The Herald - The Herald Magazine
JAPAN 2014
LAURA LEWIS
“Ganbatte, kudasai.” It’s a Japanese phrase that means “do your best”. Or, depending how you translate it, “good luck”. The photographer Laura Lewis and the electronic musician Gold Panda first heard the phrase spoken by a taxi driver in Hiroshima as they left his cab. The words stuck.
It was 2014 and the duo were in Japan together seeking inspiration. He had been to the country before. It was her first time. She took images and he gathered field recordings in an attempt to catch a sense of the everyday in that particular corner of the Far East. “We decided to explore suburbia,” Gold Panda says. “Places that might be considered mundane and boring by the people living there.”
Not to them however. Clearly. The trip has now inspired Gold Panda’s recent electronic album Good Luck and Do Your Best, a very moreish combination of glitch beats and found sound. And now a book of the same name gathers Lewis’s images from the trip.
“I photographed absolutely everything I could,” Lewis says. “In essence, I feel the book is a representation of my first-time eyes on the country so loved by my guide, his fondness for its rich culture, quirks and design realised through the photography we collated together.”
The result is both unfamiliar and familiar. Hotel rooms and underpasses, rail lines and tower blocks, all of them the same but different to our own. In short, the sometimes foreign strangeness of the everyday. Good luck and do your best.