A trip to the Japan’s Kyotography Festival

Via commuters and passers -by of the Kyoto Station there is a monumental mural with more than 500 portraits of residents. This remarkable installation by the celebrated French photographer Jr. Heralds the opening of Kyotography 2025, the famous one -month international international photographer.

The topic for this year’s event is “Humanity”. Last autumn, JR and his team Kyoto converted into a living studio and built mobile portrait stations throughout the city to capture the rich variety of Kyoto-Jin Society. Monks, craftsmen, politicians, school children and drag Queens – all life is here.

The technology of the photographer and street artist is to take every portrait on a green screen backdrop with controlled lighting for continuity so that they can be cut out slightly and placed on a constructed landscape. This is based on rooms and buildings from all over the city that are sewn together to create a large tableau unexpected interactions.

Each individual is responsible for how they are presented. It is entirely with you what you wear and how you face – there is no direction or choreography of the artist. The only letter for JR is to grasp the essence and character of the population and all their lively characteristics.

Many also have a short audio reflection at – share personal stories or everyday thoughts – a collective portrait of the current moment.

In the Shimbun building, a former printing press, visitors are guided through a detailed exhibition by the creative process of JR. Examples of its large -scale public installations from all over the world offer an insight into its unique artistic vision.

As always, kyotography offers a tri-continental dialogue between Japan, France and Africa, which reflects the cultural heritage of the festival co-director Yusuke Nakanishi and Lucille Reyboz who spent their childhood in Mali years. Every year an African photographer is invited to spend a stay in the city to create a unique work, and this year’s selected artist is Laetitia Ky from Ivory Coast.

Ky is known for self -portraits with sophisticated sculptures that she produces with her hair. The pictures are quirky and funny, but they make a serious point for their relationship with their Afro hair and the shadow of the colonial heritage that influences their legacy.

Her friends and family grew up in Abidjan to meet an ideal of western beauty that contained poisonous, hair relaxing chemicals. After Ky himself subjected a catastrophic chemical treatment, he discovered a community of women online who hugged her natural hair, and she wondered why she had the need to change her true self. Her work is an expression of acceptance and self -love that she shares with online communities around the world on social media, and it makes a social and political statement about the complexity of female identity.

During her time in Kyoto, Ky made a loving comment on her Japanese experience and turned extensions with wire into her hair to create an act of self -expression that shares and supports cultural pride.

African Experience is also of central importance for the series that the British artist Lee Shulman created in cooperation with Omar Victor Diop from Senegal. This nostalgic journey into time decreases examples of the type of photography that can appear in family albums across North America from the 50s and 60s, a time of separation and racery, and questions what is missing.

The source pictures for the project are found or “orphaned” photos that nobody is attributed to. The couple then adds Omar, a black African, into the scene and naturally presents him in every frame so as not to disturb the cohesion of the family album. It is an meticulous process that combines light and atmosphere and even the surface structure of the original photo. The series is displayed in a traditional Japanese home meditation in the middle of the century and offers moving meditation about representation, memory and belonging.

Omar grew up in Senegal and did not experience any segregation himself, but he feels empathy for those who did it. In the work he has done in the past 12 years, it was about traveling through time to explore the place of the African people in the world.

Japanese perspectives are also central. This year the pioneer’s return in Okinawan photographer and activist Mao Ishikawa, now in the 70s. Her 1970s series Red Flower: The women from Okinawa document the life of women – including themselves – in bars that are stationed by African -American GIS frequent on the island. These open, intimate images confront persistent stigms and the complex sociopolitical legacy of the US military presence in post -war -okinawa.

Another Japanese highlight is Keijiro Kai, a sports photographer who is fascinated by the original intensity of physical competitions. From the chaotic football game in Ashbourne, England, to Japan’s Hadaka Matsuri, in which naked men in a frenzied fight for happiness-Kai fights the raw, cross-border energy that combines people in common physical experience. His work is a visceral research of masculinity, ritual and collective identity.

• Clothing in sunny freedom, Okayama, 2018, by Keijiro Kai

The festival is the first Japanese retrospective of the legendary Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide. The exhibition over six decades takes over your poetic journey via deserts, mountains and cultures -from the indigenous seri people in the Sonora desert to Zapotec women in Oaxaca and beyond. Inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “Crucial moment”, Graciela’s memorable picture-how the majestic angel woman or the Iguan crowned Nuestra Señora de Las Iguanas.

• Angelsfrau, shot in the Sonora desert, Mexico, 1979

• Our dear wife of the Iguane, photographed in 1979 in Juchitán, Oaxaca, Mexico

Graciela still takes photos today in the 80s. The Curation contains a reportage series commissioned by Dior for Vogue Mexico in 2023. Work is a perfect example of creative intelligence and the dynamic figure that continues to define it.