Celebrate Japan’s White Day with Joseph Maida by Lily Rothman
Joseph Maida, an American photographer who has been working on a
Japan-based project since 2007, was in a department store in Kyoto when
he first saw the little plastic miniatures of Western consumer goods.
The toys sparked nostalgia but were clearly not the product of his own
culture. “On the surface they seem completely Western,” he says, “but at
their core they’re actually based on something Japanese.”
That collision formed the basis for his ongoing project, selections from which are featured in the gallery above. The series,
Dream Factory,
is his take on how Western culture is filtered through Japanese
culture. The simplest example of the phenomenon, he says, is in the
country’s food, where a dish can look like hamburgers or spaghetti but
cater to the taste buds of a Japanese palate. Other instances, such as
the scene of a woman playing a keyboard in what looks like a glass
bubble (shown above), are subtler, as they require the viewer to think
about a Japanese instrument based on a European instrument, played
during a Japanese winter festival that uses Western ideas of what a
“winter wonderland” should look like.
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