Judges (Until 2021)

FIND/47 wants to publish only the best photographs that are sent to us. This is why we have assembled a team of judges
from a number of different fields, each of whom has, in their work, demonstrated a keen eye for Japanese beauty and culture.

Naoki Ishikawa
Saiko Ito
Shotaro Kushi
Dominick Chen
Oriza Hirata
Peter Barakan

Naoki Ishikawa

Photographer

When it comes to subjects that already have a certain image attached to them, I'm not interested in photographs that emphasize that image. I prefer photographs that help destroy that image.

People offer a wide range of opinions when they look at a photograph. What is important is that you, as the photographer, are not swayed by these opinions, whether they rip your photograph to shreds or praise it to the high heavens. There's no need to hold your ears and refuse to listen to them, but there's also no need to heed these opinions or to try to please your audience.

I firmly believe that you can only be good at something you are passionate about. I hope you will take only the kinds of pictures that you personally believe in.

Profile Ishikawa was born in Tokyo in 1977. After earning his doctorate at the Graduate School of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts, he developed an interest in anthropology and folklore. He has since traveled all over Japan, chronicling his travels through his photography. His photo collection, CORONA (Seidosha), was given the Ken Domon Award for documentary photography books. Ishikawa has published numerous books, including Saigo no Bokenka (The last adventurer; Shueisha), which earned the Takeshi Kaiko Award for Nonfiction. Most recently, his works were featured at the 2017 Sapporo International Air Festival and the 2017 Oku-noto Triennale, as well as a solo exhibition, Capturing the Map of Light on This Planet, at Ichihara Lakeside Museum in Chiba Prefecture.
Saiko Ito

Lifestyle Adventurers

Every year, it becomes easier for anyone to take a picture. As a result, when assessing a photograph, it's becoming increasingly important to assess the photographer's relationship to the subject.

Has the photographer captured changes in the scenery that can easily be missed unless one stays in that place, waiting and observing? Have they found angles that are difficult to discover unless one delves deep into that place?

Passion, time, and a sense of connection--these are the elements that are going to be increasingly crucial to photography and, eventually, to other fields.

Through photography, you can inform people around the world about the place you live in, and about your life in that place.

It is a process that involves living your life to the fullest in that place so you can discover its hidden delights.

When you find them, we hope you'll capture them in a photograph and share them with us.

Profile Ito is an ad producer who also experiments with rebuilding commonly held views about lifestyles. A self-described introvert, Ito uses social media to overcome her social awkwardness and achieve her grand objectives, in the process suggesting that crowdsourcing will be the lifestyle norm in the future. Her projects include Wedding Camp, an event that involved a hundred participants holding a wedding at a campsite where they also spent the night, and My Townhouse, in which she renovated a 100-year-old house in Kumamoto Prefecture that had been abandoned for 17 years. For the 2014 Sapporo International Art Festival, she presented Hey, Sapporo, a project involving her moving to the titular city and living there at the behest of the festival's guest director, Ryuichi Sakamoto, who described her very lifestyle as art. In 2017, Ito directed her first movie, Wakarekata Kurashikata (How to leave, how to live). Her writings can be found in Atarashii Iezukuri no Kyokasho (The new homebuilder's textbook) and other books.
Shotaro Kushi

CEO and Creative Director, New Standard Co.

There have to be many beautiful aspects of Japan that we haven't seen yet. I want to see photographs that will expand my horizons in new and unpredictable ways.

Profile Kushi was born in 1984. After graduating from junior high, he studied abroad in the U.S., where he graduated high school early at the age of 16 and started up a business. After returning to Japan at 19, Kushi began working at Dell. The following year, he became the company's top salesman in corporate sales. At 21, Kushi left Dell to spend the next two years traveling around 25 countries. He then returned to Dell and, at age 25, became manager of service sales. After leaving Dell a second time, Kushi began developing a social business in Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan. He launched Tabi Labo in 2014, and in 2017 established Brand Studio, an in-house creative agency. In May 2019, Kushi announced that Tabi Labo Co. would be renamed New Standard Co.
© takashi.mochizuki

Dominick Chen

Information Science Researcher

Photos are portals to the world seen by the photographer through the viewfinder.
The viewer opens the door and revives the moment experienced by the photographer.
Like paintings and music, photography also produces different emotions inside the viewer's unconsciousness.

All photos are published under Creative Commons License in FIND/47. This means that the photos are open not only for viewing but also for the possibility of being used as a material of another expression. So, the picture you have taken may be an illustration of another person's sentence, graphic material, or part of a motion picture.

I'm looking forward to seeing photos that produce different kinds of interpretations, rather than just the strength of a single piece of work.

