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Master Photographers Tell You How

The "Kabuki Pop" of Maki Kawakita by Sarah Coleman Olympus Visionary and celebrity portraitist Maki Kawakita offers ten tips on how to add creativity to your portrait shots Article rating: 8.21

Click here to read Maki's Ten Tips on How to Make Portraits More Interesting

Maki Kawakita’s photographs should come with a health advisory: Warning, these images will lift your spirits significantly. Giddiness may ensue. Playful, irreverent and a little bit zany, Kawakita’s images mix bold, bright colors with surreal and pop elements. This is a world where you might see a lifesize Barbie wrapped in cellophane, or a head being shipped in a FedEx box. Mannequins look stangely human, while people hang puppet-like from strings. Nothing is quite what it seems.

Kawakita refers to her art as “Kabuki Pop.” It’s what happens, she says, when traditional Japanese art collides with Western pop culture, forming a rich stew of styles and themes. In Japan, where she grew up, it’s common to find such cultural collisions – Kawakita cites seaweed-topped pizza as a prime example. Still, she had to become a bit of a rebel to develop her personal style. “I grew up, in a pretty traditional family, but Tokyo is really crazy,” she says. “Every time I’d go into a restaurant or a store, I’d start getting ideas.”

Macginn Advertisement Campaign, 2006 © Maki Kawakita

A lot of the exuberance and drama in Kawakita’s work can be traced back to her childhood, when she studied formal Japanese dance and theater with her mother, a performer and teacher. Japanese Kabuki theater is known for its dramatic make-up, elaborate costumes and exaggerated expressions, and Kawakita remembers performing as a three-year-old in Japan’s National Theater. “I was a little princess with an enormous headpiece,” she says. “My hair was bigger than anything else.”

Levi's Advertorial, 2004 © Maki Kawakita

A career in dance beckoned, but because she didn’t want to retire in her twenties, Kawakita chose to study art instead. In love with American Pop Art (especially Andy Warhol), she decided to come to New York. There, at the School of Visual Arts, her imagination took off. For her Master’s thesis, Kawakita produced a color magazine called “Geisha+Blond=Pokemon,” full of surreal images that explore the strange nexus of female sexuality and consumerism. (In one of the most arresting, a Barbie-perfect woman sits, awkwardly stiff, on a bed next to a relaxed, sleeping black man.) It got her noticed: agents came calling, and soon she was getting assignments for commercials, portraits and fashion work.

BNP Paribas Advertisement Campaign © Maki Kawakita

   

BNP Paribas Advertisement Campaign © Maki Kawakita

These days, Kawakita divides her time between celebrity portraiture, commercial work and a personal series she calls “Makirama.” Petite, with an easy smile, she manages to be both calm and energetic – a combination that no doubt puts her subjects at ease while also bringing out their own liveliness. Definitely, that combination comes through in her portraits of such stars as Beyoncé, Missy Elliott and Hilary Duff. What’s more surprising is the way Kawakita can bring out an unseen side of a well-known public figure. When shooting Paris Hilton, for example, she went against the grain by posing the It Girl in white against a white background, creating an elegant, sophisticated look that recalls Grace Kelly (yes, really). 

WWE Magazine, 2007 © Maki Kawakita

 

WWE Magazine, 2007 © Maki Kawakita

Elsewhere in her work, Kawakita’s fertile imagination seems to know no bounds. A recent assignment found her in Kuwait, where she shot a veiled woman at a gun range as part of an advertisement for a cellphone company. Strong, independent women crop up everywhere in her work, nowhere more so than in her personal “Makirama” series, where multi-ethnic models strike action poses and battle with giant monsters as they make their way through a bright, cartoon urban landscape. For Kawakita, creating such imagery is a key to her own multi-layered psyche. “In my work, all my experience gathers together,” she says. “The cultural clashes I love: between East and West, old and new, commerce and art.” She pauses, then adds with an impish smile, “I guess it’s my form of self-analysis.”

>>Click here to read our interview with Maki Kawakita...

>>Click here to read Maki Kawakita's Ten Tips on Making Portraits More Interesting...

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Maki Kawakita's "10 TIPS" is an insider's GIANT LEAP toward making us ALL "feel-like" taking photos like a PROFESSIONAL...who's having FUN. So much of photography is about FUN...and so much of the JOY of SEEING a photo that I've created come ALIVE...is involved with SHARING your photos with others. DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY...makes sharing "ALL THAT JOY" ever more accessible! Thanx to MAKI and TGP for sharing! Posted by: Willful Sailor Jan 24, 2008 @ 9:48 AM EST

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