 2. This is the first exhibit of all of the photographs. It will be open to the public during the day. And there is one life size image!

I’m really thrilled about the exhibition and delighted to be back in Japan.

There will be a panel where I and models Mari Kotani, Manami Tachibana, Rebecca Jennison and Junko Fukazawa talk about Women of Japan. I’ll also be conducting an artist’s tour of the exhibition. I’ll be in Japan then for about three weeks working and talking about the project.

I’ll be in Tokyo, Yokohama (for the convention), Kyoto and Osaka and at the end of the trip I get to go back to Okinawa.

As folks who read the blog know, I’ve been working on the digital images for quite a while. Well they’re done and the exhibition went in to FedEx today. I did a small happy dance in the FedEx store (and nobody laughted). It felt really great have it finished.

Here are a couple of images from the project that are up for the first time. These are of Naomi Shimazaki and Hatumi Komatsuda. The last solo image is of Hiroko Kawakami.

Shimazaki-san was kind enough to have me stay at her home in Hokkaido where I shot these photos. All of the women are activists on issues of Ainu rights and culture. Their hospitality was marvelous.

I’ll be in touch from BlogHer.

feminism, Women of Japan, art, BlogHer, Ainu, body image, feminism, Body Impolitic