Profile Dominique Chen Born 1981 in Tokyo, French citizen. B.A. from UCLA (Design/MediaArts), M.A. and Ph.D. from University of Tokyo iii (Information Studies). Associate Professor at Waseda University, School of Culture, Media and Society since 2017. Dominick started his career as a researcher at the NTT InterCommunication Center, taking in charge of constructing its open web archive "HIVE" that applied Creative Commons license to all of its video contents. He has then been active in promoting the Creative Commons license in Japan since 2004, and is on the Board of Directors of Creative Commons Japan since 2007. In 2008, he started Dividual, an IT startup in Tokyo, where he has been developing numerous web services and smart phone apps one of which was awarded Best of AppStore from Apple for both 2015 and 2016. He was also certified as “Super Creator” by the Information-Technology Promotion Agency, Japan (2009), for the proposal of ThoughtTrace, a key-logger software that analyses the writer's mind and thought process. He has hosted NHK(Japan Broadcasting Corporation)’s news program NEWSWEB (2015.4~2016.3), as a specialist in information technology. He has served as a jury member and Focus Issue Director in “Technology and Information”, "Development of Social Infrastructure" for the Good Design Award since 2016. Dominique is also an author of several books on Open Source and Free Culture, Neo-cybernetics, Philosophy of Information, and has translated books on Positive Computing, Reality Mining and Technological Singularity.
© T.Aoki

Oriza Hirata

Playwright and director

My plays are often described in the overseas press as being "like haiku," perhaps due to my preference for presenting scenes that suggest but do not fully show the enormity of the world they exist in. The Japanese arts have a tradition of expressing the cosmos through the landscapes that lie immediately before one's eyes. I believe that the Japanese love of photography derives from this tradition.

I serve as artistic director of Kinosaki International Art Center, which is located at the edge of the Kinosaki hot spring district in Toyooka, Hyogo Prefecture. In the last few years, the number of foreign visitors to the hot spring district has increased fortyfold, largely due to word of mouth on social media platforms such as Instagram. These visitors, I believe, are discovering Japanese landscapes they have never seen before. I like to think that the Art Center, with its many artists-in-residence from around the world, has played a role in attracting in these visitors.

Through FIND/47, I hope that more people around the world will discover more new landscapes around Japan.

Profile Hirata is a visiting professor at the Osaka University Center for the Study of Co* Design, sub project leader at the Tokyo University of the Arts Center of Innovation, and guest lecturer and special advisor to the president at Shikoku Gakuin University. In 1995, Hirata earned the 39th Kishida Prize for Drama for his play, Tokyo Note. He has also received a Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award (2006) and the title of Chevalier of France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2011). In recent years, Hirata has produced works in collaboration with other countries, primarily France, and has led avant garde projects such as the theatrical productions involving robots and androids he has directed in collaboration with Osaka University and Tokyo University of the Arts. He has also served as cultural policy advisor to the city of Toyooka, and has led cultural and educational initiatives in the town of Nagi in Okayama Prefecture.
Peter Barakan

Broadcaster

For several years now I have been presenting a show currently known as “Japanology Plus” on NHK World TV. Every week we go out on location somewhere in Japan and report on one or another facet of Japanese culture. These trips generally entail a bus trip with the crew through often stunning natural scenery, and on occasion one will come across examples of the unique traditional architecture that is becoming all too rare in 21st century Japan.
Although I was not blessed with a photographer’s eye, I like to think that I can appreciate good photography, and was delighted to be asked to take part in this FIND/47 project as a judge. I sincerely hope that this site will become a venue for photographers of all stripes from around the world to enrich our souls with their own discoveries and interpretations of Japan.

Profile Barakan was born in London in 1951. After studying Japanese at SOAS, University of London, he traveled to Japan in 1974 to begin work in the rights department of a music publisher. Barakan is currently a freelance broadcaster, whose voice can be heard on Barakan Beat (Inter FM), Weekend Sunshine (NHK-FM), Lifestyle Museum (Tokyo FM), and other radio programs. He is also the host of the TV show Japanology Plus (NHK BS1). Barakan has published several books in Japanese, including Rock Between the Lines: Songs with a Conscience (Shueisha International), Rajio no Kochiragawa de (On this side of the radio; Iwanami Shinsho), Once Upon a Time in England... (Kobunsha Bunko), Musings on Music (and Radio) (Shueisha International), Souru no Yukue (Where has soul gone?; Artes Publishing), and Boku ga Aisuru Rokku: Meiban 240 (Rock music that I love: 240 classic albums; Kodansha Plus Alpha Bunko).
http://peterbarakan.net/