About the photographer
Brian Minami specializes in shibari art photography. Please see Minami Pictures Shibari for more information, recent work and to purchase the Skinscapes photozine.
I have worked as photojournalist and commercial photographer based in the Los Angeles area since 1988 — currently living in Gardena, California. I now produce shibari art, photojournalism, landscapes, street photography, headshots for actors and business, portraits, 3d stereo photography, community events and commercial photography.
I 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, I began turning his camera toward people — my friends and neighbors in Venice, California. Around that time, I exchanged the old, wooden large format camera for the speed and portability of the legendary Nikon F 35mm camera.
In the late nineties, I 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, and covered news and community events, Japanese athletes, Los Angeles politics and Asian American culture.
Other work
I am also 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 my web site documenting the poetry created in Santa Fe, Many Mountains Surrounding and read my article, Under the Moon I Saw in Exile published in El Palacio, a Santa Fe quarterly art magazine.
I continue to operate a web design and marketing company that specializes in search engine optimization and content strategy for businesses.
