Photographer focus #9: Hiromix

I’ve spent a lot of words arguing that the ordinary is enough. To me, documenting your own life is the most interesting thing you can do for your own future self. And as I mentioned before, I see Japanese photography as the centre of that approach. So when a Substack note appeared on my feed the other day about a teenager in Tokyo who’d won a million yen with a photocopied zine of her own life, I knew who they were talking about, of course. Who is interested in photography and hasn’t heard of that zine? The note came from The Last Rangefinder Society, and it made a big claim: that this zine, which won in 1995, is the origin point of the visual grammar of every phone camera. It turned out to be both too big and not big enough, and its subject is in London right now, hanging in a museum. Hiromix, Seventeen Day Girl, 1995 The zine was called Seventeen Girl Days, and the girl behind it was Hiromix: Hiromi Toshikawa, born in Suginami, Tokyo, in 1976. In March 1995, at eighteen, she won the…