Photographers We Love :: Masashi Wakui - Street Shots

There are some photographers that make you wanna grab your camera and get lost in the shadows of the night- Masashi Wakui is that kind of photographer. I love getting lost in his photos of long windy streets where neon signs reflect off wet streets and turn into a surreal scenes where reality surrenders to the dreamers.

Many have come to love the look and feel of Wakui’s images and someone has even created a tutorial for those of you that may want to give it try.

Check out the tutorial: THE MASAHI LOOK

Follow @masashi_wakui

About

Tokyo is the main source of inspiration of the Japanese photographer Masashi Wakui, who specialises in nocturnal views of urban landscapes. Born in 1978, he brings an entrancing and poetic eye to the Japanese capital, which he continually captures in the course of his nocturnal wanderings. His introduction to photography took place in 2012 on a shooting platform, when discovering a new camera that enabled him to extract fixed images of shots taken by filming a scene in very high definition. He became more and more interested and thus produced his first photographs, later modifying the colours and lighting with the help of retouching software. Masashi Wakui finds inspiration in the film world, where he has worked on a daily basis since 1999. His photographs in cosy colours evoke the mystical and surrealistic atmospheres of Japanese comic strips and animations, whether these are mangas like Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow and Akira by Katsuhiro à”tomo or productions by the illustrious Studio Ghibli.

Exhibits We Love :: LEE QUIÑONES - "If These Walls Could Talk"

If you’re in L.A. this weekend, make your way over to the Charlie James Gallery in Chinatown to check out street art & graffiti pioneer Lee Quiñones’s first ever solo gallery show in Los Angeles called “IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK”.

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About:

Charlie James Gallery is proud to present IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK, Lee Quiñones’s first ever solo gallery show in Los Angeles. “In a manner and as a matter of speaking, the studio walls have always been my visual sounding board.”

Four decades on from his influential mark on New York City’s graffiti movement of the late 1970s that eventually pushed the illicit visual vernacular of the subway graffitists through the lips of contemporary art society, Lee Quiñones has created intimate new works meditating on the passage of time and the organic process by which meaning speaks through his artistic practice.

IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK consists of a series of framed “tablets” – writings on slabs of drywall and wood paneling that once were the walls of Quiñones’s studio(s), which were painstakingly removed during recent years. Unlike the urban landscape largely hostile to his earliest artistic production, these walls have offered an inviting interiority for the artist to perform his spray bomb color tests that ultimately become the foundation of his paintings.

Charlie James Gallery

969 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Shorts We Love :: “Incident by a Bank" by Ruben Östlund

INCIDENT BY A BANK from New Europe Film Sales on Vimeo.

**Don’t try this at home**

Shot using a single camera, 90 people meticulously recreate a failed bank robbery that took place in Stockholm in June 2006.

Written & Directed by Ruben Östlund

ABOUT

“Incident by a Bank” is a unique instance of life imitating art (the real robbery), only to be later imitated by art (the film itself). However, the line between fact and fiction only got blurrier after the film was released, according to an anecdote from Östlund: “During the shoot I had a couple of extras film the robbers with their cellphones. That material was used as a promo for the film. Half a year later, I get a link from a friend who watched an American TV show called ‘The Top Ten Dumbest Criminals in the World.’ In seventh place, they used the clip from the shoot, claiming it was authentic material.” Should we really be that surprised?

MORE: INCIDENT