The Bondage Queen of Tokyo Ed. 1 of 6

Yu Reika is really quite famous in Japan. So it was with a sense of awe that I made my way into the Rippongi district of Tokyo to meet her. I have no interest at all in bondage and discipline, but I am fascinated by Japanese "hyper-culture" and the people that inhabit the transgressive, subversive world that Tokyo offers. The Elvis impersonators, the Rockabilly fanatics, the adults who find respite from their jobs in childlike video games and anime culture; Tokyo is a shimmering kaleidoscope of people fetishising anything that is not, well, 'Japanese.' The whole place is a mega-sized homage to something else, whether it be a dead Hollywood icon, a character in a cartoon or a baby wolf/penguin toy thing. What the Japanese crave most though is security; Japan is an island that over thousands of years has endured invasion, Tsunamis and two atom bombs. Tokyo for me resembles an artefact, more specifically a memory of the 1990's, that most secure and stable decade, with its neon lights and frontier digital happy-place. As China rises, Japan clings fondly and nostalgically to its glory days.

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Alex Frayne has been involved in film and images from his earliest school days. Beginning with an 8mm camera in hand he has continued his love affair with visual media ever since. His stills photography work has earned acclaim and his work is held in galleries including the National Portrait Gallery (two images in the Permanent Collection).

He shoots mainly analogue film formats, including 6x6cm, 6x9cm and 35mm formats. In 2023 his performance MUSIC FOR OTHER WORLDS had its world premiere at the prestigious Adelaide
Festival of Arts, featuring the esteemed pianist Paul Grabowsky responding in real time to a series of his photographs projected.

In 2026 his American Photographic Essay MANIFEST DESTINY premiered at the Adelaide Festival Of Arts to huge acclaim. Rosemary Neil writing for The Australian proclaimed it "the best photographic exhibition I have seen in years."

He has four art books published by Wakefield Press. Simon Caterson, for The Australian, writes: "the last book confirms that Frayne deserves to be thought of alongside Ansel Adams and the other great landscape photographers.' (Landscapes of South Australia, Wakefield Press, 2020).

BOOKS (all published by WAKEFIELD PRESS, ADELAIDE)

-Adelaide Noir, 86pg, 2015
-Theatre of Life, Portraits - 80pg, 2017
-Landscapes of South Australia, 216 pg, 2020 (3 print runs)
-Distance and Desire, 216 pg 2024