Photo festival part 1: Osaku amateur photographers in Akihabara

I’ve been wanting to replace my aged and moderately decrepit EOS 300D for a couple of years now, and I have finally decided to take the plunge and upgrade to a brand-spanking new 50D next week. Problem is, I had made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t buy a new camera until I put some serious effort into going through my photo archive and actually selecting/posting a substantial number of galleries. This means that I’m going to try and blow through as much as I can in the next few days, starting here.

These photos were taken in the pedestrian area in front of Akihabara Station on June 1, 2008, exactly one week before the infamous massacre there. It had become a tradition for various cutesy female models to pose for Otaku photographers and do publicity in this area. There are many thousands upon thousands, if not millions of photographs of cosplay and moe models so when I happened to pass by the area, I decided to take some photos of the men who actually take those photographs. I don’t know if these events have made a comeback in the months since the grim events of the following week, but either way these photographs document the sort of people who were the victims of the tragedy.

See Flickr Flash slideshow, or individual photos below the jump.

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