About the photographer
Brian Minami is a photojournalist and commercial photographer based in the Los Angeles area since 1988 — currently living in Gardena, California, a town in the South Bay area of Los Angeles. Brian shoots photojournalism, commercial photography, landscapes, street photography, headshots for actors and business, portraits, 3d stereo photography, community events and more.
Brian started taking pictures in high school, learning the zone system from Ansel Adams' books and using a 4x5 field camera in the tradition of the California landscape photographers. After going to school at UCLA (B.A., Study of Religion, 1993) and becoming more socially conscious, he began turning his camera toward people — his friends and neighbors in Venice, California. Around that time, he exchanged the old, wooden large format camera for the speed and portability of the legendary Nikon F 35mm camera.
In the late nineties, Brian joined the staff of the Rafu Shimpo [Los Angeles Japanese Daily News], a small, bilingual, community newspaper based in the Little Tokyo section of downtown Los Angeles. He covered news and community events, Japanese athletes, Los Angeles politics and Asian American culture.
He produces commercial photos for a diverse group of companies around the Los Angeles area including clothing companies, contractors, manufacturers and industrial clients. He produces headshots for actors, model portfolios, portraits and publicity photos.
Other work
Brian is an amateur historian of Japanese American history with an interest in the World War II concentration camps for Japanese civilians in Lordsburg and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Please visit his web site documenting the poetry created in Santa Fe, Many Mountains Surrounding and read his article, Under the Moon I Saw in Exile published in El Palacio, a Santa Fe quarterly art magazine.
Also, Brian operates a web design and marketing company that specializes in search engine optimization and content strategy for business web sites.
