My serious photo life, which began in 1970, has been one of incessant obsessions with my subjects.
In the early days, I lived with a dancer/mime named Rosebud Conway, and could not stop making photos of her and eventually did a book called Figments in 1975, which was edited and sequenced by Minor White.
When I lived with Minor White, he became a new photo obsession and eventually I did a book about him called Lives I’ve Never Lived: A Portrait of Minor White, 1983.
Along the way a project about Cleveland Ohio, became it’s own kind of obsession and in 1981, became a book called, Cleveland Infrared.
Throughout my career I have been obsessed with the female nude and that manifested as a book in 1999, Eros Eterna.
The following year my obsession with creatives–artists, writers, musicians, actors, directors, became Portraits, 2000.
Another life-long project and obsession on master photographers became Penelope’s Hungry Eyes, 2011.
And when i met Minami Azu in the Union Square subway station in NYC on December 12, 2008, i had a true “coup de foudre” and have not stopped photographing her around the world, ever since.
After that NYC meeting, we worked in Tokyo, NYC, Venice, Rome, Castelfranco di Sopra, Tokyo, Kyoto, Cleveland, where she started coming in 2016 when I moved here.
This past summer I did a workshop with her in Cleveland and what you see here is work by my students and me of this personal obsession, Minami Azu, Butoh Master.
Abe Frajndlich
Cleveland, Ohio
3 Feb. 2019
