In 1983, at only 18 years of age, Katsu Naito arrived in New York from his native Japan to work as a contracted kitchen chef. By 1988 he had settled i…
Link: https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/photography/a-japanese-photographer-s-images-of-1990s-harlem/
In 1983, at only 18 years of age, Katsu Naito arrived in New York from his native Japan to work as a contracted kitchen chef.
In 2018, you might find your mind casting back, reminiscing on the way things were when Harlem was black – long before the cultural imperialists crossed the Hudson River and…
via Feature Shoot: https://www.featureshoot.com/2018/02/portraits-recall-harlem-in-the-1980s/
These were the years that photographer Katsu Naito lived in a third floor apartment overlooking St. Nicholas Avenue and taken as an undercover cop by local residents – because what was a Japanese man doing here?
When Katsu Naito, a newcomer to the area, worked up the courage to ask if he could take his neighbors’ pictures, no one said no.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/a-young-japanese-photographers-view-of-harlem-in-the-nineties
In 1983, at the age of eighteen, Katsu Naito left his small Japanese city of Maebashi, in the Gunma Prefecture, and headed to the United States. “New York City is a place for kids like you to go and get disciplined,” his mother had told him as she scanned ads for overseas job offers. He didn’t argue. At the time, Naito’s greatest love was disco, and his mother, unwittingly, was ushering him straight to its center. For his first three years in the U.S., Naito was contracted to work as an assistant chef at a Japanese restaurant on Columbus Avenue, a job that helped him get a green card. He spoke little English, but he’d go dancing at the Paradise Garage night club, and at the end of each day he found “a kind of calm,” he said, in looking at books by Diane Arbus, which he browsed on the shelves of A Photographer’s Place, on Mercer Street. Her photographs reflected something of his own wanderings along the city streets that he had not yet found a way to express. “They just stole my heart,” Naito told me. A sushi chef at the restaurant showed him how to work a Leica, and how to develop film.