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"I started taking Oyako photos by accident over 24 years ago."
I was born in southern California, and studied economics, politics, and sociology at university. But in the end I decided that art, which I'd always loved, was what I really wanted to do. I was torn between painting and photography, and chose photography because it is a more collaborative art form. One paints a picture alone, but with photography there's always the subject, not to mention staff such as art directors and stylists. So getting the job done requires two-way communication. It's that collaborative element that I find so exciting and enjoyable.
After university, I studied photography at an art college and began working as a freelance photographer, mainly for music magazines. It was around that time that I met and married my Japanese wife. Later, in 1980, I came to Tokyo to hold an exhibition which generated some business that marked the start of my career in Japan.
Oyako (parents and children) became a theme for my work by chance when, 24 years ago, a magazine asked me to take some photographs of young Japanese punk rockers. This made me think that I'd like to see the faces of the parents of these kids to discover a different side of them, and so I proposed the idea of Oyako. My interest was further spurred by the fact that I was about to become a parent myself. The results were fascinating, providing a unique view of the relationship between parent and child as well as a mother's power. It was the coincidence of being asked to photograph punks and being an expectant father that gave birth to the idea of Oyako.
After that I continued to take photographs for the Oyako series, and started to wonder if I could take things to another level by using the idea to make everyone think about parent-child relationships. After talking about it with my wife, we agreed that since Mother's Day and Father's Day were on the calendar, there should be a "Parent and Child Day," too. So we rented a studio and held the first Oyako Day photo event in 2003. We chose the fourth Sunday of July as Oyako Day because it follows on from Mother's Day on the second Sunday of May and Father's Day on the third Sunday of June. The problem was that we didn't make up our minds until just before the fourth Sunday of July and so we had to take a "guerilla" approach, having our project introduced in newspapers and making telephone calls at the last minute.
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