Photographing the Yakuza crime family sounds like a dangerous task, but Anton Kusters seems to have no problem mingling with mobsters and getting some amazing shots.
He spent two years capturing images from within the Yakuza subculture, after ten months of negotiation which granted Anton access very few Westerners have ever received.
I'm surprised Anton made it out in one piece, but the images he came back with were worth the ordeal!
Link --via Beautiful/Decay
While the project sounds neat, after purchasing the (rather expensive) book, it is a real let down. I understand the artistic notion of using blurry photographs, and I understand having the target not be the center of the photograph. However, the book ends up being nothing but pictures of random rooms with blurry people that could have been taken on any street or in random buildings. Even for people familiar with the Yakuza (via reading about them in books), Kusters' book in the hands of an average person without the qualification of the subject matter would leave them wondering what was going on. By the end of the book, there is almost nothing that identifies any scene or person as Yakuza. I had high hopes for this book going into it.
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