Street Style Photog Shoots Only Legs, We Get Creeped Out
The popularity of street style photographers have grown over the last five years, thanks to bloggers like Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist, Yvan Rodic of Facehunter, and Tommy Ton of Jak and Jil.
These photographers roam the streets of major urban centers all around the world to capture the city’s most stylish street walkers (and no, that was not a reference to hookers), documenting their subjects from head to toe. But for photog Atsushi Nishijima, he prefers to capture his mobile subjects only from knee to toe.
That’s righthe only takes street style shots of people’s legs.
In Jim Helton‘s short film, titled A Study of Legs, the German-American filmmaker follows Nishijima as he takes to the streets of Midtown Manhattan to find his photographic prey, with a special preference for women in heeled footwear.
The film, which is narrated by Nishijima himself, was shot over the course of 23 days and breaks into 11 different parts, each part unveiling a new layer of Nishijima’s personality and the reasoning behind his calf-centric, voyeuristic ways.
There is something beautiful and yet creepy about Nishijima and his snapshots. Nishijima’s subjects tend to vary from all sorts of sizes, shapes and ages, which is great to see that he can appreciate all sorts of ladies. But over the course of the film, his humble, quiet and stagnant voice delivers these poetic statements about his picture-taking process, that ultimately over-romanticizes the subjects he captures, like a dog’s leg, for example.
Another thing I don’t understand is why he tends to prefer to shoot women who wear kitten heels, as opposed to shooting women with more trendier shoe choices like wedged platforms. But, kitten heels…really?!
Watch the film below and decide if you think Nishijima is just another street style photog with a twist, or if he is just a weird, lonely voyeur who can get away with calling what he does “art.”
[via Portable.tv]
