The mobile future that wasn’t – Japanese Keitai Prototypes from 2000, 2001 and 2002
March 31, 2010 by Juergen Specht · 2 Comments
Back in the year 2000, the Japanese mobile phone market was the most advanced market in the world. DoCoMo’s newly launched service i-mode started practically the mobile revolution and Japanese handset makers became incredible creative in inventing new mobile device prototypes.
Latest since 2007 with the launch of the iPhone by an california based fruit company, all new phones became the long sought after smart phones the Japanese companies predicted back in the early years.
Flip-able mobile phone prototype by Hitachi, 2001
It’s time to look back at these early years, because many of the ideas and concepts integrated so successful into the iPhone where already available as prototypes back then, but only Apple was so bold and knowledgeable enough to integrate most of the good ideas into one single device.
We remember: In 2000, no mobile phone existed with full blown Internet access, there was no GPS and the integration of memory cards into a phone was an engineers dream. Even color screens were the future back then.
My latest show: Keitaigirls
March 14, 2010 by Juergen Specht · Leave a Comment
I just finished my latest show “Keitaigirls” in the Uplink Factory in Shibuya, Tokyo. Every 2 months about 20 photographers present their work there in front of a great audience (it’s always packed!) and I decided to show my Keitaigirls. To be perfectly honest, I am not a great presenter, I kinda get too nervous in front of an audience and forget what I wanted to say…after its over I always remember the witty puns again, but then its too late. Nonetheless some people liked my show.
So what are the Keitaigirls? Maybe I let others explain it, the famous blog “Fleshbot” once wrote:
Through his “Keitai Girls” series of pretty models with cell phones (often nude, and sometimes wearing things like wigs, bondage gear, spaghetti, body paint, or clown makeup as a bonus), German photographer Juergen Specht may have done the next to impossible: singelehandedly cornered the market on a whole new fetish. “It all started as a joke … This developed its own dynamic and here is the first part of my Keitai Girls.” And he did it in Japan, no less, home of just about every existing kink you can think of. We’re impressed.
The longer story goes like this: 10 years ago one of my models got a call in the middle of a photo shooting. It took rather long and I was standing there with my camera in my hand…so I just decided to take pictures while she used her Keitai (if you still don’t know what a Keitai is – it’s the Japanese word for mobile phone).
After this first time, I started in most of my shootings also to take a picture of the model and a Keitai. Now – 10 years later – its hard to stop, its almost like a ritual for me and models who worked with me before even remind me to take the Keitai shot. While preparing for the show, I found more than 150 pictures of girls with a Keitai, 117 of them are now (re-)published. However, if you also count my street portraits and other pictures I took of girls holding a Keitai, I counted more than 600 (!) pictures in my entire Keitaigirls series…
It is really a series in progress and one day this might become a book.
Update:
Photo One Night by Ken Lee/Artsyken
My buddy Ken just sent me this snap shot from yesterdays show. The picture shown on the screen can be seen in all its glory here.
Random Images
