shashasha

In 2002, having spent his first year abroad in Japan, John Sypal began to photograph his home of Nebraska with a different awareness and sensibility – with a “new set of eyes,” as he writes in his afterword. After moving to Japan again in 2004, Sypal kept returning to Nebraska each year and photographed his hometown with newfound interest, noticing the peculiarity and importance of moments that may have otherwise seemed ordinary. Composed of photographs taken between 2002 and 2015, “Nebraska, The Good Life“ is also a personal diary of his Sypal’s life, recorded in moments of familiarity and estrangement.

“In August of 2002, after a year of learning how to see and interact with my environment in Japan, I returned to my home state of Nebraska. I realized that, thanks to the many photographs I took in Tokyo, my eyes had taken on a new shape- allowing me a new way of looking at what I thought was just my familiar, regular hometown. Not missing a beat, I decided to use these new eyes and my camera to look at the place I was from.”
― from the artist’s statement

About John Sypal
John Sypal was born in 1979 in Nebraska, USA. He studied abroad in Japan twice as a student, moving to Japan in 2004. In 2005, he began holding photo exhibitions. In 2010, he joined Totem Pole Photo Gallery, and since 2012, he has been showing his works regularly in his ongoing "Zuisha" series. He has held more than 30 solo exhibitions in Tokyo over the past 17 years and has published several books of his work. Sypal also celebrates Tokyo's photographic culture on a blog and instagram account titled "Tokyo Camera Style".