Models
Danger Level: Freckles
Kanae Kanzaki, collected here, here, here, and of course a google image search for 神崎かなえ will find plenty more. It looks like she did some part-time amateur modeling in college, then moved on. Her blog is abandoned, “her” twitter account exists only to promote some digital photobooks by one of the photographers who shot her, and I haven’t found anything to suggest that she’s still getting in front of cameras. Pity.
Real-life Escher Girl
I stumbled on this picture recently, and was struck by how effortlessly she pulled off the classic Escher Girls boobs-and-butt pose.
After a bit of digging, I discovered that she’s Misa Kusumoto, a 21-year-old actress/model who’s just released her first DVD, which includes this photo on the back cover. A few more pictures from photographer Shin Yamagishi are available, as well as a very short bio.
Do the models know?
At the creepy end of the Japanese photobook/DVD market, you can be pretty sure that the very young models don’t really know that being photographed in perfectly ordinary school outfits is fetish bait for middle-aged men, and that the photographers, editors, and stylists feel no urge to enlighten them. Ditto when they set up a scene in the kitchen and carefully adjust her string bikini to emulate the “naked apron” fetish.
But what about the ones who are all grown up?
I'll just leave this here...
…in case anyone needs it. Yuu Hasebe.
My non-existent Tumblr blog #3
“If I were to create a Tumblr blog…”, he says, refusing once again to enter the swirling vortex of multi-panel animated gifs, endless-scrolling memory hogs, and myspace-like design aesthetics, “I think I’d have to call it Baffled Cheesecake, in honor of a sexyfail expression that’s almost as common as Bored Porn Star, Angry Stripper, Constipated Chick, and Wannabe Realdoll.”
Two samples below, one nude.
Another kanji-tattoo victim
Hopefully this nonsense was just painted on for the photo, and she doesn’t really have this tattoo. It’s classic Hanzismatter material. I can’t see them all clearly, but the fifth and sixth look like the top and bottom of “老”.
I’d like to credit the original artist, since the content of the “tattoo” is only a minor part of the composition, but of course it arrived through Tumblr, a system that goes out of its way to hide sources. My search dead-ended at the ironically-named Cool Tattoos tumblr.
[Update: the model’s name is Salleh Sparrow, and sadly, it is indeed a tattoo. She’s also a photographer, so it may be a self-portrait; I eventually traced it back to a defunct DeviantArt page under her name. The slightly larger version of the image that I found didn’t make the characters any clearer, and her Facebook portfolio doesn’t have anything that shows them off, either.]
Speaking of Hanzismatter, I think this is my new favorite bad tattoo. At least the tattoo artist used a real character, and the result is only a bit absurd, not obscene or gibberish.
